Tuesday, August 7th, 2007
I have often wondered why I can only seem to sing melancholy songs…why, when I play music, I can’t seem to leave aside the blues. I have discovered that I am a ballad singer, or that that is the polite way to say it. There is a nostalgia in my soul that never leaves me…a calling of the ocean inside of me that makes everything else bittersweet. It comes out when I sing, and when I write.
I don’t see it as something to overcome. In fact, it overcomes me instead quite frequently, and gives even my greatest joy an amber hue. But you see I love amber, and I wouldn’t want to live without the pull of the ocean inside me.
You may laugh, but clearing off an old computer to give away stirred a whole movement in my soul. It seemed like a simple task…just to save and move old files, photos, videos…emails, poems…
But there I was in front of the glowing screen, watching old images of myself looking back at me. Wearing an old warm coat in the winter, squinting against blazing sunlight in the summer…standing beside the blossoms of spring and in the halloween costumes of fall…birthdays, old friends, the words I wrote about it all. Pajamas and party dresses…our old house and this new one full of boxes when we moved in. Asia, Egypt…laid out like a palate of love and aching all over me. My love, my hope, and everything born of it for those years.
But in the meantime that big desktop has sat, untouched, for months in the corner. I have been camped out in the kitchen, refugee from old spaces and inventor of new ones. Still, one day, I knew it wasn’t big enough anymore for me and my laptop. I have a second book to finish and I knew it wasn’t going to happen in the kitchen, like as I would for it to have.
I had to deconstruct everything I had built my dreams on in order to make room for new ones…to reclaim my plain desk and a space by the window. A clean slate. We think it comes out of nowhere, but sometimes it has to be built right on top of the entire world that came before it. And first, the old empires have to fall.
I don’t know if it is ever easy to watch an empire fall…at least not the kind we built with our love and our sweat and our most intense prayers. But I do know we outgrow these empires, and if we leave them to become overgrown they only haunt us until we revisit them. At some point only pulling them apart allows us to return them to the source of their brilliant creation…that first glimmer within us that inspired us to build them in the first place.
They never really die, but we can only give them new life if we are willing to let them be leveled sometimes. They started with dirt, and blood. Only we can make them new again.
It is that glimmer we are afraid we will lose…that original quake from the bottom of our sea. It will never go anywhere, and it will never let us settle for less than everything we could be. It doesn’t lose sight, or forget its amazing design. It exists only in the passion it was born of, and it holds its place in us forever. It wakes us up at night, asking for more, every time we get stuck on the way to unfolding our ultimate beauty.
If you are watching an old world die, there is little I can say to console you, but just in case it does…there are more empires of your heart to come…and they are far more beautiful than any you have known. They hold the things you are afraid you will never have, or never have again, and though they ask of you everything you are, they are your most divine will manifest.
We can’t not become more of what we are. Even the loops off the track progress us further on that same path. Ultimately our kingdom is waiting for us, much closer than we think, though sometimes just far enough away to miss. That missing is holy. It will call you home better than anything else. Trust what you long for, and never give up, even when empires fall.
From a friend on the journey, with love,
Jennifer
