New Year Naked

These songs resonate lately. Much roils and rumbles in my core, washing up on the shoreline of my thoughts, leaving me lost on where to begin, which detail do I pick up first and what do I do? It’s time for big change.

“We’re all lost. We’re all found. We’re all the same.
Just one heart beats in us, with different names.
Just one heart, with different names.

Hold me inside you…” (Vertical Horizon)

“…me, I figure as each breath goes by, I only own my mind.
The north is to south what the clock is to time
there’s east and there’s west and there’s eveywhere life
I know I was born and I know that I’ll die.
The in-between is mine, I am mine…
The full moon is looking for friends at high tide.
The sorrow grows bigger when the sorrow’s denied…” (Pearl Jam)

AND this one line, over and over and over…

“Tidal waves don’t beg forgiveness, crashed and on their way…
Nature has its own religion, gospel from the land.
Father ruled by long division, young men they pretend.
Old men comprehend…” (Pearl Jam)

And this one…

“You can spend your whole life building something from nothing
one storm can come and blow it all away, build it anyway.” (Martina McBride)

The bold lines are the ones that ruthlessly dog me, nipping at the heels of my retreat from myself. When this kind of stash and crash of tides and words, songs and impressions haunt my world, I know life is trying to get through to me, pushing past the rationalizing and over-analyzing and doubt. But I’m hard-headed. I roll the eyes and throw my hands up in the air with frustration. There’s so damn much to climb still. Why should I check back in with myself? So, I purchased my Brezsny forecast. Love is on the ticket for me this year and just when I’ve declared I’m not going in that direction in my heart, made peace with life without the great big love, the one we all long for and some of us actually experience (I mean marriage/partnership/whatever you call it). There it is. Love, baby. Whatever. I’ve been getting the lovers card in tarot. Over and over and over. I think of union within, the much-needed marriage of opposing forces in my soul and and and. It keeps coming back down to my coming home to me. Everything else can come find me as I reach out to life in love as love for love love love. Including that grandest of loves love.

To top it off, someone keeps clicking on my la-loba posts. Over and over. Where is my la loba? I need the songs of the old woman, unearthing the bones and singing life into the wolfish best of me. Where is she? I feel her within and in my closest friendships. My mate, the woman-friend who is the air in the lungs, the man I would’ve married if she were a man spoke huge words of exhortatation to me yesterday. (Everyone should have such a friend. Wow. She’s the one I can tell all the nasty stuff and the great stuff too. She’s the witness of my sorrows and dreams. She’s the one who helps me brave the dating scene, shaking her head or giving a thumbs up at the prospective male suitors and oftentimes holding up a higher standard when I’m full of shite.) We sat and wept together over what life is showing us. They were good tears of healing. I should’ve felt like leaping tall buildings but something within me resists this last great push. (okay, on this current TRAIL…the last great push…and then the next and) I’m down. Not depressed. Pushed down by some tides and just sitting in the hermit’s cave. Brewing, humming. Somewhere there’s a song that sings every layer of restoration.

One book I’d rather never lose found me again. Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet adds words to the brew:

“The girl and the woman, in their new, their own unfolding, will but in passing be imitators of masculine ways, good and bad, and repeaters of masculine professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions it will become apparent that women were only going through the profusion and vicissitude of those (often ridiculous) disguises in order to cleanse their own most characteristic nature of the distorting influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully and more confidently, must surely have become fundamentally riper people, more human people, than easygoing man, who is not pulled down below the surface of life by the weight of any fruit of his body, and who, presumptuous and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, borne its full time…will come to light when she will have stripped off the conventions of mere femininity in the mutations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching today will be surprised and struck by it. Some day…some day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer signify merely an opposite of the masculine, but something in itself, something that makes one think, not of any complement and limit, but only of life and existence: the feminine human being…This advance…will change the love experience, which is now full of error, will alter it from the ground up, reshape it into a relation that is meant to be of one human being to another, no longer of man to woman. And this more human love (that will fulfill itself, infinitely considerate and geintle, and kind and clear in binding and releasing) will resemble that which we are preparing with struggle and toil, the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.”

I type that out and see the image of the two loves in Avatar (the movie, yes, i love it). She’s insisting he go, leave their world. She stands there on the root of an amazing tree and says “You have big heart….” (in explanation of why she didn’t leave him to be killed by the wilder animals of her forest) and then she gets in his face, opening her hand and pushing out in his direction “but STUPID! Stupid!” She meant that he did not see, that he did not know the earth or life without the egotistical reach of “knowledge,” that he did not value even those animals who had tried to kill him. I can relate to that reaction. I’d rather run and hide amongst the trees. But that stupid one is in me too. “I” get it all figured out and that knowledge piecemeals and divides my wise soul, strips the trees away and “experts” me to death. I just “know.” Haaaaaa….big heart but STUPID. But deeper words chase me, the parts of me not stupid perk up and listen.

The conversation of yesterday led me to the heart of the woods, to that part of me ancient. It’s time to build again. I find the pieces of the songs come together in that one Rilke spill. And he doesn’t leave the ground out. FROM THE GROUND…UP. The spiritual me is the grounded me, the citizen of earth…long exiled. When you’ve had deeply spiritual and even “mystical” experiences within Christianity and then walk away from almost all the parts that anchored you…where do you put the spiritual one within? I’ve shoved her in a corner, disgusted with the alternatives, the groupie gropings of masses finding so much “spirituality” like the latest trend or candy and spitting out “knowledge” without intimacy of the roots. Ohm ohm…no need to own just ohm ohm. But I don’t mince words or have some snobby nasty ideals. (forgive me, but i want to know people who can articulate why they believe what they believe and know why they embrace certain spiritual paths and if they don’t know then they don’t pretend to know or be expert) So I content myself with roiling in the corner, shoving that part of me into hiding. But friends find me and speak of Spirit while soulmates (there is not just ONE of those, by the way) haunt me with their truths. “Stay wild.” Relentless, that tide.

It’s time to assimilate, incorporate and let go. As we keep building on the solitude of our personal truths and needs, the internal rift heals, the outward manifestation reveals and somehow that spiritually mature human creature builds. The songs and their pieces form a tapestry of meaning, stripping away the fig leaves of my “knowledge,” guiding me to the tree of life. 

On with it…