Repost. To remind myself. Trying. But could try a lot harder...

Friday, December 25, 2009

Before the inspiration dips below the horizon of my heart...

"I gave her my heart, and she gave me a pen." Say Anything

I am starting to know when something is right...I feel it. I just know. I don't question it. It just is. Like an instinct. Like the sky. No doubt in the addled brain means a lot. But I am also learning that even though I know something, it doesn't always mean anything...because some of the feelings that I have, though valid, can't ever breathe the light of day if they are not shared. Other feelings are significantly mine: when warmth spreads through my belly: inspiration. When my pupils dilate, my lips part and my skin tingles: excitement, curiosity. When I isolate myself on the island of my cold side of the bed: loneliness, self-induced. When my toes hit the sand touch the waves: my spirit, my home. When my throat feels closed, tight, tense: mute. Oh yes, mute is a feeling to me; not using my voice, burying myself under a mountain of each other person's expectation will be death by silence. And it will be a quiet, hurtful violence if I allow it to happen.

It is ok to feel in color, to hear so acutely, to bundle up each tiny emotion in it's own unmarked box so that I am never sure what I am pulling out of the attic of my soul. It's ok to want to fish with the egrets in the salt marsh and covet Christian Louboutins: pumps, black. It's ok to be wrong, it's ok to fight when I am right, even if that means everything around me will change. It's ok to want it all, from one opposite end of the spectrum to another.

And it's ok to be afraid, as long as that fear is an impetus. Because if I don't take my respect for the things that I love and turn them into something useful for me and the world, it will be a waste. No one can write about the heart-breakingly beautiful shades that the intercoastal can be on any given day like I can. No one can wax poetical about her love of a small beach town and live in the greatest, craziest city in the world like I can. No one can talk my particular brand of smack and use the same mouth to sooth a fussy child like I can. No one can feel people and read people and really see people like I can. I can, I only have...all I have is to try. But I know before I can do any of it I have to be without fear. I am ok with trying and failing. I am not ok with dying and never knowing.

What I have longed for is this. The words; somehow communicating the intrinsic beauty I see in the things that are special to me. I have been trying to feed the longing with other things, I have been thinking that what I ache for is him, or that thing, or this place...when really I have been aching to be me. It all makes me stupid with distraction, discouraged that I can't seem to get it right and no one seems to get it. But I am not trying to be anything but a fraction of me, a shadow of the dark, sweet, honored power that I posses. I ignore and I pretend and I smile and I hope for the best, but nothing else will mean much until I use what I have at my fingertips...my very own heart. No one can see it or judge it or measure it, only me.

My gift is me.