A Fickle Path To Be Known

It’s 1pm and I’m in my pajamas pacing my kitchen. Distracting the creative urge bubbling within by cleaning house or telling myself to bake banana bread, both worthwhile causes.

I get this way. Inconsolable and restless, pounding inside my head. A message or a pattern has connected and begs to be brought into expression. Into art. I usually resist these urges with the everyday minutiae of my life.

This time, I have been brought to a ledge that feels new. Adventurous, even. Please excuse my dramatic disposition but my heart has recently been ripped apart in the most delicate way via the Venus Sequence by Richard Rudd. And because of this, there is an insatiable burning. A fire that can either be channeled creatively or will desecrate and scar the tender bits of my freshly exposed heart.

This journey has been a treacherous invisible tale of the Spirit. Perpetuated by my mind’s resistance to peace. Only in realizing this resistance did I begin my search for Truth. For God. And to find out that I am an expression of God.

There is a piece of me that delights in harmony. And add a little real world anxiety, it will quietly darken into perfectionism. You wouldn’t really know it, looking at the online spaces I keep. I am often told how brave I am for just doing a thing and experimenting openly. But for every singular expression, post, episode, story, I have scrapped and thrown away 20 more ideas that never see the light of day.

This newest version of Self comes with a sensitivity that I have denied since childhood. My old patterns of self preservation and neglect, no longer support my new found and always present desire for intimacy. I am the oldest of 4 children, a firstborn through and through. Always tending, giving away my toys, learning the first lesson and stubbornly resisting hierarchy and dominance. A heart that desired communion and synarchy, and the acknowledging of wisdom that can be accessed even as children.

My grandpa is famously quoted in telling his children (my mom, also a firstborn) and us grandkids “Children are to be seen, and not heard”.

Thanks Grandpa.

(Side note: Our parents and grandparents gift us with the premise of our story and mythology that begins our reintegration back to who we came here to be. They did the best, like for real. So seriously, thanks Grandpa)

And so the quieting of an individual, special and perfectly whole being begins. The inner sabotage begins. Self-denial and creative implosion manifests as angst and pride and ignorance of self. A perfectionism for creation that has yet to be born.

And these stories are so intricately mine, and central to my being, that the work can only be healed and understood by living authentically as I am. Expressing and making art and being in communion. Arrived to by way of detachment. This detachment presents a fickle oppositional landscape I’m only now becoming aware of. I recently declared to a friend a set of standards that I DID NOT NEED, only to realize I might need that very same thing I had hours before claimed not to. Fickle, indeed.

Communion and detachment don’t necessarily speak the same language.

Or do they?

Is the path to full communion within my wholeness also met by detaching from every version and expression I’ve identified with along the way? The ones from last year and the ones I experienced as a child? That the synergy within myself and alongside others is found in celebration of the timeless unfolding of each chapter of my life? Is maybe possible that we all experience an internal opposing and fickle nature that helps us remember our truest self?

And of course, this is no easy concept to understand about one’s self. But it is simple. In seeing, we simply see and then know about the nature of our needs. We marry ourselves a bit more fully. Lovingly. And this knowing is medicine for the weary heart, the freshly exposed, bleeding, pounding heart. The joyful heart. The childish heart. And every heart.

We tend and mend and love and then every expression and creation can burst forth, unhindered. Arriving, departing. As it comes and as it goes. A celebration of love, beating out of my chest and into your inbox.