Manifesto: You were made for something more

Hand holding, elbows brushing, hips swaying, feet stomping.

The world has come alive, awakening from it's winter, and I am awakening with it.

I can feel the revival stirring inside of my body, feel the rhythm as my heart beats in time, resounding against my ribcage

I want to be free

I don't know anyone but no one feels like a stranger

There is music, and laughter, and dancing, and the world feels like it has been lit on fire, and I want to be on fire too

I want to glow, emit the light that has been cooped up inside of me for so long

I want to shine like the sun as it peeks through the clouds, warming my shoulders, reminding me of miracles

The hot lemonade is warm on my tongue, but comfortably so. It tastes like honey, like promise and sweetness and hope. It is warmth and comfort.

We watch as people move like they were born solely to exist in this moment, like nothing else matters besides this awakening, and I can feel my heart awakening too

I am coming out of a long, cold winter

My bones are still rusty and don't quite remember how to dance but the echo of my heartbeat (sounds like a symphony) is a persistent partner, always inviting me to dance no matter how many times I step on his feet

She says my confidence is coming back, he says the light is returning to my eyes, and I feel it all as I am shedding extra layers

I want to experience what it means to be alive

I play a game of feeling everything, letting it be absorbed into my skin like it is medicine, letting it wash over me like the promise of hope

It makes me giddy

Reminding me what it's like to have a voice, to break free from the shackles of darkness, to grow my own set of wings

It reminds me of being seven, when I still fiercely held on to my light, when the whole world made me insanely happy

Ten years have passed, and I have become more jaded, hardened by the world, and yet I still feel that same awakening inside of me

the same hope and potential and possibility

this could be the start of something beautiful

And I want to fall in love with this moment, and these people, and myself and the birds and the trees and the hills and the sky and everything that seems to call my name, begging me, for this one moment, to be alive

I am poetess, story teller, belonging to the universe and the One who created it all, created to marvel and wonder and be fully alive in every moment while my heart is still beating like a drum inside of me

I was made to feel something more than the weight of the darkness as it wraps itself around my shoulders and calls itself warmth

I remember a few years ago sitting at a kitchen table in a house that didn't belong to me, writing on the back of a grocery list that I want to be enough for myself

I didn't know then that those words would become my cry as I wandered through these next few years of my life

I was, and am, searching for ways to be enough for myself

I am realizing now I don't have to do anything

I just have to exist

in wonder

in grace

in love

there is nothing I can do or not to do make myself enough, I just need to accept that I am

I was

And I always will be

I'm still learning what that means

I'm coming back to that place where I live in honesty, not belonging to another human being but myself, marveling at the world

Sometimes it's easy to write from this place

It's not so easy when you are lacking connection, when the pieces don't quite fit, when you spill your coffee and spend the afternoon in bed and stub your toe on your way out the door

I am learning this too is it's own kind of beautiful

If this is crazy than I want to be that. I want to fall in love with every moment of my one wild and beautiful life, I want to see heaven and God and the divine nature of it all in everything, I want to finally learn what it means to embrace my enough-ness and be free

I want to use these wings to fly

Forest Green

I've started identifying each day with a color
Blood red, harsh pink, ocean blue
I write every day that today is harsh pink or today is burnt orange
I've been taking notes
Some of them in a running word document I have on my computer titled Remember this.
Remember the way you feel right now, remembering how it all was, remember how you felt, remember this. Sometimes the words are coherent, detailed accounts of what happened. Sometimes they are feelings, words I shouldn't say but write anyway, the honest truth. Sometimes it is only a sentence, or a color.
Today is blood red
There are years for questions and years for answers and so far this year has been one for being stripped bare, standing naked in front of people, wearing my heart on my sleeve, gasping for air, trying to understand this. I'm not exactly sure what kind of year that is, but I know this last month and a bit has felt like a sledge hammer to the stomach, kicking my spine. I keep choking on the truth, acting like I have something to prove.
I've been writing a lot, most of it broken records, the same thing repeated in a million different ways. It's not always polite and I'm learning that sometimes honesty isn't polite. I'm over using the word metaphor and the truth is sometimes a bitter pill to swallow.
Today is forest green. It's wrapping my mind around the truth and trying to get it right. It's too much poetry, not enough honesty.


"There are places inside me I'm still learning to love. They are shaped like God or cigarette smoke"

The Land of Enchantment

I've been thinking a lot lately. Writing a lot of poetry, collecting quotes and photographs. It's an interesting time for me, one full of so much sorrow and heart ache but also full of peace.
I might not have the words to process everything right now, but I have words to make stories, and I guess in a way my creating stories is me processing it all. So here's something I wrote with the inspiration I gathered from this post

4 times in 5 days. That had to be some sort of record, even in it was only a personal one. And the tears had to be some sort of reflection of the burdened state of her heart. They were poetry in their own way, speaking when no more words could be said.

The hardest word to say is goodbye. To the man you loved with all your crooked heart, to the tiny babe who held a piece of your heart, to friends and grandparents and those barely human but very much alive. Goodbye never gets easier.

She thought about this as she walked down the road that blistery October day, her toes and the tip of her nose growing colder.

A coffin the size no coffin should be, belonging to a tiny girl who was there that day when her life changed, a girl so loved by so many who had never met her. And it reminded her of a bigger coffin, one she stood over in march and sobbed over words unsaid and promises that didn't have time to be kept. And it reminded her of the others, the coffins she never saw but the lives of those behind them that had taken a piece of her with them as they passed on into the great perhaps.

The cruelty and brutality of death must be met with the gentle hand of hope for without it everything crumbles.
Loss had put years on her. Her forehead was slightly wrinkled now, her feet colder, her body more fatigued and frail.
Being berated time after time, being forced to say the hardest word until there are no more words left, only aching sobs, it takes a toll on one's physical body.
If she were to write the names of the deceased up her arm the total would be over two dozen.
It is said there is one living person for each dead 14 and she felt she had more than her fair share of names tattooed on her skin of those who had changed her and died too soon.
When she was younger, her aunt, a seasoned veteran of life herself, used to tell her stories as she brushed out her hair. She spoke of unicorns and fairies and once she spoke of the land of enchantment.
She said the sand there was holy, and there were healing springs of life. She collected sand in plastic bags and water in tiny jars and she gave them to her friends back home. One to the divorcee, one to the motherless child, one to the ill and dying. She offered these items to her loved ones, and also offered herself.
She said perhaps we are all collecting things, filling our bags and jars. We fill and collect the offerings of others and when we are finally full we pass on.
It isn't painful, she said, rather it is more like being underwater, a breath and then as one world slips away a new one takes its place. For those left behind, though, her aunt said, when they have offered up pieces of themselves that are now gone, its the most painful thing imaginable. Suddenly you are without this part of yourself, however large or small, and you must figure out how to let it go.
People help. so do long hot showers, coffee so strong and hot it can make you wince, poetry and tears.
But in the end the only cure for the unbearable ache of saying a permanent goodbye is time itself.
One day, even if it seems unthinkable, the smile will return.
Her heart was broken. She had offered up herself to those who had gone to explore the great perhaps and the agony of living with a fractured heart was almost too much to bear.
Goodbye seems to get caught in the throat, sticky like peanut butter, and the idea of time healing all wounds seems laughable.
The idea of venturing into the great perhaps seems more appealing when you're lying on the bathroom floor with a broken heart.
But, her aunt had said, there comes a time when you must get up. Take that hot shower, stomach a cup of piping hot coffee and put one foot in front of the other. Collect moments of your own that will sustain you for a lifetime and then some extra to stow away for your own journey, when the time comes.
Swallow the hope. While it tastes sickeningly sweet in the mouth in the stomach it is a helpful remedy.
A scar will form, a reminder of the one you loved and the part of the heart that was given away, one for every unspeakable goodbye.
"Don't be afraid, my dear," her aunt had told her. "Your heart knows how to heal, even when you deem it impossible. You are a vessel, giving and collecting love. This is life."
And so, with red rimmed eyes and pale skin, she decided to get up. To shower, and make that pot of coffee and pray her aunt had been right, that over time the ache would diminish.
Besides, there was still much more loving left to do.

Peace

You don't have to know what to say. You don't have to understand. But you do have to make words. Use your words.

When I was younger, my parents would always remind me to use my words. And through my growing up years I've heard that phrase echoed many a time.
But what happens when you don't know how to make words? What happens when you feel so much inside of you that there are no words?

I sat in the library this morning next to a boy who's in my biology class. My thoughts were going off in so many different directions and I felt completely broken.
"Are you ok?" He asked me. I looked up from my text book, the one I hadn't really been reading. He was watching me, with his big brown eyes.
"I don't know how to do this..." I said, meaning more than just the biology work set out before me.
"I know," He replied.
And somehow it wasn't the wrong thing to say.
He watched me for another minute before turning back to his own work and I stared at the clock and counted down the minutes.

There's this thing they call survivor's guilt. It's found in people who have survived a traumatic event, such as combat, natural disasters, epidemics and suicides.
The inside of my left wrist has seen far too many names in the past little while. Names of those I know who have died. People who died while I survived.
Right now the black ink has been rubbed off because of the bracelets I was wearing this morning, but the letters can still be made out.
Peace

My own broken heart has been beating rapidly all day, pounding against the inside of my chest. I am reminded of the journey I am continually walking, one I don't understand, one that is breaking me in so many ways.
I am so tired. I can barely find the strength in me to lift my head, to keep fighting, to keep this broken heart beating.
And there are moments, when you slip into bed at the end of a long day, or standing before a rising purple sun after hearing news like the kind I got this morning, and you think "How long can I keep doing this?"

My own broken heart beat a little faster today, as her little broken heart ceased to sustain life. Under the rising sun I fell to my knees because this isn't something I understand. My heart is heavy and full of things I can't yet make sense of, and it slams against the inside of my chest reminding me of this little one who's heart is whole now, a little one who is connected to me, from one broken heart to another.

I am broken. I am worn. I am tired of fighting this battle and I am tired of losing and I'm just plain tired. I can barely find it in me to hold myself up. I don't understand.
And even in all of this...
Peace

Sea shells and The Girl On Fire

Maybe you don't have to be ok every minute of every day
In my exhausted state, I was trying to be profound tonight.
I was reminded by a friend of something I have said before which is "There is beauty in the breaking."
I told her from the middle of a breakdown it doesn't look so beautiful and she said maybe I just need to blink a few times.
I told her I thought that was profound, I just wasn't sure how yet. And then I started writing and this is what I came up with.
"It will get worse before it gets better but I promise you it will get better."
I'm waiting for the better.
I'm waiting for the day when I can say "My cousin is dead" and it doesn't hit me like a ton of bricks
I'm waiting for the day when I can look at the people who love me and not want to push them away
I'm waiting for the moments that I can savor, when I can look around and think "If this isn't happy, I don't know what is." I have a collection of these moments. I'm waiting for the day when I can find more to collect, like finding a pile of sea shells someone left on the sand.
I was watching this movie the other night and one of the main characters said this quote I wish I could remember exactly but it was something along the lines of "You are have such a cynical outlook on life for such a privileged person." And I don't know why but it was something about that quote that made me stop for a minute. Because it's right.
I was talking to a friend a while ago and I said that, while being burned, I'd rather be known as the girl on fire than the girl who burned in the blaze. And what I meant was that I wanted people to see beauty in the breakdown. I don't want to just burn slowly, I want to be on fire.
And on Monday of this week, I was sitting in the backyard, being loud and crazy and cartwheeling across the wet grass and pretending I was talking to someone and I was talking about what it meant to be alive. I said in this moment I feel alive. I feel like my soul is alive. But in those bad moments, I'm alive in those too. Those dark moments, they remind me I am alive. Even if what I am feeling is painful and heartbreaking, I am feeling something. I do not cease to exist because things are hard. I never stopped being alive.
And in writing all this, it made me wonder if perhaps my friend is right. So things are hard, and I feel broken. But never once have I stopped being alive. And even though I'm burning maybe it doesn't mean I'm turning to ash but I'm becoming the girl on fire, stronger for it. Maybe the only way through is to feel every heartbreaking, agonizing minute of it. No one gets to go through life without pain. and so I get more than my fair share. Even in the pain, I never stopped being alive. Even though I can look at myself and think how everything is a disaster, maybe it's a beautiful disaster. Maybe instead of burning alive, I'm the girl on fire.
I believe there is more than what my eyes are seeing.
And yes, despite going through a time where all I can seem to feel are the heartbreaking, agonizing moments of everything, I do believe still that there is beauty in the breaking.
I believe things will get better. Maybe they have to get worse before they get better but they will get better.
I believe that sometimes you can't wait for someone to save you, sometimes you have to save yourself. In the end you have to want to change, you have to want to be saved, you have to want to live. In the end there's no one else, only you and the sound of your heart. And you'll have to learn to listen to what it is saying.
And the sound of my heart? It's saying "Keep going. I promise you things will get better. And while you're waiting for the tides to change, keep looking for sea shells."
And so I will. I'll look for sea shells in this storm. And instead of burning I'll become the girl on fire.

Live Loved

I was never not meant to be here...
There was never a chance that I wasn't going to be here in this moment, writing this blog post and watching baby birds learn how to fly and practicing yoga on the bedroom floor and not being on a plane headed halfway around the world. There was never a moment when I wasn't going to be here.

I woke up this morning, groaned, rolled over and slept for another hour. Because today, 10 months out from my Dysautonomia diagnosis and the day the people I love are getting on a plane and going to Africa without me, I knew I was going to need the extra sleep.
Scrolling through my news feed this morning, one message kept popping up, one thought kept dancing through everything I read.
Love.
Love where you are, love who you're with, love with heart and arms wide open. Love now because this is exactly where you are supposed to be and love even though your heart is broken and love from where you're at and you are loved. You are loved and you are here, in this moment, for a reason and you can't let them take your happy. You can't let them take it and stuff it in a suitcase rolled up beside cargo pants and canned meat because you need it here. You deserve to be happy. You are loved and you were never not meant to be here right now so let go. Let go of everything you've been holding on to and all these ideas you had of how you think life should go and breathe them all out and breathe in love.
That's what I read this morning. In my inbox and in blog posts and Facebook statuses, one word kept coming up. Love.
It's hung on my bedroom wall and yet so easily I forget that I am love. I am loved so deeply and I have the power to love the whole world. Inside of my blood stream and in my veins and muscle and bone I want there to be love. I want to feel it inside of me with every breath, breathing it in so in turn I can breathe it out into this world I live in, the place I am at right now.
Because that lady at the park, she deserves to know she is loved
And the librarian, she deserves to know she is loved
And the woman in her car in a parking lot with her head in her hands, she deserves to know she is loved
And those boys riding their bikes, and that mother trying to control her playful children and those construction workers in the noon day sun, they deserve to know they are loved.
You don't need to travel half way around the world to find people who need love. They are right in front of you, in stores and walking down the street and driving cars and sitting on corners and holding signs, they all deserve to know they are loved.
And when I breathe in love, when I let go of things I cannot control and accept that I was never meant to not be here and this is where I'm called and I am here for a reason, I have the potential to love the whole world. And you do too.
When we live like we are loved, something amazing happens.
The only life worth knowing is the one right in front of me.
The other lives, the places you wish you could be and the people you wish you could be with, don't let them take your happy. Don't let them keep you from living the one life you were given in the one place you were called and loving the people right in front of you.
Breathe in love and let it be enough. Breathe it in and let it ground you in the present, in where you are right now. Breathe in love and let it change you, let it manifest happiness because you were never supposed to be somewhere other than where you are right now. Breathe it in and breathe it back out into the world, because the people around you deserve to know they are loved.
Love where you are, right now.
You are here for a reason, and you were never supposed to be somewhere other than here. Maybe you don't know why yet, but maybe you aren't supposed to. Just go where you're needed and breathe love, letting it be your offering.

A semi-autobiography

    i.            Words flow from me like a river. Warm in my belly they sit like soup. Gently, with butterfly like fingers, like soft, flowing ribbons they caress my insides. “Speak your truth,” They whisper to me. I barely have the ears to listen.  Like a river it flows from me, pain like a white, radiant light comes from my spine, my shoulders, and my hips. This pain transforms. It spins me like a spider weaving its web, stitching into me fibers of silver and gold. Stories balance precariously on my tongue and I soak up information, lapping it up like a dog, drinking it in like a traveler in the desert thirsty for a cool drink. Transformed, spinning in this web, I shift and change. Truths are spoken and tiny hands pick up each heel, pressing me onward. Their belief, this radiant form of love, it changes me. With a gentle spirit I open myself upwards to the sun, letting the rays and all their glory penetrate my very being. The babbling brook whispers my name and her laughter catches the wind. I have folded myself into this universe, wrapped myself in the golden rays of the truth. Wrapped in sunlight and silk from the spider’s web, I walk forward.

 

   ii.             The world is not my playground.  Thoughts spiral down, around, thoughts of love and loss and forever. I thought I knew what these things meant, once. But as it would seem, I am an impostor, lying in my own skin. I do not know the meaning of these delicately bound objects. Who does know, I wonder, as I watch the robin build his nest for the coming summer. I feel the sun on my shoulders, the grass under my bare feet. I have it hanging on my wall: love, and yet I am bereft to find the meaning. Because once I thought I loved you, and you were afraid and fled. And I understand, my darling. And yet I dreamt of losing you and I fought against time and space to save you. Your brow is knit tight, your lips pursed closed, and I wonder at your thoughts. I’d throw a penny in every wishing well for you to tell me your utmost desires. What is it that keeps you up all night? What is it that makes your heart sing? What is it, my love? What is it that makes you angry and what makes you at peace? But, like the robin, you are just beyond my reach. And so I will sit in silence, watching, marveling at the beauty that you are. I will watch as you fly away. And I will hope for the day you will come back to my tender garden. I will wait for the day when the beauty of a robin will finally be enough for my wandering heart.

 

  iii.            The memory of you is stored there. Right there, in the pocket of empty space running up my spine, from my tailbone into my shoulders. Some days I scarcely notice the ache from the absence of you. Other days it is all I can think of. The missing is not so much pain, not anymore. It isn’t joy either. I would say it is light grey, like the sun shining through the clouds right before they are about to break after a rainstorm. The world smells fresh and the earth is damp and if I sink my toes into it long enough, I can feel you in the rain. It is stillness. The missing of you is stillness. It isn’t a throbbing absence, not pulsating inside of me. It is more like this empty pocket of space, just there. Most days it doesn’t hurt. It just feels empty. And on those days I’ll put on your sweater, stand on the back porch and wait for rain.

 

     iv.            Soon this space will be too small. I push against the edges of this old box. Like toes in shoes, I am pressed up against the edges. I shift and make myself more comfortable in this space which I am rapidly outgrowing. I feel the tension from being pressed tight, no room to expand. So I must gain courage. I must walk in love, in truth. I must be willing to lose sight of the shore, becoming vulnerable and taking risks. It is there I will taste healing, savoring the taste of solace on my tongue, drinking in marvelous beauty, open to embracing creativity and my truth. With one final push this old rowboat is out to sea. My hands shake as I grip the oars, pushing myself farther and farther away from the shore with each stroke.
Attraversiamo – Let’s cross over.

 

v.            Something always brings me back to you. Like tangles in my hair and the blue heart drawn on the inside of my favorite pair of jeans. It’s a touch stone, I think. It’s like the universe holds it breath in anticipation for this moment, the moment I’ll come back. Because I always do. I’m a gypsy at heart but I can never stay gone for long. I tell myself I’m really leaving this time but we both know it’s a lie. I’m not capable of leaving. I will always come back, floating in on the wind. It’s because you’re a touch stone. It’s because, hard as I try, I can never look into my eyes without seeing the reflection of yours.

 

vi.            And so I wait. For love, for peace, for reunion, for words that last longer than a few moments, for a place my body knows how to stay. I build myself into people. There’s a piece of me there, right under your left ear, and that person has a tiny piece on their big toe. I toss my heart like ashes in the wind and hoping where they fall will be somewhere safe. That’s why I spend so much time running, I think. I’m trying to find myself. I’ve forgotten that here already holds the biggest piece of me.

 

vii.            I ask my empty hands what it all means. I ask myself what it means to love, to let go. I feel the empty space as I sit and I wonder how much longer I will feel the absence like the lack of fluid around my spinal column. I ask them what it  means. I ask them if this time I’m really letting go.

 

viii.            My hands have yet to write the answer.