Saturday, March 4, 2017

Where to Begin? ALL OF IT.


Oh my...when the words flow. Thank GOD for words. I have waited so long. I wrote this today - felt compelled to share, especially since the lovely Julie M Daley has been inspiring me with her exploration of writing RAW.

<Start>


It’s hard to know where to begin a story such as mine. There is so much. So much to tell that my body feels almost pregnant with words unspoken. So much that I have scraped across canvases and draped in poetic language only to hide it all away behind a lens of color and artistry. So much that I have buried deep within the vast primitive nervous system in my belly, watching my stomach expand to such a degree that I feel the exact same burning pressure that comes just before labor. So much that I have held in the deep ocean of my subconscious mind, almost believing for a brief moment that the left hemisphere of my brain could be blissfully ignorant of the “so much” that I have carried for so long.


But the “so much” does not define me. Many people can say such things, as it is easy to intellectually grasp the notion that we are not defined by our life experiences. Yet, there is a deep awakening that occurs when the very core of a human comes to recognize that there is a difference between thoughts/actions/achievements/pain and who I AM.


This flicker of awareness is the beginning of a courageous walk that allows observation of ALL OF IT - the horror, elation, tragedy, mediocrity, eroticism, violation - it all becomes a complex pattern of colorful beauty splattered across the multidimensional canvas of life. This cannot be understood dualistically. There is not a simple means of telling a genuine story. While it would seem easier to articulate my path in a linear progression of events and adventures that ultimately led me to this defining moment in existence – because every moment is a defining one – such a one dimensional recollection would fail to capture the inherent complexity of the journey and would therefore miss the point entirely.


I will not collapse the vastness of human experience - in this case my experience - into line graphs and bar charts that can be easily digested. No, I shall be bold enough to honestly articulate the messy and miraculous complexity the comes with living.


Stepping back to observe, I notice that my path is a holographic orb swirling and pulling at each polarity - good/bad, yes/no, tragedy/triumph, chaos/order. As tension builds within this maelstrom of living substance, an explosion releases something new within the vessel that is Me. Mirroring the orgasmic Big Bang that brought forth all of known Creation, I become a fractal of the greater whole.


So I return to the original question. Where do I begin? My answer is simple – I begin with ALL OF IT. Everything that I have experienced thus far in my life, along with everything I will experience in the future - and the entirety of Creation - is collapsed into this single moment. As I write every word on this page, I am both who I was and who I will be, but neither history nor potentiality defines who I am. I simply am.

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