All the beginnings
I have just returned from Carpinteria after a teaching weekend. The last few days, a quality of lethargy had been bearing down on my spirit—I had not been able to cleanse or lighten it. It was only after I came back, took a bath, and got into bed that the word flashed before me: susto. Something had frightened a part of me. I called it back.
I suspect this was a tiny flag from my soul to make a keen examination of what I had begun rejecting within myself, incited by a fear of rejection. There are many varieties of silence in the world, just as there are many varieties of speech in the world.
I don’t want to add more confusion into the world, nor do I wish to speak to shore up versions of myself circulated by my/anyone’s ego. I refuse to add speech for the sake of speaking. And yet, if I don’t even try to raise my ears to the channel, to tune my instrument to the frequencies this moment can split open to reveal—as possibilities—the not-speaking is participating in a pretense: that there is no choice, and that speaking does not matter.
Silence is the Great Mother, the chaos from which sounds that are needed will be born. I acknowledge the resistance to the labor (of listening, building, transformation), I release the temptations of false (shadow) labor, and I set myself free.
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It does not matter where we begin. The weave of the web is impeccable. Every gleaming strand we lift and blow our breath on weaves us into wholeness.
And, perhaps, all the beginnings do matter. Daniel Heath Justice’s The Way of Thorn and Thunder begins by telling us the story has many beginnings: “It’s sometimes hard to tell which of these beginnings give it life. Maybe it isn’t one way at all. Maybe it’s all of them, each giving a true and necessary part of the whole.”1
Sometimes, for the true and necessary weaving to begin, we must brush away the cobwebs around the work(ing): the ‘consensus reality’ web, the devitalized web, the mechanical or not-real web. The trickster will use the silk to build a new pattern.
Years ago, I learned to enter the universe of a poem wearing nothing but courage. I am slipping out of safe garments again: to find/build that space between poetry and philosophy; sense, no-sense, and more-than-sense; rock matter and sky trace.
What must be said, given back to the Earth, will not come out of a mouth of control, a mouth wearing a guard, holding voice(s) back. A part of me is still nervous whether the voice(s) can become a bridge. I suppose I will just have to wade in and see! Remembering anew: every element of life/practice gets shaped in the writing. I feelsenseknow the vital connection between writing, speaking, teaching, and living again: the alchemy pulls away at my restraints.
Daniel Heath Justice. The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011) : 1.