Friday, June 24, 2016

what i didn't say {poem}























I asked for one last goodbye.

I couldn't let us dissolve like that:
into a pool of pain,
hurt creating an abyss to lose
all that we had once loved in,
life rafts constructed from pointed blame--

here, take fault and you won't drown in my own sorrows.

I couldn't let us cut each other out,
literally, viscerally,
raw and readily scarred--
there are sweeter ways to make space in your heart.

I asked for one last goodbye
not to ensure for my own heart
that yours was as defeated,
not to know that you knew what you were giving up on.

No, I needed to know that we didn't give up.
That every belief we had in love,
still pulsed in the very hearts
that now, deflated of hope, could hardly hold themselves up,

but would. I asked to know yours would.
I asked because your suffering is mine
and mine yours and I have not yet landed
in a space that is no longer ours.

But I will.
And so I say goodbye to remember,
and to thank you for loving me.
For trembling with me when we touched,

and coaxing trust from my defences,
letting me love you as I knew how,
for accepting what you could
and leaving when you couldn't

pretend anymore that we were more than we are.
Thank you for the strength it took
to love me first and love me still,
and for, in the last goodbye we shared,

left that love, kindly, behind.





As published on Elephant Journal: http://www.elephantjournal.com/2016/06/i-asked-for-one-last-goodbye-poem/

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

Spacious, full

so this is it, then--

the dissolution of hope.

Reality permeating
our newly emptied hearts

spacious

echoing

of what us meant just one rainstorm
ago
and through every storm
and how the sun feels so much different
when it rises than when it sets.





















This full moon was a potent one. This month has been a potent one. This coffee next to me is not potent enough. Never is...

I am in Santa Teresa Costa Rica, cooking for a yoga teacher training and generally having my spirit transfused in, well, the most potent of ways. Coming here, I immediately felt the shadow side to this oh so easy going surfing village--the trees have a dark allure about them, as if in contrast to the light grey/barely blue sea whose vastness gets lost in catching the light of the sun--she wants something from you here, Mother N, she wants to know all the things about you you aren't willing to share; all that you cling to underneath what you present. She wants your truth.

And she can have it.

The energy created in this teacher training has been one of welcome and acceptance. There is a grace to every human here that has allowed the space to feel full--and so too my emptying heart.

It is an interesting paradox to exist in: at once so empty, so spacious, yet so full. This is the visceral sensation of a cycle in completion: there is fullness-- resolute, decided, finished; and there is emptiness, that which is leaving making space for all that has the potential to occupy. This is sweet: to be unoccupied, with all the room for anything. This is not a duality, at once empty and full, but rather a sameness, a unified state, a oneness. Its the end of the equation.

Let's look at the beginning of it.

In coming here, I was wrought with self doubt as to where I stood spiritually. But that is just it, I was trying to stand--I was confusing my physical existence, what I could prove, align with, embody even, with my spiritual one; with the purity of existence itself. I was lost in doubt, delusion, and emotion, convinced of things I didn't believe in adjudicating my very beliefs. I had lost the trust in my higher moral conscious and was like a fish out of water. And there was that sea with its constant energetic embrace, and there was my truth, in my own. All of the pieces of me that seemed scattered, unresolved, gently fused together in a remembered awareness of my energetic presence here, and I felt whole.

This is my pattern: question, remember, affirm. It isn't to seek out new information, it isn't to desperately need to know, it is to create a distance from myself only to collect back again, more sure, more honest, more content. Undeniably an energetic being as much as a sassy, heart forward, over-thinking human sticky with salt water and mangos, listening always to the echoes of my behaviours.

In the spaciousness those echoes become more clear. They inignorably sound off of our skeletal existence, the bare bones of whom we are as constructs of our patterns. Listen. What is on repeat for you? What removes you from the constancy of source and intoxicates you with the constancy of habit? Where are you cheating yourself of an immediate aliveness?

A sister of mine says that we hear these echoes, or rather, repeat our lessons time after (defeating) time, looping and looping a string of behaviour, at some point realizing, here I am again, when will I learn? And every time we complete a circle, the strings are being woven into a cord with the eventual strength to use the lesson instead of being used by it; rather than orchestrating the way that we live, our patterns become the foundation from which to transform. We learn to alchemize our shadows into light.

And then we start to get right addicted to truth for feeling it's weight in gold.

Fullness. From the emptying out, from the spaciousness created in trusting, in being willing to let go, in hosting the echoes of our behaviours so that they might resonate more obviously, poignant in deliverance to our knowing, comes a richness. Truth of self is satiating, and it is found in taking accountability for that which feels burdensome, that which is created in suffering, and choosing what is necessary to heal. Choosing to empty out to delusion, false hope, conditions, energetically harmful contracts with your physical and emotional self so that you might feel full of possibility, integrity, and, well, you.

You. Complete. Whole. Clear. Emptied for expansion, filled by truth.

I did not know the light that would come for me in the shadows here, but ooh lala do I hope you find the light in yours, and feel the same completion. I hope you saw the sky last night and howled. I hope as the moon closes her cycle to allow for the next, you will too; that as the days get longer, your spirit gets brighter.

Thank you always for seeing me: dark, light, in pieces or collected together in a unique expression of energy, life, love.

xx