If you’re wondering if you can ever break free, you can.
If you’re wondering if you’re crazy because you can’t just laugh at office gossip like everyone else, without something inside of you wanting to scream “this is not my life”— you are not. If you’re wondering if you’re “unrealistic” because you need expression and passion even more than you desire stability– you are not.
You’re the free kind.
You’re marked. You’re cracked just a little bit and the air gets in now. You feel the call of the wind and adventures you long to have and can’t even name. You know you don’t belong in the world that demands you stay conventional and that secretly makes your brain crawl into a soft muzzy corner of your mind. That muzzy feeling feels comfortable and devastatingly wrong at the same time. It’s like letting go when you’ve gotten too cold in the woods— and you want to fall asleep– only you know that hypothermia can take your life that way, so you have to stay awake. Yes, you have to stay awake.
If you are wondering why you can’t just be like everyone else, it’s because you can’t. You were made with free blood and electrons that whir inside you like lights, whispers, promises, and a knowing that you long for places without walls or halls. You ache to say your name, your one true name, the one that lives in your heart even if you don’t know it yet. If you’re wondering if you could ever make it in the wide world without a plan or a clue or a grain of realism, an eye of newt or a sinew of an idea, you can. The ball of yarn is in you, it will unravel, it will thread itself into garments and destinies, it will lay down a path before you of bright warmth to be followed and it will never run out. It will weave a destiny for you if you grant it safe passage. It will take you all the way, when you follow your own true way.
If you wonder why you are haunted by the desire to walk on beaches and pick the shells that shine in the morning or ride on the back of a motorcycle around narrow roads near coastlines of faraway lands, it’s because the wild world always knows it’s own and always claims its souls. If you wonder why you want to feed children with dusty faces in hot countries while you can barely pay your rent, it’s because you know that what you are to do with your time on earth has nothing to do with your present circumstances, history, or the opinion of others.
You may know you were meant to heal others or write screenplays or paint because the truth always repeats itself until you listen. You may know you were meant to use the secret codes of technology to make the lives of others more expansive. You may know you came here to make a difference, and that, dear one, always makes you different.
Your Temptation is Your Ticket
If you know you don’t belong where you are, you are right. Your skin doesn’t itch with the need to be muted, but the need to be obeyed. The world that baits you is real. The secret life that flashes before your eyes are moon white seeds that will grow into forests of thick and powerful evergreens. Your temptation is your ticket. Your temptation isn’t a tiny spark meant to be stamped out before it catches fire and burns down what you really do not want, leaving you only your true red beating heart, warm and lively. Your temptation is your ticket. It’s your rite of passage. It’s your birthright. It’s your blood calling you with ancestry and with future. It’s your portal, your passport, and the hook that will fasten you to the big life beyond the big tent where some will say you are too big for your britches and you will know you are, even now, still growing. You cannot be content in places that dwarf your spirit, that douse your spark, that force you to bend down, speak softly and nod your head when you want to shriek your fury and desire and hunger. When you do not speak, the thousand stars that lay upon your tongue slide back down your throat only to be swallowed one by one, jagged, pointed and weighing more than planets. When we swallow the truth, we turn our bodies into graveyards.
When everything feels too small for you or too large but barren, it is not because you are missing some crucial gene, but because you have it. You are in the family of the free; you are in the lineage of the alive. You have come here to sing and dance and taste your days.
You are one of the ones who knows that your circumstances are not your identity and that the reality on the tongues of others is not the reality in your fluttering heart. You are of the tribe of evolution. You are of the tribe of the alive. You cannot settle because it is not your nature to duck when all of you is born to stand proud, run free and light the lives of others with your contagious light and the silver petals of your laughter.
You Cannot Eat Bread When You Hunger for the Moon
You cannot eat bread when you hunger for the moon– it will not fill you. Walls will not warm you when you shiver for the heat of your own bloodstream come alive when you stand in the one life you belong in. You cannot settle for a half life because it will hurt you more than no-life because it is no life for you, even while others praise your name. Approval won’t keep you alive for long, when self- rejection lives in your bloodstream.
Praise and money may pay your bills but not your rent here on earth. The landlord wants more from you and you know it. Really, you will evict yourself if you deny yourself for too long. You simply cannot just keep going through the motions, when the wildness is within you. It costs too much to live without living. You can suffocate in broad daylight; you can disappear while making friends, but something in you knows all this and will yet choose the light. You will find your way and you will find your own.
So yes, if you feel there’s something more for you, you’re right. It is not your woundedness that hurts you, it is your promise. It is the promise the universe made to you and you made to the universe. It is the thousand and one blossoms that live within one seed. And you have a thousand and three seeds in but one chamber of your heart and it is too much to bear, it is too much to deny. It is not your lack of life that torments you, it is the presence of your True Life. It is the sweeping magnitude that presses against your ribs and pounds within your bloodstream, it is the song, it is the song, it is the song you cannot hum, but yet it hums you and you feel the notes with every eyelash. It is the song you came to sing.
Tama
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©Copyright 2012 Tama J. Kieves. All rights reserved.
SAHMthing i wrote 