Healing and reclaiming my relationship to the beauty of the world, and Story

Alia's post made me want to also share my processing here again, for the first time in awhile. I am in the deep weeds of untangling my teenager years, years where everything got pulled really tight, all the loose threads of trauma and loss, and knots were tied in my psyche even as energy was also pouring through from my soul. 

As I put it in my journal last night, "the years of SCT shaping and hyper-accomplishment and trying to balance longing with ambition, passion with dictated practicality. My spirit burned and was funneled into prescribed pathways. I fought and gave in, often simultaneously. And this bitterness and resentment I now face within me is tied to the losses from that time, the loss of easeful expression and collaborative potential and softness of ritual and routine. But through this grieving I can see the light returning..."

One of the ways I'm feeling through this process is by reading Guy Gavriel Kay's latest book, aptly titled A Brightness Long Ago. I read so many books by him when I was growing up, and I truly would be a different person without his stories. He is a 7th ray kitten through and through, and his characters move through the world in ways that echo and emanate with aspects of my mao and his kittens. This one is no exception, with its courtly intrigues and complex assassins and extraordinary meetings in the night.

Reading it, it does feel like I am encountering a brightness from what feels like so long ago, a time when I burned and hoped and felt so much clarity and confusion in equal measure. A time from which there is so much to reclaim, to call back into my life now, as I sit on another spinning threshold, another chapter in my life that is asking how I want to live into it.

I am writing now for me, to help me process Guy Gavriel Kay's latest book, and with it, my life.

How he holds that there is this mystery, possible randomness, but also potential for being held by the overwhelming, overall tapestry of it all, being woven threads within, some bright and others brighter, but spun with deftness to touch other threads, and to be known or unknown...

All of his books, with their possibility of shaping one's own destiny, even as one is shaped, woven...

Characters often armed with little beside their own cleverness, and earnestness.

My heart.

Sitting here, on this day fading into evening with such prettiness, the earnest peach glow of sunset beginning, our tortoiseshell cat jumping up onto the couch between us as we each sit here typing our thoughts into our chromebooks, I think of my younger self, sitting at her desk or the kitchen table, absorbed in words by this same deft being, words weaving through her. And I think of how she tried to use them to make sense of the world, the weight of it, the beauty wending through the dense forms, leaving these openings for possible redemption, possible love actualizing and fulfilling itself, and then coming back to the painted corkboard, glass jars, brightly colored boxes around her, the piled up papers, the images scrawled and collaged and painted on the walls.

The way no one ever gave her a sign beyond this, beyond these shimmering worlds in black and white compressed between covers. The way all “real life” people seemed to subsist on daily necessities and the pursuit of abstractions dictated by someone else, out of their hands, anxious fluttering butterflies content to flutter in the stale suburban wind. And the way her heart thumped painfully, wanting something else, wanting more, not knowing what she wanted, except reaching, reaching for these sharply realized, perfumed and sometimes blood-soaked, far away lifescapes in which people moved with intention, with cleverness, with sorrow in their hearts, and grief was allowed. And longing was held in the balance. And it mattered. It all mattered.

I do not need the wineglass on the rim of a fountain, as poetic as that sounds, as much as I can hear the misting droplets tinning against the delicate glass.

What I need is to come curving clearly into my own life, and see my own world through the mosaic of meaning. I need to know that I, here in this body, this non-european, non-male body, with perhaps more cleverness and earnestness than I've ever known what to with, can also live my thread in a shimmering way. That I can be here, with my aching heart, sitting on an olive green couch in our one bedroom apartment, and embody a thrum of humanity, here to be more than a vehicle for words or creations - also for experiences, for Love to love through me, for soft sensations to land and be savored, for the emotional mending and connecting that is possible here, between me and other beings. How many years I ran away from this presence here, the minute impact of each moment muted, thwarting my awareness, trying to point me to some other land.

I am here, and what I feel and love matters. I love this enormous busheling green tree outside the window, thrusting its full canopy of self into the watercolor sky. I love the antics of cats, small and contained, licking themselves and listening to air currents, sometimes batting at keyboards that they know hold our attention. I love my boo, staring, thinking into a screen, their own universe of words, wanting to know something all the way through. And I love myself, I feel myself, sitting here, full-blooded in flesh and form, my heart opening so big with that pain that is also pleasure, my eyes on the trail of small green curved leaves tumbling down the side of our refrigerator. All these longings and sensations, cycling through, in and out. Moving through the ocean of my being. There is nothing I need to do, here. I am sacred here, as I am. And it is possible to hold that lushness of meaningful possibility, that horizon opening up and touching so tenderly all the different threads, right here, right now, honoring the deep sacredness of the world, trusting in the communication of my existence, feeling the mattering of it all. After all, my own story is sovereign, too. And I can open to, not only funnel through or frame or force, the stories of the world, enlivened through the ways they flow through me. 

Taking little steps towards this truth, a truth that can help me rewrite my process and what it all means, begin to come home to a way of being that is kinder to me, building the other half of my bridge of longing...

<3 Tessa