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.
deliwrites 