Friday, November 2nd, 2007
I have always been intense. It isn’t a brag or a boast, in fact it has sometimes been a shame, and a pain, but it isn’t something I could ever do anything about. It is who I am, and trying to hold it back just hasn’t been an option. Yes, like a dammed river that could blow at any moment and cover forests of reservation in no time at all. Yes, a wild fire that sometimes feels like it could consume the very wick that holds it lit, leaving little blazing embers everywhere behind it.
I have been told this is wrong. I wrote about it in my song “Joan of Arc” in the chapter called Passion and Risk in my book. As soon as you burn and shine, someone, or many, will tell you you’ve burned them, and it will only sometimes be true…and even when it is true it will only sometimes be “wrong” and never really if the flame came right from the center of your burning heart. But these are radical thoughts. The kinds of thoughts that have put people really to flame.
Yes, I am a radical. Mostly because I have decided that I am okay. And whatever happens to or comes from me that doesn’t seem okay can be remedied, and without years of self-flagellation and belittlement. I believe what is in me can be trusted, even when it doesn’t seem so. I believe what is in me, if I dig as deep as I can, is wise, and I believe in it more than I believe in what I see around me or what others tell me. This hasn’t always made me popular or made me friends, but what it has given me is priceless beyond measure and among the world of dreams-come-true.
But that, you see, is because having your greatest dreams come true is not a walk in the park…it is a walk on the wild side, or you at least have to be willing to walk through the wild side to get to the park. What you really have to do is open your heart.
I am not talking about opening your heart in a greeting card kind of way. I am talking about getting naked, in front of yourself. I am talking about losing your armor in a world full of tricksters with long blades, and not feeling any weaker for it. I am talking about real vulnerability, real courage, real transparency. But you can only allow yourself to be transparent if you aren’t afraid that you are ugly underneath everything, or if you are at least willing to find out. And whatever comfort it is to you, if any, I will tell you that I know you aren’t ugly underneath. You are the glowing heartbeat of the universe. And that is perhaps what we are most afraid to find…how beautiful we really are.
In my recent transmission with the Goddess Lakshmi she talked about the missing link in asking for abundance in our lives…how many of us have learned how to ask, and how to hold our thoughts and clear our past…but have not remembered to learn how to truly receive.
The thing about receiving is that we have to open our arms. If someone truly were handing us the horn of plenty it would be big. We would have to open wide. But opening wide enough to let in what we want, might mean letting in too much…feeling too much. I know some things about this. I feel everything. And yet it doesn’t overwhelm me as it does many empaths. Why? Because however it happened, through many lifetimes of work or some funny accident, I know myself. I am strong in myself, and so the waves of feeling do not consume me entirely. However, when the levels raise right up to the point that I can barely keep my head above water, and flesh from flame, there is one place I can always go: art.
Only occasionally when I talk about art do I mean paintings on a wall. But I do mean anything that gets your fingers dirty and your eyes looking and your heart pumping and your muscles aching and your soul speaking. I am talking about what I am doing right now…I am talking about poetry and feeling your body. I am talking about music that talks to the deepest part of who you are, sometimes without saying a word. I am talking about quenching the thirst that depletes us, and I am talking about taking risks.
It is a risk to receive. It is a risk to open. It is a risk to love.
But then life, or anything beyond it, wouldn’t be worth a thing if we didn’t take those risks…
We have to be willing to actually turn the door knob if we want a door to open, and then we have to walk through it, if we want to get to the other side. Sometimes even when we have no idea what is on the other side. We have to hold up the thin tissue paper of the heart against the light, when we have nothing else left in us to give, and trust that even that small glow will be luminous enough to help us find, again, a spark.
Sometimes our fire feels gone and we have to rub sticks against each other for a long time, despairing at times that it will never work, before we can even find enough friction for heat. And all we feel intensely is the pain. But the pain and the friction will yield to us finally, and the fire will be warm and sweet. In the meantime we can listen the rhythm of our labor until we find peace in it, and it finally sets us free.
If you know what I am saying all too well, put pen to paper tonight and tell it everything you can. Run out of words. Put music on that you love and let it speak to you, or move you. Sing a song that you make up as you go…and you know will never be sung again. Put your hands in dirt, or clay, or paint or the ocean, and don’t let it go, until it lets you go.
Give yourself over to what you want, so that the universe has the opportunity to bless you with it completely. Stand under the stars and decide to take a chance, on something, on anything…whatever the odds. And then do it again, and again, and again. Make it your art, and never lose faith, and you shall inherit the bliss and the pain of all creation…and you shall choose the bliss.
Love,
Jennifer
