The Quiet Words

fiction...

The ribbons have long since fallen from her hair. Or were they cut? She can't remember, but it's been a very long time since she was a girl. Even then, she had never had the freedom of dependence. That came to her when she was just becoming a woman. Just beginning to flower. Her childlike trust had already ebbed away with the dust of so many travel days and so many moments un witnessed.

Now she was older. There were no callers and the urge to produce had left her. The instinct to be productive and to build or create was dormant. At least in this instant and what she had been forced to learn over the years was that it was futile to live in any other time but the present.

She kept hearing over and over from the people around her that were always there but that knew her the least that she lacked an inner glow. that she needed to be completely in love with herself.

She contemplated this concept as she sat in a wicker rocker looking out at a teal blue sea under a thunder headed sky.

This was not her truth.

The truth is, she thought was that she would never be completely in love with herself. there would be days perhaps that she would have a deep satisfaction with everything just as it was including herself, but her nature was what it was, which was always what it was meant to be for her. She would always lean toward love, but she would always have a side that viewed herself in a depreciating way. A melancholic self image. 

She was not a self hater. This was also not her truth. but she simply wasn't full of self satisfaction either. For her there was always a seeking when it came to her own self image. Internal and external. She had an appreciation for her own beauty but was always curious to see a different view. Actually, she was more interested in other people than she was in herself. She felt that learning from others only enhanced her own experience in life, which is true if you think about it. If you can learn from someone else's experience that is.

Some days she was self rightious. Some days she was morose. Some days she felt she was a boring plain ugly duckling and some days she felt the spark of life so fiercely inside her that she was sure she  had been chosen for some greater purpose than anyone could ever imagine. Some days she just wanted to look at the sea and others she wanted to soar over it.

In the end she concluded that she really wanted to keep having all of these feelings, because they were abundance to her. She wanted the variety of joy mingled with pain. The lines were so clearly defined in this way for her, but what she desired within all of this inner chaos was safety. She wanted to be safe.

Safe to feel beautiful. safe to feel ugly. Safe to be fat or thin. Old. Safe to be angry, to drip with tears and sweat. Safe to be sick. Safe to be a success. Safe to be still, to stay in, to spend quiet hours reading. Safe to dance, to sing, to laugh insanely. Safe to fall into a routine. Safe to fall out. Safe. Safe. 

Who would stay with her like that? Who would help her create safe?

She would. She would stay, and be safe with herself. She would be enough safety for one lifetime. What a big adventure that would be, she thought. What an interesting perspective. who knows what will happen. What wild and strange idea may pop into her head tomorrow? As long as she was safe she felt she could do anything...

The surge.

Right at this moment, on paper, I am a total failure.

Truly. If I were to write down all of my faults one would assume I was either a criminal, vagrant or some sort of destitute mentally ill person.

All of which I am not.

I just happen to be cresting a wave of defeats and emotional challenges one after the other right now.

I know I'm not alone, especially in this economy. People are tired and desperate. Suffering financial insecurity on top of whatever emotional and or personal challenges that all humans face or flee at one point or other in their lives. We all share change, we have to because no one has invented a way to stop time. Not yet anyway. And with the passage of time comes change. No denying it.

What has been revealed to me that I find incredibly interesting, however and that is also very new for me which i can only attribute to my age and willingness to stay clear and present, is the way I seem to be able to step back out of my emotional connection to my life and simply observe it. It's almost laughable! I have never been able to do this before! The basic idea came from a Dharma talk I listened to a while back but it stuck so easily and started becoming almost second nature immediately. 

I sort of step out of my feelings when they start to get big and try to observe my relationship with the experience I am having at that time.

Over the weekend, no actually over a period of about twenty four hours, I went through such a massive arch of feelings from enraptured to humiliated, shamed and rejected all in one day.It was an unavoidable experience that life just threw at me and believe me, lately I have become a skilled drama evader. This was just one of those inevitable roller-coasters that we all have to ride eventually, and this morning, Monday morning, as I started a very busy week on a very weary psyche I found myself in the midst of one of the most beautiful metaphors I have ever had the pleasure to sense.

I feel that life for me is a great and terrible storm right now, surging forward in giant menacing sets. Life has risen up in a gale like this for me before but I found endless and sometimes very creative ways to hide and turn away from the barrage.

This time I feel my legs firmly planted, anchored into the ground and my stance is solid. I feel like I am facing life's massive endless ocean head on, but I am lit from within. There is a warm glow heating me from the inside out so that I remain relatively comfortable with the cold biting rain and waves crashing against me. They will not uproot me. I will remain standing. The bitter cold will not overcome me, I have a continuous heat source that can not be reached by it's weathered frosty tentacles.

I don't know why but I am in awe of the current of feelings passing through me. I can feel everything and it excites me. I can feel the storm surging all around me, I can taste the salt water, like blood blasting through and around me, eroding me. Natures force changing me and breaking down all my old ideas about who I am or what I  thought I wanted out of life. It burns and stings like horseradish in the back of your nose. Behind the pain is a pleasure. A knowing that my core still remains and always will. The pain of the present is the birth of the future and I am unassisted. I am alone. 

Nothing makes me feel more connected to one and all thing like this embraced realization of alone-ness. 

Nothing gives me more hope than the knowledge that I have no idea what is to come.  No idea how this eroded glowing figure will unfold as the surge recedes. But I am grateful for this time, this life, and these thoughts and images. I am grateful to be able to express them in the ways I do. I am grateful for the sense I have of benevolence within that alone-ness. I will stay the course and ride the storm. The surge will recede and once it does..it will be a new world