"The world around
gotcha down
you got high blood pressure people pushing you around
and some wanna tell you how you should behave
cut your hair the right way, tell you what to say,
hang out with the right folks, become a fashion slave
But do you wanna feel free
but do you wanna feel freaky and free
but do you wanna feel free
do you wanna feel free, free, free, freaky and free?"
This time around, I am addressing the pain that my perceived rejection has rubbed raw. This time around, I am staying rooted, like a tree corkscrewed deeply below the Earth's crust. This time, I refuse to be blown over or, even, be severed at the core. This time, I am not running away, cowering, hiding or trying to elude the continual pain that my patterns of repetition produce. This time, I am sitting with the tumult ~ I am turning it over in my hands, churning its beginnings in my heart and my mind and breathing into its fire. This time I am gonna stand here and smolder until I am ash and until my Phoenix has once again risen.
As Francis Moore Lappe so eloquently spells out in her Diet for a Small Planet, western civilization - as we know it - is based upon a premise of lack. As I have known me for these past thirty-three years, I witness this same underlying story at play. The monotony of an internal dialogue, sometimes too dangerously subtle to notice, drones on. "Not good enough," it whispers. "You're not good enough to lead the life and to live the love that you dream of," my actions elucidate. I'm not good enough to walk through the inferno of rejection; not good enough to continually plant my fertilized seeds regardless of the "No's," "can not's" and "will not's" that pop up in my way; and not good enough to keep moving forward when the ground below my feet is rock-hard and lacking nutrients.
Intellectually, I get that this narrative is a complete fabrication. It's a lie. It's an illusion that doesn't serve. I'm not good enough... naked, it began. Thus, I must buy, wear, trade and cover up, with textiles and clothing, this vulnerable, shameful body. I'm not good enough to simply live everyday trusting that the next will provide, so I must hoard stockpiles of food and resources. I'm not good enough without someone ensuring me, over and over again, that I am. I'm not enough when I'm just like everyone else. I'm not enough just being ME so I have to fix my hair, wear the right clothes, and hang out with the right crowd.
Personally, there is no traumatic experience from where this fiction and deeply ingrained wiring within emerged. There was only the daily routine of being raised by two individuals who suffered from their own self-hated and sense of lack. This bottomless well, however, feels much deeper than a few simple generations. Seemingly, it stretches back beyond myself and my parents, beyond my grandparents and their abuse and dysfunction, beyond my great-grandparents and their escapes from famine and fascism. Past my ancestral lineage of the sufferin' Irish, the drunken English, the fightin' Welsh, the morose Germans, the guilt-ridden Catholics, the persecuted Jews and the fleein' Moors. It reaches far back into the very heart and nature of my DNA. It is human, right down to its very core.
I'm not enough as I am right NOW, sitting beside the flowing current that is my life. What came before was better as it is closer to the source. And, where it ends is best because it isn't here - it's there. I'm not enough - this naked, vulnerable me. This heavy, hurting mass who just wants, more than anything, to be touched and loved. It is all par for course for being human. Nonetheless, we try to cover up and mask our naked vulnerability with our money and our half-truths. With our dogma and our reason. With our anger and our shame. With our substances and our plundering of resources. With our longing and our primal whims.
But we can't run from it. We can't hide from it, evade it or elude it. For the truth is - we're all just these naked, vulnerable beings desperately seeking love, touch, connection and communion. We need nothing more, even though we convince ourselves otherwise. Infuriatingly, we create all these tools, maps and means for connection that only serve to divide us further. Intimacy is, ultimately, what we all seek. And, yet, our seeking it outside of ourselves creates the separation as well as the distinctions between us. Our seeking outside of ourselves keeps us running on empty. Suffering and struggling. Grasping and reaching. Never quite there. Never able to keep up.
Yet, as my friend Ben has been teaching and sharing for the past few years,
"You're Perfect."
Now.
Just as you are.
Be.
And, breathe into that.
I am/you are
we are
ENOUGH.
"When you look at me you see my purpose, see my pride
you think I just saddle up my anger and ride and ride and ride
you think I stand so firm, you think I sit so high on my trusty steed
let me tell you I'm usually face down on the ground
when there's a stampede
I'm no heroine
at least, not last time I checked
I'm too easy to roll over, I'm too easy to wreck
I just write about what I should have done
I just sing what I wish I could say
and hope somewhere some woman hears my music
and it helps her through her day." --Ani DiFranco
