Sunday, September 13th, 2009
I’m upstairs in my room…the sunlight is streaming in and I’ve spent the last hour or so playing a new song I really like, singing along, and dancing around…over and over again. And it’s amazing. It’s amazing how much it feels like not only a balm to the soul, but a seal of protection…driving any darknesses far away, or pulling the ones from my heart and making them into beautiful new shapes. I looked up the chords to the song online and started playing it on my guitar, and then I pulled out the old typewriter I just started using and let a poem come out of me…
This…this is one of the most powerful forms of sound healing I have ever known. It’s the miracle of music or sound bringing you back to yourself, and really that is the truest power of healing in whatever form it comes…singing, writing, dancing, painting, making love, walking out under the sky, a long drive to nowhere in particular, a new place to see, a new way to see yourself…the gifts of life are the things that give you back to yourself, over and over again. This is remembering. This is what then lets you give yourself to others, or to anything you want to give yourself to. And giving yourself as deeply as you want to, without ever having to give yourself away, is the sweetest feeling I have ever known.
Once we learn to capture the glimmers of gold…the special things that somehow pull us inside, and then inside-out, and how to give over to them (like me playing the same song over and over again for an hour and letting it lead me, and simply not worrying about all the other things I could be doing…) life starts to be sweeter than it ever has been. You get the feeling of being in love, and no matter how many people this may or may not extend to…it extends to yourself…you are in love with being you. And you can get there even on the worst days, if you just know how to see that gold wherever it is hiding…or to have the deep-soul strength and faith to wait when it isn’t showing up at all.
I used to write a lot of poetry. I started when I was little and kept up until my early twenties, and then, suddenly…it got quiet. Don’t get me wrong. I write all the time…here, in my journal, songs, and so much more. But the poetry that seemed to feed my soul which starved for a depth that complete sentences rarely captured was waiting on something…so I waited too. And then my love gave me one of his antique typewriters…and suddenly something freed up in me. Full of errors and inconsistencies, ink that fades and intensifies in waves…I found that voice again. The one of so many in me that I adore, and that I missed.
Sometimes I get wrapped up in being outside of my element, without even knowing it. I am just “making do”…just coping. And then I get into the woods, or near the ocean. And I suddenly breathe again. I hadn’t even known I was holding it back. The other day was one of those even-more-magical than usual days. I knew I had to go to the woods, and when I did I was enveloped in a rare light, and everything was on fire with itself…lit from within. And I was walking across mossy rocks in my bare feet, and the trees were all speaking wordlessly at the same time, and my body suddenly made sense again here on this planet. I was the forest…I am the ocean.
download Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders I recently spent a week in the city, and though I am so glad I did because it was an incredible time, the very best part of it all was coming back home. It was a fresh start, and a new perspective. And there is almost nothing like a new perspective. It comes with a liberation…and sometimes even a freedom that makes you believe that the burdens of lifetimes can, and will, someday have fully fallen from your heart. It lets you know that you are not the many things that have been weighing on you. You are what is beneath them. You are what is beneath everything, and like the flowers that grow through the thinnest cracks in concrete, you too will burst forward with your heart-stopping beauty in every possible space…until finally, your radiant soul will overtake anything that dares to try to hold it back. That’s just who you are.
I know about the days that it feels like all we’ve done is push our tender heads against the concrete without moving it all. And all you can feel is the headache and your heart can’t even speak. But it only gets that bad when it is just about to give way. And the tougher and thicker the layer, the more wildly alive and blooming what overcomes it in you will be…and that….that beauty in you that bursts forth…it can never be held back by anything ever again…it is golden.
So if the concrete is heavy on your heart today, and you don’t know how you will ever get around it (or even how the light could get through)…turn to something that gives you back to yourself, and let it…
And if you are fresh out of ideas, find a song you really love…that makes you feel good again inside…and put it on repeat.
Love, Jennifer
