for when we don’t…
I love an ellipsis... In the way I often use it, the ellipsis is less about indicating an omission, and more about leaving room for words, or an experience, still in formation, translation, and transition. I use ellipses as an invitation for us to to think, write, and express together; for us to sit and feel in the openness of space…
Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to attend an intimate gathering hosted by one of my favorite writers. As we’re settling in, she’s telling us what she’s been up to, working on, and how life has been. As she’s speaking, she takes a slight pause, smiles slyly, and I feel the energy in the room lean in. She does a slow blink and says, “…and I am tired.”
Listening, I closed my eyes, exhaled a full bodied, “yessss”, and held back tears. Not sad tears but tears of relief, and release. The kind of tears wept after a truth you didn’t know needed to be told passes through someone else’s lips. The kind of tears wept when you realize your mind, has been holding on too long to emotion or feeling you’re unwilling to admit to but need to acknowledge. This moment of honesty allowed me to release, and experience a kind of weightlessness for the rest of the gathering. On the drive home I thought about why this seemingly simple admittance, from someone whose talents I admire but do not personally know, had such an impact. I thought maybe it was because I tend to look upon the lives of others through angled admiration and conclude they have it all figured out and together. Subconsciously, or even consciously, I then take a tape measure to my own life and tally up all the ways in which I fall short and am behind. So when someone like this writer, highly praised, critically acclaimed, utters a seemingly simple yet tender truth, it lifts a curtain, melts away a mask, and brings into focus the reality that, regardless of ones level of achievement and perceived success, we are human, living, finding, and sometimes stumbling our way through.
Years ago during a conversation with Judy (Mom/Iya) she asked if I’d taken time to sit and catch up with myself. In the course of the previous year, a lot had changed, in me and around me. Judy was asking if I had stopped and taken account of the impact. I had not. It’s taken me years to understand the practice of, “sitting with it”, and I am still developing the habit of slowing down, and pausing to notice and document growth, transition, and maturation. I am still growing, nurturing and learning how to maintain the relationship with self. A relationship where honesty, transparency, and vulnerability are non-negotiable.
There are pages in my collection of journals filled with questions. Some I have answered, most sit in waiting, just needing expressing.
Maybe these are questions for when we don’t…For when we don’t know. For when we don’t have it all figured out but we are trying. For when we don’t have the words but we have deep emotions and we are willing to explore them at their depths. These questions are not to cause doubt or confusion. These questions are an invitation to know intimately what anchors us, what carries us, holds us steady, and lets us free.
…what calls to you? whispers your name between sleep and awake, caressing the links between your thought’s chains…
what quiets the noise and makes medicine of the aches? what lays down at night and rests beside you? what wakes and waits for you in rests’ meeting place?
what moves you like the earth when it quakes? what presses upon your heart’s strings and plays enchanting melodies? what stories meet you in the quiet? what emotions pour out knowings?
in the midst of chaos, heartache, sadness and grief, what delivers peace? what catches your breath? what coaxes you into deeper breathing?
on days when you find yourself lost and wandering, moving further and further away from inner knowing, what embraces you? what returns you back to you?
what brings you to your knees? not in defeat but in genuflection to flow, alignment, and ease. what refuses to leave your side, even after you have pushed, and pushed, and pushed it away?
what whispers to you in the glow at twilight? what asks you to open? please.
– ei