What would I need to be complete? To understand that maybe there never really was a hole in my heart. Maybe I bought the story of a hole in a heart from my mother’s depression that was passed through me when she pushed me out. That I bought into the myth of grief and loss and nostalgia. That I never needed permission in the first place to be who I am, in all my quirks and beauty. To understand that change is the constant. And maybe a past focus on loss creates more loss because my focus was for the longest time, just that – past focused. To believe in alchemy of our own awakening. To understand that I am no worse and no better than any other human being on this planet, accomplished inventors, thieves, drug addicts, narcissists. To know that underneath all the illusions, all the shit I was told, I was already whole, already in full bloom, waiting, waiting to believe, to lay claim to my own heart. To not take the pain so personally now, that I once did, that I let define and nearly destroy me.

The only constant is change and there is no end to new beginnings. The earth itself unfolding, alive, the cocoa smell of the tropical woods, the over-sized trees with vines connecting with and draped over each other, walking through these woods in Kalihi Valley which had me do a double take time and time again because it looked so much like Lahijan, the city in Gilan, where my mother was born. And the smell of cinnamon, some kind of wood. And as step after step my feet touched the earth, it felt like the woods helped narrate my story for me. That I belong to the earth. This overlay of moments, the double takes. My Iran, my home country, my grandmother, my parents, my artist heart, they still belong to me in the deepest of ways. And my Halley, Niko and Uma everyday they help me feel the pulse of the earth, alive, that hum of living on a living, rumbling, revolving planet, that is, for now, held together. That I never really had to pretend to be unkind because kind wasn’t cool or hip, that I never had anything to prove to anyone and yet I spent most of my life proving my right to take space on this planet. That once I mended my relationships —  last tethers to any holding back had to break, that faced with the violent tumult of people’s own pain pitched onto me awakened me – that and my grandmother’s death – and I said, that is enough now.

I’m walking into my own life. I know who I am. No better, no worse than you. But I will take the fragments of my life and not try to piece them together, I will admire them for the mosaics they create, shifting, glimmering in the heat of the sun like the fragments of jeweled toned Minoan frescoes and vases. What beauty in what they are, and what is. Which poet was it that said “the past was never past redeeming.” And what I realize is that even the past doesn’t need to be redeemed. No thing, no body is in need of redeeming. Redeem: to make (something that is bad, unpleasant, etc.) better or more acceptable. In the Oxford dictionary, to compensate for the faults or bad aspects of (something). It’s no surprise that in the archaic sense, to re-deem, meant to buy one’s freedom. But what I realize is that there is nothing to re-deem, there is no need for a transaction of this kind to buy our own freedom. That once we make peace with the knowing that we are and always were free. That we were and are already whole and that the fractions of ourselves we gave away just to buy, to appropriate our freedom, our right to exist, our right to breathe, was all an illusion in our minds. Our freedom waits for us to claim it – the fog in our mind is our only divider to that recognition. And so I throw away that word, redemption. That arrogant word. And so maybe what holds us together and has always held us together is consciousness, and a measure of kindness. To ourselves, to others. Who was it that said, a little bit more kindness would resolve so much. So that healing is not a change, a becoming better, more worthy of taking space now, that healing is simply the diffusion of the illusion, that illusion that made me suspect as a kid that we might me hurtling through the darkness by ourselves, that line from Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness which stayed with me since high school, ‘We live as we dream, alone.” What a lie. Or misconception. Or, diseased illusion. We are not alone, child, whether we like it or not. We are witness, bear witness to ourselves and to each other. To so much that we are creating. Now.

It’s universal, this longing to peel back layer after layer after layer of conditioned responses to loss, to losing, to breaking, to making judgments on what is or was. This longing to de-program our selves from everything we soaked up, maybe as a child, or maybe because we are particularly impressionable. It’s universal to long to know yourself and the essence of your own heart beat, as you came to be, you, here on earth. To know who you are in the heart of the woods, in a deep silence where the only constant sound you hear is the humming of the Earth, humming because it’s alive, you are an extension of it, you rising up from it, disconnected so often with your thoughts, and judgments and the things that happened in the past that were shit-storms or unfair. You, who hung your hopes on others for security – people, places and things – you who looked for reliance and dependability of anything, anyone in the world, something constant. You, whose family shattered in a thousand shards of sharp mirrored fragments, distorted reflections everywhere. You who try to piece the broken pieces together and realize the past will never come again and that your heartbeat is now, naked. That if you try to hard to make the pieces fit, they will cut your flesh. You, who realize that you and your creative life are the only ballast you have in the world. You narrate, you create your dreams, your days, your moments.

When I was five years old, laying in that bed, with Tuesday Taylor’s penthouse at my feet, and her rebellious blond and black hair, I asked my father: “Dad, what holds up the Universe?” And he attempted to answer this question, looking perplexed and gave me an answer I don’t remember. And I pleaded, with more urgency this time, “but WHAT holds up the Universe? What? How are we held up?” And what I realize now is that I wondered what kept us from spinning through the Universe, separate fragments, hurtling somewhere unknown in the darkness alone by ourselves. And if we did, who would find us? What would keep us tethered together? And how would I know that for sure? And was there a guarantee? In that 5 or 6 year old heart – I can’t exactly remember – in a new country with new smells, and words, and materials like vinyl, my extended family on the other side of Earth, that there was no guarantee and I did not know how I’d come to terms with that. And something in me felt unsettled that maybe my father and my mother buried the same struggle in their chests. All of us up against not knowing.

This post first appeared on Jhttp://jenaschwartz.com/2015/11/23/the-roar-sessions-deli-moussavi-bock/

 

Roar.

I grew up with two views of that word. One came from watching Born Free and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, again and again. My brother and I, our eyes glued to the set. The other was the insolent roaring of people in proximity to me, roars worthy of tuning out.

I’d later recognize the latter as false roars. For much of my life I was surrounded by one or another person whose roar deafened. Rage roars, unexpected roars, anywhere, here, there, anywhere. Individuals roaring, trying to establish control, wanting me and others under their thumb. And it was just their pain they voiced. At one of my jobs, my female boss roared. Roared a roar when it made no sense. A searing roar. A missile full of rage, targeting anyone and everyone, on which to pin her self-hatred. Scores of male and female false roars, trying to decimate with the volume and the arrows of their words, unleashing fury for the pain they had lived and had not. A mushroom cloud of dead roars. This was my human context of roar: to harm and to hurt. And, an utter annoyance, to boot. Imposter roars masking pain, longing, sorrow, the-self-annihilating-you-will-feel-my-pain-as-much-as-I-do trauma drama roars when I’m just trying to eat my hamburger and live my life. Roars aimed to turn the inside pain out toward someone or something. A hit here. A hit there. Echoes reverberating every which way bullet sprays.

Enough, I said. I pulled in my real voice. It was far safer, tucked in the left drawer in my head. I had already picked up some bad habit false roars in what I justified as self-defense. So many years of having tucked in my true roar made it hard to discern my inner roar from the outside noise. The shit I had picked up along the way and thought was mine.

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And then there was Born Free, Elsa the lion, and the wild creatures on Wild Kingdom. There was something about the musicality of both titles. Again, my brother and I, glued to the screen night after night. Watch a baby lion learn to roar. Now, that is a roar. A groan. Lions have such a wide range in their vocalizations, from ferocious roars heard for miles to a rumble to show they’re pleased.

I had to practice my real roar, in all its permutations, speaking from my heart, the way a lion cub tries on its roar. My roar came from the depth of me, swelled in me.

Growing up, I heard, if you roar in public, you will die. And I think about my first country and the fear they put into everyone and the saying that fear is a liar. Under the old regime, if you roared, you’d find yourself dead of a purported ski accident in the mountains. The new regime was more straightforward than that. Off with your head. So I played it safe for years. I learned the cost of roaring is high.

At the dinner table, we’d talk politics, the state of the world, of our two countries–and my parents swore I’d become a debater. I knew where my heart was in all of this. At school, my teachers knew I had something to say. But outside of home and school, my mouth would close and my immigrant head would nod. “Do you have any of your own opinions?” some would ask. I’d shrug. It was simply easier to swallow my words. I swallowed and sometimes choked on words because I learned that my real roar was trouble for some, inconvenient or too bold for others, too true or too strange. It simply had no place. So I hid it. I roared in my head, in countless conversations with myself. I lived my two lives, one on the outside and one within, urgently writing on stolen scraps of paper here and there, but for what, I didn’t know. Swallowing my words became habit. You always have a sore throat, people would say. Yet there were messages to my self in those words that had to be written no matter the cost.

I learned there were prices to pay for roaring within the family as well. I put off publishing my stories in my 20s because of the fear that I’d be disowned. Well, I was disowned anyway. That’s the funny thing with stuffing your roar. All the exhausting hard work of nodding, acquiescing, agreeing, bolstering, playing it safe to stay safe–and shit happens anyway.

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I practiced listening for my roar. I listened for the shades of difference in roars; did they come from the heart or from the head? I grew up listening to Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin roar. I read Ghandi’s roars, I listened to Martin Luther King roar. To Henry David Thoreau. Willa Cather. Edith Wharton. And I thought: Wait… these are the people in whose company I would love to be. Self-possessed. Having flipped off fear. And yet in service to something… something higher than themselves.

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Sarah Orne Jewett said, “Find your quiet center of life and write from that to the world.”

It took me years to steadily regain my roar, to hear her, let alone unchain her and let her out. I chucked the people in my life who insisted on their habit of false roars, rationalizing away the pain they inflicted. I made a ritual of finding my quiet center day after day, and I write to hear my roar more clearly. A firm, gentle, harmless, powerful roar. In the quiet space of my inner life, my roar reminds me: I was born free. I am free. My roar is the wild kingdom inside me. And as much as I feared that it would cost me, it was my true roar that brought me back with my family, closer than ever, after being disowned. It’s my true roar that has made every pivotal decision in my life, for good. It is my true roar that has kept me awake and alive in my own life.

I listen carefully to others’ roars, which reach my ears and heart. I sift and sift. My gut knows to discern true, heartfelt roars from the rest. They rise up from the center of the earth. When I walk into the woods, in the mountains, in meadows, by a river or a lake, I hear the roar of Earth in all of its modulations, her rumblings, the roar of the trees, however gentle, pine needles. I hear the roar of the birds that goes right through the depth of me. They were born to sing and for some, their lives depend on it. And the wind roars through it all. Rain, thunder, and quiet small brooks. And the almost imperceptible hum of Earth itself, breathing. The roar of my life narrates itself in these places and I am but a humble listener.

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When I practice attuning my ears to my own true roar, a funny thing happens. I become attuned to the true roars of others, however quiet and imperceptible they seem at first. I receive them because I know where they’re coming from. A deep well. A true space. The truest space within each of us. That quiet center.

No, I’m not a seer. I am a human being with ears. Finally listening, paying attention. That is all. So now I regularly clear a space for myself, just for my roar, and invite it forth. And when it comes, often to my surprise, it’s not a solitary roar. When I clear that space to hear my own roar, it is life speaking with me. I am in fine company. I hear my sisters roar, in the Middle East, in the West, to the South, to the North. I hear men roar in the ways they want to, not how they’re expected to. The rumblings, the rising, the liberating roars. Roars transcending time and space. Hums, chants and incantations. The chorus of collective roars, oars in an open sea of energy, an opening, an opening into a life maybe we’ve never lived before. Moving us forward collectively. A frequency or a harmony we’ve forgotten, maybe. Quiet revolutions unfolding. Revolutions of the heart–the most permanent kind of turnover.

The gold, the gold, the alchemists’ gold is in the deep well below the fake roars, whether our own or that of others, that try to strangle our freedom.

I forgive myself for muffling my true roar for years.
I forgive myself.

May I never forget the jurisdiction I have over the wild kingdom of my heart, and that I, and each and every single one of us, are born free. And connected.