First Words from a Sea Bird

There is always some part of yourself, some story you leave unsaid. It doesn’t seem to have a role in the overall plot. And then there are other things you just get used to holding, you’ve been at it so long. These are the carcinogens. Held in our mouths so long, we forget the taste, forget it is poison.

I find myself now facing the truth of my experience and no longer willing to remain silent about it for the sake of peace and appearances. I ask you to bear witness.

I was in a committed relationship with someone I deeply cared about. He was the person I hadn’t believed existed before I met him. He was charming and everyone who knew him thought so. He was weird, quirky, attentive, and saw the world in a refreshing way. For about a year he professed his deep, unending love for me. And I thought I had unexpectedly found true love. I didn’t know he could only be seen by strangers. His behavior could not withstand the extended gaze of an intimate relationship.

Soon the compliments shifted to undercutting remarks, “teasing,” and criticisms coupled with the bonus criticism of my increasing self-consciousness. That turned into manipulation, secrecy, lying, jealousy, and possessiveness. Verbal and emotional abuse. Infidelity, lies about lies, threats of leaving, and ignored questions. Gaslighting, name-calling, raging anger and violent threats finally fulfilled by physical abuse. I distanced myself from everyone but him. Thinking I was just being a compassionate partner, I financed our life together with a student loan. When he did finally get a job, I repeatedly had to ask for his help with bills. He required upmost privacy. I begged for his respect, communication, and forgiveness, believing by then what I was told – that our conflicts were my fault.

I was depressed, physically ill, suicidal, and filled with anxiety and shame. I felt trapped. Like in a dream where you need to scream but nothing comes out. I felt like I was losing myself. I loved this man with all my heart. He was the one I would go to for relief and solace, but his responses were narrowed to anger or dismissiveness.

No one knew. Maybe some had a clue. Eventually, I found my voice. Said I could do it no more. That was ten years ago. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and it saved my life. But it will no longer hold in my belly, in my throat.

I want to move closer to my authentic self. I’m seeing her more and more these days. People behaving badly gives permission to others to do the same. The same is true of people speaking their truth. It’s the objective of art. Getting us closer to seeing ourselves and, in that, one another.

Part of my healing means no longer protecting him from himself. He can carry his own burdens. I wish to meet the world in a more real way. It has taken a decade to realize I missed him despite the abuse. I was holding on to the part of him that everyone else sees. I only now recognize that in doing so, I was betraying the truth of my own pain. I was still looking for, and finding, him in others I would date.

I let go. And send my story to the special collection of invitations to do the same. We all have pain. And secrets. We must find ways to acknowledge, attend to, and release them. Otherwise, we just end up perpetuating the violence.

Why do I share this with you? Pity does not interest me. I want honesty. I want to be a vessel of love. I pour this poison out.

Love is expanse. If it feels like anything else, walk away.

cover art by me.

I bear witness to the world as it is. Not resisting what I see for what I want.

I listen to it, allow it to be. I hold space while the world weeps. I bow to it while the old order burns, writhes.

I am not dead set on a design for the new world, but breathe in the wondrous possibility. Still there, with it. With me in it. We only begrudge death when we don’t walk with it at its own pace. Like an old dog. A father. A friend. That’s where the grace is. The seeing, the listening. The being there.

From that place, love burns like a fire in my belly. I feel the awakening. The universal birth beginning. This river is me. And bigger than me. In the allowing, seeds can germinate. In the allowing, the path is clear and love rushes through, unceasingly.

 

How unthinkingly we squash: Ants, pumpkins, human spirit.

Yesterday, I was thinking on how I used to listen to music in my bedroom.  I played it with the volume so low that I could barely hear it.  At first I thought, you know, if I still played my music that low, I would still have pretty good hearing.  I was allowing my ears to be sensitive.  But my father would comment on it every time he realized I was doing it.  He would ask me, “Why?”  I didn’t know why, but I didn’t know why not, either.  I considered how often we do this to each other.  So often we plant, however casually, softly, or inadvertently, so many seeds of doubt for soil fertile and receptive enough.  Doesn’t it stand to reason that if the soil is fertile enough to foster positive thoughts, it will be equally receptive to critique?  Why did he need to ask me why I did it?  I have no doubt he loved me.  But, regarding this specific recurring inquiry, I’m not sure if he was actually curious for my explanation, just looking for something to say, or if it was rhetorical and borne out of some unsettled self-consciousness.  In any case, that was middle school and this is now.  Twenty years later.  I remember it well.  It may have had something to do with the volume I use as my standard now – loud.

But, delving deeper into the memory, I realize I used to sing often.  I used to sing to music in my room, memorizing lyrics as a hobby.  If I played it low enough, I could follow along and still hear my own voice; it wouldn’t get lost in the other.  It makes perfect sense, but I didn’t realize it enough at the time to be able to put it into words when he asked.

I knew my voice.  I wanted to hear it, strengthen it, use it.  I was confident in it and when I sang, those around me could hear that; they commented on it.  My conviction was that anyone could sing as long as they did it often and mindfully.  My music teacher once asked me to sing “Silent Night” in German for our class because she said she wanted me to demonstrate the correct pronunciation and I think secretly wanted me to be outed as a kid with some talent (I was awkward and shy – and she was a sweetheart).  I sang and in the quiet, carpeted innocuousness of the music room; I surprised myself at my composure. Something in her asking gave me a calm confidence. Several classmates with whom I didn’t normally socialize, complimented me afterward in the hall.

This was before my self-doubt kicked in to full gear in high school (if you tend toward being an alto, don’t audition as a soprano singing Handel’s “Messiah”.)  However, my point is not my singing.  My point is the confidence we regularly shake out of one another as if it’s a fruit or flower of which there are 500 more.  It is hard work to get those flowers to fruit – we know that much from our own experience.  Too often we underestimate the power of words.  So, let’s mind well the flowers on one another’s trees.  Although this is critical for children, it is no less true for adults.  Would we rather be a field of stark, weather-worn branches that bear no fruit, or a grove of nurtured trees, bearing witness to our own ability and gifts to share?  We begin in this world wanting for and accomplishing so much before we learn to ask whether we can or should.

Rather than assume the over-confidence of one another, let’s assume we don’t have enough.  You never know how much encouragement can mean to someone.  Besides, why wouldn’t you give it?  It’s 100% free.  The world needs more strong, creative voices, not less.  And the world’s creatives need more encouragement, not less.

Let us not build houses too small,
walking hunched room to room
and call it love.
That is not living, and it is not love
despite what we may call it.

Loves makes our shoulders wide
and backs straight.
Draws breath and gives us eyes for beauty.

May we all know that love,
the one that comprises the fabric of our every cell.
The one that makes us noble, vulnerable,
and capable of marvelous things.

May all those who do not yet know, come to know,
and those who do know, not forget.

A sweet, soft pulp,
wrapped in the confidence of autumn,
carried in her oversized coat pocket –
all the more sacred
for its secrecy.

We passed through gates
of elms, pines tall as dinosaurs,
quiet enough to be alive.
Dry leaves crunched,
exposing us
to no one.

Sunlight flickered, daring,
through hushed,
circling cedars.

Seated at a
fallen trunk,
we consumed the pulp
bite by bite
to remember home.

the real voice, the one that haunts me.
It mimics the grind and shift.  Stop.
Jerk start
cogs    wheels    cymbal din.
Mocks pollution of unused industry.
Gears turn full
then reverse.

Truth is not beauty unless we don’t understand what beauty is.
Studies support this.
If the word “unless” is no older than the fourteenth century,
there must have been another way to neatly explain conditionals.

Wheels lock.
Must be a feather
in the system or
a piece of string
(from the sweaters
my mother finds me).

I want to write

(but)

wheels lock

(when)

my mother finds me

Marshes stretch beyond
stone structures, weathered
arches, foundations.
Trees are short and few, spiny   living
a dry life.
I take a dusty path
worn, scraped through the rolling land,
on my way to the pool, but on a tour,
in a gallery,
a neighborhood of no one.

Structures that housed people now
stand as art.  Not found
art, like paint chipping from a back
gate under
weight of age and
acid rain.
Placed art, realized, praised.
Black lines frame
doorways and squares on solid
white-washed walls.

And then the pool.
Others have already found it
warm not stagnant within
high sand walls
rim lined rust brown
holding tightly against the sea beside.
Wash-over water contained,
clear enough but not domesticated
de-mineralized.
I step from the grassy border,
swim through the shallow hint
and into the deeper.

I live inside some other creature –
not a mere pelt but
a warm red inside speaking
to water pressure –
I know what it is
to be a slick-skinned swimmer
singing of the glide, the slight surface lip yield
the deaf delay below.

He says it’s the letting go I’ve read about, a fall asleep sigh
as nothing takes over.
All those times on the couch reading, the bed waiting, lids too
heavy to lift
all at once drifting
away – that was practice, I suppose.

After three weeks without food, what does the mind turn to when it
finally knows
this will be
the sleep?  The nap that clings too tight.