Free, at last.

 Angel, by Salvador Dalí

 [click here for audio]

So you are standing there, on the edge of some imaginary cliff. You are so damn afraid, to fall, to fail, to look like a fucking fool. It feels like the entire world is watching you.

The hurricane of doubt challenges your balance. You become so self-aware.  You forget the muscles that hold your once gracious posture. Your knees weaken.

The claws of fear possess you and the offbeat of your heart makes you tremble. You close your eyes. The beast of vertigo makes you want to jump. You stumble.

The ground on which you’re standing is burning. Confidence melts with your frantic terror and your will stubbornly freezes as you stand on the sizzling fire.

You wish, oh yes, you blindly wish, for everything to be done and over with.

Really, who cares?

Somewhere, out of nowhere, someone shouts: Jump!

Com’on you can do it! Another voice screams.

They have faith in you, but you just can’t believe it.

You clutch your nails tightly against the palm of your hands. You want to fight back, but those muscles, too, have abandoned you.

And just in that moment, when your dreams start fading like thin particles of ashes blown by gusts of self-deprecation, someone whispers your name and almost violently, defies you face-to-face:

“I love you! I love you!” the invisible voice says.

That’s when you open your eyes.

You are awake, and the cliff -yes that cliff - is fucking real, just as the fists that couldn’t punch, just as the wings you never noticed unfolding, just as the abyss beckoning you.

Without thinking or knowing why, you jump.

Yes, you jump.

Just like that.

Somehow, for reasons without words to explain it, you discover that you can fly.

Yes, you can fly.

Just like that.

All beneath and above you is an amazingly vast white canvas.

And yes, oh yes, the entire world is really watching you.

Nothing can stop you now.

You’re free.

At last.

  [click here for audio version]

Published in Six Word Memoirs.

by Amapola in Six-Word Memoirs on Dec 06, 2012 | | T-shirt | Edit

What's love got to do with us?

What's love got to do with us?  | The desire to be desired, the hunger? | The impatient egoes that get in the way? | Our fabricated insecurities? | Being afraid to speak freshly, lovingly, kindly? | The common failures in our individual stories? | The fear to be in pain again? | The annoying "ifs" that never happened? | The thirst for connection and youthful passion? | The tongue-biting silence that keeps us lying? | The invented excuses to delay togetherness? | The hidden dreams? | The rational focus on sex, the blissful pleasure? | Losing our deceiving freedom, our stubborn claims of not being ready? | What's love got to do with it all, but haunt us? | If we don't surrrender to it, that is.

On the edges of love

Here's the image:

You and I standing
on the fragile edges of love,
I on yours, you on mine,
arms wide open and ready
to unfold our hovering wings,
capriciously teasing the gusts
and the wheezy tender breeze.

Icarus by Henry Matisse

The question is whether or not

we'll  still be facing other

and if then, without faltering,

together we'll jump into the abyss

and dance to the laughing wind

very softly, and so damn closely

even if it's just for a little while.

In style

 (Shoe by Christian Louboutin)

I want those glittery shoes 

with skyscraper heels 

and thick platforms.

 I also want to walk in them 

smoothly and gracefully, 

just like Jesus did

on wavy waters.

Amen.

Gratitude (to my family, friends, teachers and kind strangers... you are the nightingales in my life)

The Nightingale and the Rose
(Image by http://pjlynchgallery.blogspot.com)

That freezing night, one of the many that I've felt hopeless and lonesome, I let my doors wide open as if wanting the wind to blow me out of my world and dissolve my tears in faraway mists.

But instead of the wind, that same night, as if seeking shelter, a flock of birds flew into the wide room of my cold, trembling silence. One by one, they approached me and with their tiny peaks, they pierced my chest with hungry kindness.  Hungry for my aching love, for the sour nectar of my sadness, they perched my heart and drank the thirst of my solitude, of my abandonment.

And they sang and perched, and they perched and sang my song of hollow regrets and ancient sorrows.  With each note, they gently hushed the laments of my cracking voice.  And touch after touch after touch, the silence became all wings until it was not painful anymore.

That long night I made a promise to honour and not to taint the echo and the tunes of the breeze that carry the melodies of compassionate nightingales, who selflessly offered me their loving thirst to help me mend my broken dreams.  And ever since,  when I hear their harmonious notes,  my chest grows and blossoms into hundreds of splendorous roses, willingly offering to be perched once again.

Tonight, doors wide open, I stand fearless as I wave to the chilled blows of the passing wind.  I invite the nightingales in, so they can drink from the sweet and pouring gratitude of my garden, and find a home in the loving embrace of new-born red petals.

(This note has been inspired by the teachings of the Dharma and by Oscar Wilde's "The Nightingale and the Rose", but when searching for a suitable image, I learned that Florence Nightingale is the woman who is the mother of modern nursery and was a very caring person.  It is a beautiful coincidence!).

Little prayer for stray dreams

 Nyx, goddess of the night, William-Adolphe Bouguereau – La Nuit (1883)

Lullaby after lullaby,  the graceful gods of the silence whisper the nightly songs of the ebony angels. Like gracious tempting shadows, mysterious stray dreams dance and tease the raven feathers of my tired eyes.  As if longing for shelter, the goddess Nox softly squeezes herself into my velvet pupils and I have no other choice but to surrender to her blank blanket of darkness. And I embrace her lovingly, with the faith that in a fraction of a second, someone, somewhere, won't shed a drop of blood or sorrow, nor a tear of fear. 

 

No more.

Me and my hummingbird

If the lines I shall write speak to no-one I shall declare myself a dead poet, an abortion of my own voice, as I struggle with giving birth to the sadness and joys that have long lived in full-mouth pregnancy since I was just a child that started to learn how to spell the words I did not know how to pronounce well as yet.

Back then my voice was in Spanish, my mother voice. And ever since I learned how to draw the symbols rolled in the swollen papyrus of my tongue, my passion for wordplay made of them my imaginary friends. As a child, I read more than what my hand could express  in writing and very soon my imagination started to sketch stories that I soon attempted to put on paper.

I was only 8 years old and I was spending the summer at my grandmother’s in a small Dominican town. That was the age of certainty, the age in which I discovered that one day, I would like to have a book of my own for others to read with joy and amazement. That was when I wrote my first story: it was about a hummingbird that came to sing by my window so I could rescue her from death. Her nest had fell along with the leaves of an undressing autumn and in fear of an imminent winter, seasons that I only knew in the foreign books I read back then, she asked me for help.

Thirty-one autumns and winters later and after several attempts to accomplish my dream and publish some poetry during my college years, I fell into a hollow language. My voice now shifts between English, Dutch and Spanish, result of an impulsive decision to live abroad when I was twenty-five and I moved to the Netherlands.

Today, I feel incapable to choose which language would be the strongest and most perpetual: which one would give shape to my voice? Which one will not only be read and listened to with the heart but will be held strongly as a waving flag of expression for those who choose my words to free their own minds and feelings?

I feel that losing touch with my own language and leaving behind the first blossoms of my literary career, made me fall into the trap of forgetting that it could have been an attainable dream if only I kept it alive.

Tonight, like other moments, I feel the dream awakening, telling me again that there is nothing I want more in my life than to inspire you and make my voice resonate in those empty spaces that you seek to fill up with organic, universal meanings that once poured out in my words, will flow in your consciousness and unconsciousness as your own blood and oxygen mix with mine, regardless of language and vocabulary.

I want to write because I want to reach you and touch you in places that neither you nor I ever knew existed. I want to write because there is so much I have wanted to tell you, but have failed to disclose in these silent years. I want to write because I have let many stories cross my path, as I waved to them in resignation feeling afraid of attempting to bring my agonizing hummingbird back to life again.

It is a painful struggle to try to regain the power of the ever possible, which I felt so strongly when I was eight years old. Now I am reaching forty and I don’t know whether fighting or surrendering will give me the strength and freedom that I need to live and fully revive my childhood dream.

I implore to the universe for a sign as I close my eyes and try to let go of my fear and my confusion. My fingers touch the keyboard, wishing it would bring me to play the notes that once made my voice sing like that hummingbird that desperately wanted a life beyond a winter she could not escape.

In my childhood story, the hummingbird lived because I invited her into my grandmother’s house and I fed her and gave her shelter and we had long conversations in a language only we could speak. Time passed and on an early-spring day I opened the window so she could fly in unconditional freedom, kiss the blossoming flowers and build her nest again.

Today I miss her, more than anything.

Spring's Eve

SPRING’S EVE

Fresh hope springs
Breathing goddess of life
She beckons,
I bow

I: Fresh hope springs
 
The sun filters through the thin white curtains of my living room. It softly touches my eyes as if beckoning me to go outside. It's the last day of the winter and its concealed life is about to bloom. The branches start flirting with the blue sky, showing their first signs of green and the soil that sustains the trees is no longer muddy and dark.
 

Soon the ground will give birth to rainbows of life and wild flowers will run free on the countryside meadows. And in the homes of those who waited patiently, motherly hands will hold their newborn gardens in their arms, feeding their beauty with loving-kindness.

The generosity of nature will gift our senses with prismatic melodies: radiant tunes sang in the voices of restless birds, spread like surprising psychedelic landscapes of colourful silk; all absorbed by the insatiable thirst of every living creature at the cracking of a fresh day.




II: Breathing
 
Spring is marching towards us. Defying any obstacle, she finds her way through the lazy old winter: determination defeats stubbornness and the winter melts at her slightest touch of breath as if saying: “you are too beautiful to resist”.

The law of nature imposes itself upon any human-made climatic disturbance and in her very own way Spring claims victory over her non-violent battle. “You have made my journey difficult”. She says to us humans. “But the colours I carry do not fade as I struggle. Their blood is pure, their strength is divine and my unselfishness is endless”.

Spring speaks with a voice as clear and convincing as the water from the deepest and most ancient wells. She knows the breath of her poetry is tangible, she knows it transcends any language as it needs no encryptions, nor a logical understanding. It is her presence that speaks through our senses; it is us who translate her glory into canvases, perfumes and verses.

Spring is nearly here.


III: Goddess of Life

She is erotic, virginal, sensual and loving; she inspires us with desires of life and freedom and fills us with hope and warmth in the darkest and coldest of the nights. She teaches us about her promises and the rich harvests ahead. Vast and detailed, her wisdom always answers with a smile. She has no secrets, she is loyal and when she retreats, her caressing memories hold us alive.

Spring is a goddess with no religion. She is as real as the bones that keep us erect and the muscles that make us mobile. Spring is prayer and answer, a deity at grasp. She needs no temple for she is pantheon, awakening, sprightliness and shrine.

Spring is our mother, our gift, divine; the very essence of unspoiled life.

IV: She beckons, I bow

The sun is still waving at me from outside and I need no reckon. I am ready to join Spring in her journey and I will run to the river shore to meet the ship on which she is traveling.

The clocks are ticking with anxiety and the drums of the soil are beating incessantly. And when Spring sets foot on the impatient humus, each step she takes will leave a lasting print of vivid, sprouting life.

I will stand in line along tender stems and naked trees, and as she passes by and beckons, I will bow deeply and make my offer: to be another seed that undisputedly surrenders to her blessing affection.

She will then pronounce her unique and only promise:

“I will never forsake you”. She will say.

Everything will start to transform and without any resistance, without any regret, for many dawns and sunsets, her glory will blossom and reign.

Epilogue

Spring smiled at my offer and whispered her unique and only promise in my ear. And as she walked away, I felt embracing roots growing from within my heart, loving blossoms exploded all around me like heavenly fireworks and I laughed at the tingly touch of the teasing grass germinating under my bare feet.

I started to dance to the beats of the soil, and prismatic melodies of excited birds sang along the beat and the stump. As a mantra, the echo of the Spring resonated repeatedly from within the earth and spread across and between the highest mountains.  Her answers and her prayers blended with the celebration of the life her footprints created and she too, sang and danced through our voices and the pulse of our pure blood.
 Victorious Spring is here!