Frontiers

I can feel the new in my whole body – the changes and shifts of my inner membranes. My chest-cave expands with fresh breath.

And how much is leaving just like a small death. The places that have held me demand their farewells. The hills that have been a home, paths that have a story in them, trees that bore witness to my life. I’ve done this before – leaving – a life of flowing from one place to another, traveller’s blood in me. Yet this time the skin I am shedding is thick and heavy – its matrix holds a lot. Its density pulls me down no more.

I say my goodbyes attentively. Leave it all, as it is, my back no longer needing to carry the past.

I condense my life in two square suitcases. Everything else, I leave here.

And how I wish I could travel back the road, briefly, to meet my own self that was doubting this possibility of light, that was circling in a body of pain and grieving. How I wish I could go and tell her to trust in the fertility of dark, to await the immense gifts of pain. To trust in the necessity of resting deeply, to trust in what was a seemingly inert state, to trust the quietness of no happenings.

The maturation of Self reaches a point that demands leaving. A soldier leaving home for the frontline. True callings require leaving home, having no roots deep enough to hold you in one place for too long. This demands fluidity – like the sea in me, always guided by the Moon’s temperament.

What brought me here, now, at the threshold of new-life, is this: the fierce stripping of all that was not pure or true, the brave descent into darkness over and over, the letting go and grieving. A commitment to strip away the layers of my own skin, to get to the pulsing warm core of being – the soul. The commitment to renewal. The commitment to serve more than my own self. The raw honesty to say this shall go, no more, no more.

I am a budding tree, the season changing within me. My extremities are bursting with new life. A life that forces in me an understanding of home beyond the walls of space and land. Home within, despite anchoring in new seas, soles awakening to new earth.

The breath is my home
body is home
heart
recalibrating to joy
and new frontiers.

***

The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.