It feels as though I stand within a hinge or a pivot, the threshold between one imperative and another. I am strung taut, poised between the irreconcilable disparity between the needs of the culture and the needs of my nervous system.
All my life I have asked what was wrong with me? Why can I not keep up? Why am I so incompetent and lacking in capacity to meet the ask of this world? I am so bone-weary of this question. I have journeyed long enough, deeply enough, to know I am the way I am for many reasons, many of which are the intergenerational repercussions of living inside a brutalising commodification of humankind, of all sentient life, an extractive exploitation of animate resource and desecration of the sacred web of interconnectedness that is our true birthright. It has unfurled amongst our kind with heartless disregard for impact and consequence to the living soul of life. We are reaping the harvest of this now like never before. I cannot pretend this is not so any more.
I feel strung upon a wire, the precarious tension between playing the part of maintaining a viable identity in a world that grows dark by it’s own hand, and honouring the true needs of my soul, the neglected warmth of my own humanity, my innate embeddedness in a larger matrix. There is a bone deep ache to redirect my navigational course, my guiding compass, from outer orientation to inner. To stop asking how can I heal? How can I grow in order to survive and belong? To stop asking what is wrong with me and begin to notice what is actually sensitively responsive and intelligently attuned? To start asking how do I support the needs of the specific nervous system that I have, with all its gift and challenge, it’s capacity and limitation? How do I hold to that, unequivocally? How do I strengthen and nurture and protect my exquisite capacity to feel and know through the body as well as the mind? How do I support my mind-body system to attend to the grief and the rage, the despair and loss that I rightfully feel, so that it does not overwhelm me, so that I can swim those deep and turbulent currents with ballast and resource and kindness? How do I also let in the love and pleasure and joy that is my deepest need, beyond independence and autonomy? How do I stop asking myself to do what is actually impossible for me to do, when the cost of trying is to exist in perpetual hyperarrousal and dysregulation? I am not an economically viable commodity. I have nothing to sell. I am a feeling, sensing, reciprocating part of the pulsing ecosystem of earth and cosmos. It is this beingness that I seek to become loyal to.
All my life I have been trained to ask how can I serve others, how can I attend to the expectation of what it is to be a woman in this world, whilst being exciled from my own capacity to inhabit need, desire, authority. It has not worked for me, I am strung so thin I could snap.
I want to find the courage within to change the questions, to change the imperative, to let go and trust that there is something far more nourishing and sustainable and reciprocal that awaits, beneath the thrashings of a desperate world. This world lives inside of me, desperately driving me forward. It is my struggle to survive in a system that does not love what I love, and I feel it dying. I am dying with it.
But my nature is there also, underneath, half-sensed, waiting, birthing itself through grinding apertures of stone and starlight. My essence and the gift of my incarnated love, vast and permeable, eternal and true. From this place all that previously made me disposable and ineffective, becomes what makes me perceptive and intelligent. My need to rest and bond and attend and listen becomes adaptive, ecological. My capacity to feel and sense, instead of a too-muchness, becomes my ally and the way I become connected and responsive and receptive to all that I am that lives within and also beyond this animal body and it’s longing and hunger and need.
I cannot keep walking the road of brutality that the dominator paradigm has laid out for me. It does not fit, and yet I must trust there is time to feel the impulse fully land within, to sniff it out, to track it’s pawprints in the neglected wilderness inside. I know it has more to do with being and less with doing, so I sit here amongst the shadows in the gloaming. I will wait. I know not what it will take to make a different choice, but I am here, alive and listening, dreaming inside, paying attention, with eyes soft focused and seeking to know what it will take to make my animal body safe, safe enough to be this profound love that I know glistens beneath the world as we know it? How can I give the dying world even less of me? How can I drink more deeply from the well that lives inside my own precious temple, soft and deep feeling, sometimes weeping, sometimes trembling with rage, sometimes attending to the fear, tracking pleasure, deepening breath, saying yes to more of me. How can I become safe enough now to know there is nothing wrong with me? I am a human being, shaped by my experience.
Inside, the transmutation unfurls, like a snake or a song, it flutters like moth’s wings for the ancient moon, it keens and sighs, it is enough, just to breathe.
As I sit in this place I am remembering that I am also something primordial and ancient, unfathomable. That the minerals of my body are the minerals of the earth recycled through incalculable cycles of decay and formation. That the air I breathe is the breath of giants, rooted and listening, that I am unfathomably indebted to, that which would ask nothing of me, but my breath in return. May I have the courage to stay listening, to stay soft and embodied, to keep feeling into the unformed becoming, the archaic remembering, the unborn immanence. May I wrestle the invitation nested inside the maelstrom of these days.
Image and text Copyright Lucy Pierce 2021
