Pain as a necessary reminder

Welcome back, little girl, small palms carrying a world so heavy.

I tried to tell you – your hair is meant to wrap around the earth’s roots and your eyes are an offering to the sea. You didn’t listen.

You trusted in a world that’s so elusive where lust and love are tangled up like two unheeding lovers. Again, you hoped to find a home, to rest within the safety of certainty, to hear that you are loved, you are loveable, you are worthy. Yet no matter how many times they use grandiose words of love and shining promises, there’s an empty space within that echoes with yearning. You know better than to believe their words and promises. There’s a wisdom within your chest, a fire in the pit of your belly, a soft nurturing vibration at the core of your spine – your body revolts when it’s touched by untruthfulness. You are hurting now, but this wound is a vessel of meaning, this pain – a necessary reminder.

So promise me now that you cease searching for home in the places that broke you; that you seek to nourish your power, the creativity that runs through you and feeds the very seed that made you. 

You see, I’m bewildered by the knowing within us; no matter how far we run away from ourselves, the Divine within will never be silenced by these worldly affairs. Our body always knows and screams the truth at us through its own ways that we often reject. And although we struggle to find words or meaning in the bizarre circumstances of our lives, there’s a knowing so visceral that we can no longer ignore.

For all the times someone has asked you how you are, and you felt pressured to say “I am well” when well wasn’t your whole truth, I offer you this wish: that this finds you not just well, but all the things that being human asks of us. And to remind you that your being alive, in all its magnificent and complicated colours, is more than enough for love. Rather than endlessly seeking to get well, or yearning for “how things used to be” or “may be one day again”, we must be willing to walk with our pain. Or at least be willing to be willing to say “This too is welcome. This too belongs”.

Toko-pa Turner – Belonging