The soles of my feet seek soil, their daily prayer to find home. World and words move through me like mad. I can no longer pretend normalcy. I can no longer falsify my belonging to this world. A world that expects you to be smooth and straight and mechanical, a silenced square box. Sing a song opposite to that: be scarred and let your edges be jagged and your prayers loud and daring. The antidote to this machine-world, to this automation of soul is to get down to earth dirty and raw, sea-salt lodging inside your small ear, moss sticking to your fingernails, twigs and leaves clinging to your hair. A madwoman.
There is so much in me – blood and words and worlds pulsating. In dreams I am captured and silenced and killed, but I know I can no longer die. I have already died in the world that was not true to me. I am dead to the people and places that stifled me, I am dead to false belonging. I refuse to be a trapped star inside the earth’s womb. I free myself.
I am mad and I am burning, humbled to the bone.
I surrender to the Light.
***
I ask my body today: how can I serve you
how can I love you better and what do you need
what have I done to make you frightened, tight and unmovable
How can I open you again like spring how can I find the moon in you
and do you forgive me for all unkind words
and the strangers that knew nothing of your truth, of how to love you
be still, be still, be still
***
In a numb dumb world I am not afraid to hold god’s name on my lips and utter it with conviction, spell-like and miraculous. In a world that denies soul, I am not afraid to hold my own up and exposed like a golden brochure, and to let soul lead the way. I am not afraid to open my mouth with truth and never, even for a second, think it is without hope or necessity.
Your death begins the day you become silent about things that matter*. And I refuse, refuse, refuse, to die a living death, to die before time, to die sleeping and numb. I am here for something greater than myself. To serve a purpose much greater than my small hands could hold.
What I know is this: nature is deeply resilient. Have you ever seen the hunger, the eagerness with which nature claims back her own, just like an abandoned home whose bricks and cemented walls are urgently taken over by moss, tree branches intertwined with windows holding what was once hostage, now freed in nature’s raw embrace. Our bodies are just like that – if we surrender to the earth’s intelligence, she will hold us, take us back to her, we are her own. Our skin is soil and our blood the waters of the world and our mouths are flowers opening in spring singing truth.
So trust. Trust in this restoration of self and other, trust to open daily, not afraid to hold god and your body into strength. Refuse to become silenced and surrender a little.
*Quote from Martin Luther King
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