To All Those In Hiding

The ones we see are the ones in the town square, selling their wares, declaring their views on overturned crates, wearing crimson silk with 2-foot feathers on their caps, challenging the chap at the other end of the bar to a dual, piping the latest ballad above the clamoring crowds.

We don’t see the ones in hiding. We don’t see those tucked inside the hedgerows counting the petals on a tightly bound bud, the ones wedged under the stairwell pouring over dusty manuscripts, the ones walking down the lane with eyes downturned under a gray hood pondering the shadows shifting under the sun’s arc, the ones who hum to themselves next to the roar of the river, who arrange a few delicacies on a plate to devour in the shadow of a great oak, who flash a knowing glance across a crowded room, who encrypt the wisdom of ages in seemingly common pleasantries.

Because we don’t see them, we think we’re the only ones. We think there’s something wrong with us – twisted at birth or wounded through life; some doubt, some fear, some lack of faith or gumption or self-worth. Maybe we prefer communion with the spheres. Maybe we’ve learned a gaze can seer the flesh from our bones. Maybe we hold something so ephemeral it may evaporate in the face of the wrong breath or shaft of light. Maybe we’ve been humbled by an ambition that turns cruel when fed. And maybe we are afraid: of our security being razed by passion, of giving ourselves fully and finding we are still utterly obsolete.

Everyone is hiding. Something. Sometimes that thing is best hidden and sometimes the world aches for it. Sometimes we’re unaware of it, or ashamed, or just haven’t found the right way to hold it up into the light. Sometimes it frightens people because they do not understand; it makes no sense or threatens their world or just takes too much energy to become intimate with. Sometimes, we simply feel it sitting there on a ledge just above our belly, swinging its feet and refusing to budge. We can feel its every move, hear its breath, smell it even, but it has nothing to say.

Sometimes when the sun slips behind the hill and the horizon fades blue to black, I steel out into the street to feel the day’s warmth on the tarmac beneath my feet, gaze up at the bottomless black and remember how this was my first childhood safe house. I could scoop the most precious thing up from the twisted caverns of my belly and hold it skyward in my cupped hands for the moonlight of all the ages to see. Nothing has ever felt more fully, cleanly satisfying.

It is a powerful gift to be able to hold what is sacred to the light of the world knowing it can be seared, scratched, crushed, maimed; to feel our very innards on the chopping block of others’ perception. It approaches magic, the capacity to maintain the purity of its form under any onslaught. For in reality, the moment we release what has grown within us into the world, it takes on its own life. The purest, fiercest words of the prophets become household cliches in a handful of generations, requiring constant renewal.

Far more numerous than the martyrs are those who practice in secret. Who scour the hills and taverns, ports and markets for subtle signs of initiates to invite underground in candlelight to hear the deeper truths. Those who are loved by all in daylight carry simple, palatable messages that soothe without disruption. The seeds of civilization scorch the hands of those who praise petty pleasures, are scorned, shunned, forgotten. So we hold them in secret, for eyes and ears who are ready. And we hide ourselves in secret, away from the bustling streets, glaring lights, and tedious gossip that dull our senses to quieter voices and subtler movements.

For when we hide, we become intimate with whatever we take into hiding: silence, stillness, darkness, ourselves. We can turn a taboo over and over in our palm, seeing how the weight of it reflects the light. We can feast or fast. We can hibernate or gestate. We can shed the skins that shield our tenderness so we can press it gently with our fingertips, feel how it sighs and shifts, weave the next garment we will wear. We can be dismembered. We can replay and drill ourselves in all skills for battles we have survived and have yet to confront, mastering the theories planted within us, sewing them into our tissues. We can apprentice ourselves to surrender, to patience, to grief, to the realms that lie beyond the daylight world. We wait.

What you are initiated into, what is planted within your chest, may not find a clear window into this world. Do not despair of those who seem to have found one. Do not discount the value of what you carry or your fitness as a vessel. These things are not decided by us: neither what we are given nor the portals that present themselves. The only thing that matters is how we come to know and nurture what we carry. Even if it spends a lifetime hidden away, it’s alive. It’s letting off perfume and putting down tendrils as we go about the semblance of a mundane life. It’s rooting us deep into the earth – where rest the bodies of all those who have died without living their potential, which is every single creature who has ever lived.

This isn’t your task. This isn’t even your life. It’s the work of Life itself. There is no way to fail. And there is no right way to do it. There is no guarantee of anything. Nothing survives without caution. No wisdom or art endures without careful tending. So trust however your instinct guides you and do not feel ashamed. There is no smallness or self-deprecation here. Only a soft, subtle smile; a life force contained and vibrating with the cosmos. Here in the deep, where the light is too dim to discern direction and formation, we begin to melt back into what birthed us: a vast consciousness that knows how to listen for what is beyond sound, to look for what is beyond light.

This is what the ancients knew. This is how they apprenticed themselves to Truth. This is what we’ve all lost to the daylight mind that thinks it knows the rhythms and direction of Life. Sometimes when we crawl into our cave, a wounded creature despairing of all mercy and meaning, we tumble into the center of it all and find our place within the universe inside.

So let us sing praises to all those in hiding: to the snails and deer, prairie dogs and sardines, viruses and bears who hide for safety, hide for communion, hide to ambush; to hunt and to play, hide for mating and giving birth, shedding skins and dying. These creatures do not teach us about ourselves. They teach us about the archetypes of the universe, about what lies beyond the forms we all take, about what brings us to life and brings us to our knees, whether we submit or even admit the truth.

Perhaps one day, after succumbing to lifetimes of suffocation, we may come to master the precise moment to inhale and exhale. We learn all the contours of the nostrils, the soft pallet, the larynx, the trachea, and every millimeter of lung – not in our mind, but through the subtle constrictions and releases, day in and day out. We become intimate with what we carry – and we become it – so it is no longer a question of hiding or revealing. It simply rests there on the surface our skin for any eye who can perceive it. And tattooed on the underside so we can never forget it.

Sometimes we find fangs in the dark. Sometimes deep rest and regeneration. Sometimes starvation and infestation. Sometimes redemption in the forgotten, which keeps the ember of truth warm for us all, whether or not we ever find the words for it.

Nancy