The Elegance of Quiet

[“It was the divine soul embracing mine. I never before dreamed what love meant: not what life meant. Never was alive before — no words but those of “new birth” can hint the meaning of what then happened to me.] [“..it must be so — my love rises up out of the very depths of the grief & tramples upon despair. I can wait — any time, a lifetime, many lifetimes — I can suffer, I can dare, I can learn, grow, toil, but nothing in life or death can tear out of my heart the passionate belief that one day I shall hear that voice say to me, “My Mate. The one I so much want…] 

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Anne Gilchrist wrote to Walt Whitman in 1870

PTSD is a an inventory of things you ignored. A troupe of shrapnels stabbing you out of the blue.  It's a list of things that wrapped you around

Letting yourself completely, incomprehensibly be one with something, something bigger than yourself, configuring to the messiest parts of it, is one of the scariest, basest, bravest things you would ever do to your self.

Worst, if you go through the breath stopping and I mean literal breathless variety of it – where you are scared to go to bed because you know your heart is now ready to shut down your body the minute you let your controls flex.

So you hang on to the sides of the cliff with your exhausted bloody hands, with winds encircling you, enticing you to let go – same winds which carried you when you first jumped, full beneath your wings. Is it because you are/were in love? Or you so brutally wrenched it out of you? Didn't you make sure to block it?  Suffocated it into a box, buried and threw the key away? What is this – threatening to rise up to the surface then?

Photo by Eugene Shelstov from Pexels

It’s exhausting. This fight. How do you survive? How does one heal? How does one forgive? How do I forgive him and myself?           

Because am done… I can’t fight anymore, blindfolded with my hands bloodied on the edge with nothing but a broken yet stubborn heart? 

I can’t breathe and I desperately need air…  it's Time

I have to Heal. Forgive. Get Better.

Happy Birthday, Dear Girl... You Shall Get Better, Happier and Radiant

Copyright©Neer

一期一会 - Ichigo Ichie

Once upon a time, I was in love.

I closed my eyes; wing spread my arms, let the wind of the time be my friend and jumped off that cliff-unharnessed headfirst.  Those moments of free fall were the moments I was in-synch with the universe. I was invincible. I was the wind and the water. The butterflies chasing the golden rays. I was ethereal and crackling fire.

It was a beautiful heart-breaking unclassifiable thing. This being. It was a living, breathing and feeding-on-me. Impervious to disaster and indifferent to dangers yet replete with both. This being. This me who had somehow survived whole, the ravages of time and growing up. The little girl with a wide eyes wonder and spirit of Gaia. 

Like an echo of Emily Dickinson's  

"I chose this single star

From out the wide night’s numbers —" 

I received a hand written note  "like once in a lifetime, meteorite...you" 

Once upon a time, I was in Love... 

I am in a constant struggle with my unsettled heart, for as long as I can remember; the war between the quiet within and the pandemonium without;  knocking against that quiet, stealthily.

And, before you know, it's a battlefield of racing, dangerous, benign, grandiose, depressed electric impulses firing the synapses. All within. All under the surface. I have implosion down as perfected art.  

Being in time, fully present comes naturally to me. They say it's a good thing. Perhaps. And yet, when the memories crash. You can feel each of those electrical impulses all over again. Nostalgia is an island - you don't want to be deserted on.

January ambled off in an insane turmoil, of world slowly going belly up with all consuming chronic pains, wars, strife, virus, protests and the general mania that dominates human society. And, I began re-learning to lean into my silence. Very very painstakingly. 

Gingerly retracing the steps of the relationship I once used to be in.  

With my quiet. The silence.

The 3:33 AM dates with self now have a spirant quality to them. 

And the ones in the sun dappled winter afternoons are filled with chirping dragonflies.

Copyright © Neer