Thursday, December 3rd, 2009
I went out to the hazel wood,
because a fire was in my head…
–Yeats
I am in love with this rough beauty…this one, long scintillating life that trails along like the tail of a serpent after all the others. I am in love with this time that brands the heart with its fierce fire, melting our very last edges and pouring us back into the larger pool of what it means to be the self. I am on fire, and I will always burn with life. Sometimes it will be hot enough to leave me trembling with tears on my face, and others it will simply tint the stars of my deepest heart with warm light. We cannot avoid this fire. We can only learn how to dip our fingers into its richness, and pull them out glowing…so that everything we touch ignites.
And we’re never gonna survive, unless, we get a little crazy…
–Seal
Most of the time we live on a very rocky boat, in the midst of a magnificent storm…and we forget. We put so much energy into bailing out the boat that we forget the miracle of being alive at all. We forget until that moment, when we are so blessed that the warm water reaches up to meet our bare feet while we stand on the edge of wood and bone, and we fall in love with something we were surrounded by but never knew. And we get naked and leap in…
And this is all we really have right now. Blind faith…pure, unreasonable love…a chance to let everything go. We live in the most powerful time of change this planet has ever known, and we will be torn apart with nothing left of what we knew before this is all over. It won’t get any less intense. We will go mad. And it will be the best thing that could have ever happened to any of us.
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous roman yellow candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
–Jack Kerouac
Because we have to fall apart. There just isn’t any other way to wholeness, and wholeness we are all, without any doubt, hellbent on getting to. We are one big beating heart now, this universe, waiting for the walls to crumble and the floodgates to open, wanting to crash in on itself in the greatest feat of love ever known. We have been so dragged through the dirt and the gravel of life and brokenness that letting go is the only option left. We have been worn down. We have been in every wreck, and we never get done surveying the wreckage. Someday we must finally get so tired of the fascination with our epic suffering that it is only natural we would look up…and find the sky. And then, though perhaps still pressed between the boulders of what we have lost, we will realize that there is something more. We will find a beauty we thought we would never get another chance to know. A sunrise everyone had forgotten.
We won’t do anything then. We will just slip…into ourselves.
So what now? Living in destruction and being pulled apart at the seams, physically, emotionally and mentally as an old world dies is no small deal. I wouldn’t worry so much about aligning your dna, or making sure your chakras are balanced perfectly. I wouldn’t worry endlessly about what could happen…no. I would steal the little moments of joy. These will give you everything you need. I would gather them up like glimmers on the surface of water in your mind’s eye. I would find ways to let loose. Do the things you have always been afraid of, and say the things you never thought you could say. Many things will happen in these next few years that you never, ever thought could. Be outrageous. Be wild. Be soft, be you. Find the things that light up something deep inside you…and run toward them rather than away. It is now. Find your passion, and then, don’t just look that tiger in the eyes…get right on and ride it. Ride hard. The night is long, and your light will be like the trailing flame of hope and triumph wherever you go. You who know yourselves…know more. Fall in love, with anything, anyone and anyplace you can, as often as possible.
Open all the pandora’s boxes, eat from all the trees of knowledge. There should be none left forbidden, and Eve and Pandora wish to walk the earth again with heads held high, hips swinging sweet and wide, and arms…open.
Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.
And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, as of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, or whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: ‘It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be the martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will!’
Baudelaire
Take this beautiful, fragile moment, and make it sing. Your strength will grow and the sun will rise on your heart. The red wave of passion will engulf you, and that drowning will be your ultimate survival. Carry hope with you always, and love hard my friends. Love deeply, love well, and love hard. It is your torch, blazing through any darkness. And it will carry you to the promised land…within.
Love, Jennifer
