I want to be alive with you

Within this pain, you’ll find the seed of its healing.

If you’re ever lost as to what meaning your meagre life holds, look into the darkness of your days.
Look into the eyes of the addictions, the perpetual disempowerment of self. There, you’ll find your gift.

The core of your shadow will reveal the light you so desperately seek, the love your heart cries for in ancient prayer.

Follow me, into the dark night, the black womb where we recreate, transform from the soil of our losses, our deaths, our disappointments. Soil watered with your tears that are holy, also. Nourished by your longing.

We are soul-alchemists, call us soil-tenders, mad ones who see the unseen and voice the unspeakable.

And for so long I sought to make my wound into something tangible, a solidity I can grasp. I swallowed my wounding, ensured it stays down and quiet. Tonight, I give voice to it.

I open my mouth wide and feral, a wild animal caged for so long in a cage of its own making.

I give voice to the voiceless. I trust the callings of the unseen, the whisper of intuition.

Your sickness holds the remedy. Herb carrying poison and its cure simultaneously.

What is it that you fear? Your fear itself bears the very thing you need.

I fear:
the liminal.
The spaces of not much happening. The quiet, the rest within which I was told I wouldn’t be enough for the world.

The space between words spoken and unspoken,
space between decisions, thought to manifestation
space between an ending and the new
space for the body to rest and digest the nutrients fed by the earth.

I filled this space up with
food and decisions, more
noise, dark chocolate more
empty work and more talk
tea more
figs
coconuts
more food
more
more
until numb and

no more space
and filled with empty.

Attention cracked and splintered in a thousands places, just not here, not here. Because here is the pain of the wounding.

In our presence, we become acutely aware of what it is our pain sings out to us, has been singing to us all along.

I give voice to it. I let her sing.

***

_{The story below is a personal share on my journey with accepting and recognising disordered eating patterns that have been holding me within their confines for many years. I choose to now name this, and through that, to release.}

Weeks after my birth, my mother called the doctor.
She drinks too much milk. And isn’t she too round?
He reassured us that I’m a child nurtured well and plump with healthfulness.

It’s the very core of our survival, to be nourished. Well-loved, and well-fed.

I remember, albeit vaguely and unsure whether I’ve made it up, the smell of my grandmother’s cooking. Cinnamon of afternoons, evenings of warm milk and honey. In the mornings, baking that would rise and crust with conviction.
I watched her spend hours chopping apples for pies and before that, watch her kill a chicken to feed me, a ritual only for special days, her granddaughter’s presence big enough for an occasion, roast meat, sweet bread.

I also remember, with more clarity, spreading Pilaf rice on my plate to make it look like I’ve eaten it, hiding some, dropping some, forcing some down. I was five, nursery. Teachers watching me grave and silent, ensuring I swallowed each bite, before I was allowed to go and play.
Five and pale, I was unable to eat.
Tears sprinkled over green peas in tomato sauce, mother watching the scene unperturbed yet uncomfortable.

I don’t remember, but my mother told me when I was older, how one day she found my school coat pocket stuffed with bags, and how I told her they were there for when I’m sick, just in case I needed it.

I grew white and weak. And apart from the aromas of my grandmother’s cooking, which was a rare occurrence for she was never much with us, I have no other memories of eating with my parents, no mother cooking, no evenings softened by rich curries, spiced tea and stories. No dinner table.

I grew ashamed of not eating, shame which evolved with me, taking shape from no eating, to eating too much. Then the counting and weighing, a body growing and becoming incomprehensible, the folds that didn’t look right, the boys making comments, the men confessing I’m used to smaller bodies but I love you as you are. The diets, measuring life into small allowances, grams of nurturing just enough to keep alive. A body changing shape, shrinking then expanding, starving then stuffed to the brim with too much until numb sick sorry. Ashamed and disgusted.

Shame only brings paralysis, an inability to move from the old story into a new one. From life-saving patterns that are no longer saving, but slowly disintegrating our inner self. Yet shame also illuminates the parts of us in need of tending, like drying flowers yearning for the gardener’s attention. The only way out is through: looking through the eyes of shame and disgust, loving those parts. To tell the old story, to name the thing itself that has been feeding on our thriving. Naming the Rumpelstiltskin that has stolen the aliveness of our heart.

The kitchen is the heart of home. A fire warming us up, we whip up the delights, transcend the mundane when our bread rises, peel off the no longer needed, steam our dreams until tender and sweet, carve out the putrid. The soul’s hearth is within this nourishment.
I find again in the bud of this opening, the possibility of a new story of presence and nurturing.

I hold my shame and fulness, a round fat newborn, and in love I release.
And tonight I tell my body for the very first time

I want to be alive with you.

***

“In out-of-the-way places of the heart, where your thoughts never think to wander, this beginning has been quietly forming, waiting until you were ready to emerge. For a long time it has watched your desire, feeling the emptiness growing inside you, noticing how you willed yourself on, still unable to leave what you had outgrown […] Soon you will be home in a new rhythm, for your soul senses the world that awaits you” (J. O’Donohue)