Tag: poetry

The Traveller’s Tale

A young soldier who survived the winter-war prepares for her next journey. She assumes the identity of ‘Traveller’ and begins to gather food and medicines. There is only one problem: she does not know what she will need. For no one knows where she will go and what she will do. This knowledge begins to dawn on her and a haze of fear begins to cloud her heart-gaze. She realizes she is standing at the edge of a precipice and the path forward looks like a terrifying and choiceless plunge into the abyss.

She begins to desperately hoard food and medicines and clothes. Anything that might help is taken. She pores over old tomes and spends her days in the archives trying to envision the final destination of the journey and draw up the shape of her map. She desperately asks villagers about their journeys and asking for their maps, blind to the knowledge that no two journeys will be the same. She is frantic and afraid because she fears that the journey will lead her astray and she will lead herself astray and she will not survive the journey and she will lose her shape.

She steps further and further from the rooted oak-center of herself and takes bigger and bigger ground-eating steps and travels voraciously and gazes distractedly around her, for a yawning, dissatisfied gaping abyss-mouth is opening within her and it needs more and more and more.

But she has forgotten simple truths. The journey she will undertake is unknown to even the gods, and the precipice is not a precipice — that is merely an illusion-distortion created by the fog of fear. The path onwards is indeed only and simply a path. There is fear, but there is joy too, for the very unknowability is a joy. The journey itself will be a glorious shaping and the final destination that she will rest in matters less than the undertaking.

The traveller shapes the journey and the journey shapes the traveller. She has forgotten to allow herself vulnerability in the dark face of the unknown. She has forgotten to carry faith and hope and strength like a torch, and to remember that a seedling does not blossom into a fine and mighty oak overnight. For she carries within her all that she needs, and she has only to take the first step forth courageously and vulnerably and calmly, to begin blossoming.

Hurt

is abandoning yourself
and expecting someone else
to adopt
the poor,
abused,
pitiful,
emaciated
and wailing child
on the sidewalk
who is only visible
to you,
and being furious
because no one
even looks
at the empty sidewalk,
and no one
takes the child,
whose cries rend your flesh,
away
from you.

Hurt

is
living
like you are
the wound
made flesh,
seeing every person around you
through the frightened eyes
of an abandoned child,
looking for your mother
in every single face –
and when
no one
meets your eyes
and sees you,
and loves you,
you grieve
every
fresh abandonment
like it is the original wound,
not realizing that
you are the only one
who can
bring the child
home
and yours is
the only hand
that can offer
healing.

Harmony

I unfold my hands gently
and look at the space between my rib cage –
the space my shoulders hunch protectively over.
And I see the wounded child and the anxious worrier
and they look up and see me
and they look at me with eyes like wounds and eyes like fear.
So I gather them within my cupped hands,
and I give them my love,
and I promise them:
I will never abandon you again.

how to self-care

1) have patience for when the maelstrom of pain bowls you over, do not flick your eyes impatiently to your watch, do not let ignorant-harsh words drop like rocks off your tongue, do not tap your foot and wish of being elsewhere.

2) be present and stay with the maelstrom and let it buffet you until you find your way into its eye, where all is calm. attend to the cries the way a mother focuses on her child.

3) repeat and promise: I will not abandon you again, and again, and again, and again – endlessly. accept that you are the pilot of the plane spinning helplessly in the walls of the maelstrom, accept that you are the mother to a wailing child, accept that you are caretaker of this grieving body. weave a new story to the wounded child – you are trying your best and it is human and it is alright and feel-observe-absorb the changes in your body, like ripples in a pond, from the right words, for the true words calm and the false words slash.

4) practice gentleness and offer it to yourself as you have generously and selflessly offered it to every other person, for you are a person, too, and deserving. for self-love is not a feeling or an attitude or a belief, it is an action and a commitment, just like its partner, other-love. for only then will the truth of you float to the surface of the deep lake, and upon reading from the lake, authenticity and peace will steal over you like warm and comforting blankets that are tough as armor. and one day, you will find yourself in the home that you have longed for once again.

perfectionism
n.

1. blindness. it starts out innocuous. you have been gifted a new sword, and you are beyond enamored with it, and you hold it out at an arm’s length, and you marvel at its sharpness, and the gleaming sear of light off the blade that could cut air dazzles your eyes, and you do not see that the casual nicks it has already left on your hands and fingers, because, oh, how safe this sword makes you feel – how it sings to you of Control and Safety and Mastery.

2. till exhaustion. you test it out – the imaginary enemies fall like wheat before a scythe. you slash and laugh and how you do not notice the ghosts that begin to solidify faster than the sword sings, how an entire war’s worth of soldiers have filled the space around you, how the goal post moves further and further and further, how there is no end in sight, and how there is a strange quiet voice warbling of the lost center.

3. while trying to fight off self-abuse. why did you make this mistake again, why do you choose to suffer, why – do not listen, dear one.

4. and you look back to shore and realize how you unmoored you have become. you have travelled far from your roots, young soldier – the shape of “enough” and “success” have become amorphous as fog, you will travel voraciously and never be sated if you keep rowing and slashing – remember.

5. and you remember. sheathe the sword. you are not ready for it yet. take hold of your scythe-light again, remember your doves and your roots. press these words onto your heart – may i have peace – and tuck yourself into bed and begin the new-old-true tale: there once was a child who was making the best decisions she could, and she was only human, and she was only striving. and most importantly whisper to yourself the promise: i will not abandon you.

Pilgrimage

I have experienced
the peace
that comes from
coming home
to myself
and the universe.

This sense
of homecoming
is
beautiful
and
there is a
softness wonderment joy
in my throat
at the sight
of every little thing
and it
takes
my breath away
just to
be,
to
breathe,
to
exist.

It is as though
every blood bone nerve breath
in my body
is aligned
perfectly,
rightly,
truly.

It has
left me now
and I am
lost,
uncertain,
bones and blood and breath and nerve
subtly misaligned.

But I am
beyond blessed
to have
stepped into
the heart of peace.

I miss it
like I
miss
my own heart.

I
seek it
again.

And so
I begin
my journey
anew.

The home I carry within me

the disease of the lost self
i have travelled far and left my home behind
i do not trust you anymore

Three accusations are brought before me.
I oveturn them all.

The journey
began
four years ago.
Let me
return
back to the start.

Four years ago,
I became aware
for the first time
of the disease
that ate
away at my roots
like black rot.

That year,
I set out
on a pilgrimage
that would span
years,
not knowing
when
I would see
my home again,
not knowing
where
I would travel to.

I dragged
my kicking
and
screaming
and
hating
self
out of the grave
I’d lain content in
and
began
the arduous toiling voyage
towards
the republic of heaven.

Three years ago,
I realized
I relentlessly
tried to build
my home
within people,
when, really,
I must
learn
to carry
my home
within myself.

Two years ago
I watched
the land
I loved;
the land
of my
hopes,
dreams,
and beliefs
fall
into
ashes
and
heartbreak.
The work
to find
and build
the republic of heaven
with my own hands
became evermore urgent.
Hope
cannot
be found
without,
pinned
to a
distant land.
It is
the invincible summer
that sings
within.

This very same year,
I learnt
that
mostly,
I want to be kind.

A year ago,
I realized
I must
learn
to swim
in the ocean
that is society.
And
I taught myself
so well
that I learned
to thrill at
the sight
of the
vast, glittering, terrifying
blue.

The search
started to turn
inward.
I stopped
traversing lands
and instead
traversed deep
within
myself.

A year ago,
I learnt
to listen
without
bearing pain.
This
is not
and will never be
a home.
Do not
carry it
like it is one.

Two months ago,
I realized
I
must
tell myself
a different narrative
if I am
to live.
I am an addict.
I am a survivor.

A month ago,
I realized
I
mistook
my humanity
for my ugliest
shame.

Four weeks ago,
I made
and remade
and remade
the choice
to
be kind
to myself.
For do I not
want, mostly,
to be kind?

Three weeks ago,
I realized
I did not
know myself
at all.
And I
would like to.

Two weeks ago,
I learnt
to allow myself
to be seen
and to bare
my heart
again
and again
and again.
It gets easier.
I learnt
to stand in the fire
shaking
but
upright.

A week ago,
I realized
I
did not
trust myself.
And, so,
I placed trust
like a mantle
around my shoulders,
and it was
so
warming
during the winter.

A week ago,
I
saw myself
with clear
and unclouded eyes.
I saw the shape
in the mirror
and how
I recognized her,
and how
I understood her.

A week ago,
I
came home
to myself
and felt
for the first time
the joy
of homecoming.

And thus,
my four-year journey
has finally come to an end.

I have travelled long and far and wide,
and I have lived in the fire, trembling, alone, agonized,
and I have lost myself to the winter of self-hatred,
and I have forged a new phoenix-self out of the ashes of my bitterness and grief and fear,
and I have learnt to build a home within myself,
and I have finally
found
the self
that I
have lost.

And I have been Persephone, toiling away below the earth,
unsure if she would see the light of spring again,
but, still, she persisted.

And I am Persephone, returned to spring,
and a part of the beauty and aliveness of the world again.
And I look back now
and I
cherish
every single step I took,
every flaying I endured,
every peace I felt,
and every inch I grew.

For I have a home now.
And there is not much to be afraid of anymore.

The tale of peace.

“Patience” is what the dial points to now.

The winter that passed was the most excruciating winter endured, to date. It was bone-chilling and skin-flaying. It was exposed heart and blood and nerve. It was icy black water seeping in through the door and the only signs of the house’s occupants are the drowning air bubbles escaping to freedom the way their owners could not.

But the mistress of the land and the owner of the house is home again and and she has begun to spring clean and the floors are gleaming white and clean and the books are no longer toppled over but upright and stacked and the curtains are thrown back and light is reaching in with tentative fingers.

The demons, unheard winter-long, clamor and rouse and bang heavy fists on her door and speak in garbled tongue but she opens her home and offers patience like tea and puts into language every single unintelligible sound and unuttered howl. And they leave, quiet, sated, docile as lambs.

And the people knock and knock and bring complaints and problems and little disasters, and she opens her home again and offers them patience like tea and untangles their messy yarn-balls of problems and offers them new yarn.

And the garden dares to grow again. Shoots pluck up their courage and push through the soil to take a peek and flowers venture, bold as you please, to put out their skirts and begin to unfurl again and the trees, the old, mighty sentinels whose roots spread across the entire land and hold it together in their unwavering, steadfast, grasp, stretch toward the sun again and groan in relief after a winter’s worth of making themselves small.

How good it is to be home.