An interesting thing that's come of the last year and a half's forced cloistering has been a fairly extensive time of self discovery, and a dramatic clean out of all the junk ideas I've accumulated and a dusting off of the solid core beliefs at the bottom. There were fewer of them than I thought - I didn't realize how many things I'd been handed (and picked up) along the way.
While my childhood (and as much of my current life as is possible) was spent largely outside, in terms of my inner life I feel I've been a cicada larvae, crawling around underground, exploring roots and dark places without any sort of context for understanding the bigger picture or how it all worked together. But I have begun to tunnel toward the surface. Gratifyingly, I've found that I'm not alone. I had been living in the crushing isolation of burial for so long that it didn't occur to me there might be a resurrection at some point. But there has been a collective emergence, a shift of examination and house-cleaning and questioning the unquestionable, so not only have I found others like me, some have even begun to express those thoughts through their shared writing.
So now I'm here, clinging to the bark, squinting at the light and wildly overstimulated by the noise we're all making, and trying to find the balance between shouting over others and simply being heard. I'm taking up a lot more space than I was, so crawling back down the hole I came out of isn't an option. I tether myself with lists: How It Was, How It Is, and How It Will Be.
How It Was is pages and pages of scrawl in my journals. Thoughts that jump, seemingly disconnected, from paragraph to paragraph, many of them ending in question marks. How It Is is more a variation on the grounding exercise for panic attacks (find five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste, oh and don't forget to breathe). How It Will Be, well. Let's explore that together.
Comments