Balance

“Oh my lover, my lover, my love.  We can never go back.”        –Fake it, Bastille

As I rise to the East the road curves North and homeward.  In this moment, the angle affords a singular and spectacular view; mountains span the horizon to my left and the mile high city stands on my right.  It captures me in ecstasy.  Such it is and has been all summer until the twilight fades into fall.  I am centered between the twinkling skyline and the silhouette of the Front Range.  Their defining figure plays with the evening colors until they dissolve into one another.  All this I witness for a brief moment and it is enough.  There is nothing like Colorado.  This place knows my heart.  The outline of the Rockies accompanies me a little farther before night claims the sky.

Husband got a bike this year.  Everyone who hears asks the same question about life insurance.  I think they misunderstand.  The bike is not the danger.  But belief is tested the first time I climb on the back.  Boots hooked onto the pedals, my hands clasped across his chest.  I learn quickly to lean in.

Riding is interesting at first.  I’m fascinated to watch my companion of anxiety scamper to keep up.  There’s simply no room.  I’m never so fully present as I am on this bike.  I am more than fearless. I am still.

We take it out almost every date night.  Weather permitting, or not.  I realize I’ve never liked the word balance, until now.  As we hurtle down the road, with only the wind at our sides I accept the change in belief. 

—

The religious use of the word balance is either a substitute for compensation or dismissed as myth.  I think it is so because we all long for it and can’t bear to believe it exists because that would mean we haven’t found it yet.  Now that I’ve ridden on the back of a motorcycle the evidence cannot be dismissed.

Interestingly, false balance is associated with oppression, injustice, and inequality.  It is a term of measurement.  So is the word for honor.  It means to weigh.

As a parent I muse upon this idea of center.  You cannot be a father who sees their son unless you know and love the boy you once were.  You cannot be a mother who sees her daughter until you find and love the girl you lost.

To be a lover you must first know your own beloved.

Justice is a woman blindfolded with bare arms outstretched who spins no plates and holds only two.  Her hand is center enough to carry in truth whatever is placed in her care.  Equality and equity once found will be clearly seen.  You can only hide what is too heavy to bear for so long.

My husband and I never dated, we were not allowed to be alone together before we were married.  I won’t even dignify the constraints put upon our relationship with a name.  With the exception of two appeals, we traveled around carrying an assortment of chaperones in the back seat of his Dodge Stratus.  Sometimes they were parents, mostly siblings, and never friends.  The witnesses accessory to the repeated molestation of privacy.  On one occasion two little brothers brought a cymbal apiece, making noise for amusement.  The crash a metaphorical prison break from complicit violation.  Consent was not a word in our language and therefore conceivable to none.  Surrounded by a community of opinionated informants, the death toll rose.  These specters, collected from brokenhearted pasts, devised trialed futures for redemption; desperate to witness their resuscitated salvation.

To make statutory this methodology, one authority would always use the same analogy.  It was like frosting a cake.  They wanted to make sure things were done right so that they had enough left.  As if the right to love can be handed out through indulgences and degrees of permission slips.

It amuses me that the latest weddings I’ve attended have naked cakes.

The evening of my proposal was on one of the two singular occasions alone.  He asked me to marry him overlooking the sunset on a street called starlight.  I was glad to be the only one present.  But after we returned home fifteen minutes past curfew and the champagne was put away and almost all had gone to bed, I braced myself for the ritual midnight inquisition composed of questions that had become a business to ask.  Knowing that no matter how I answered I would never be right or have any secrets left.

I survived in tact through the rules of engagement, but like my motherhood the aching remains for time and space that was stolen.  I was denied the experience of falling in love.  It is a story I will never know.  The cost of the forced hyper vigilance I learned to endure, or escape, the emotional circumcision is only forgiven, not repaid.  I won’t repeat future harm for past hurt, so I speak in to my story with prophetic courage and hope.  This means letting go of saying it perfectly right and missing what’s left of my heart, lowering my expectations for healing to make love sustainable in the middle.

I am one who waits expectantly and thus I find myself surprised by joy, on a bike.

Riding a motorcycle isn’t about having just enough right and just enough left.

—

No longer in a barred metal frame, where chaperones of fear and restriction may sit and wave their symbols.  It is only the wind that sings in our ears telling us it is good.  My hands laced across his chest, eyes ahead, holding tension in space to accommodate the unexpected.

I absorb the present, when he inhales, and feel my grip expand.  My legs press against and surround him, anticipating the movement in the path ahead of us.  He accelerates.  Individuation of center unites in momentum; the warmth of one other caressed by the edge in the night air.  We are alone, together, the most vulnerable travelers on the road and therefore the most alive.  My only authority the presence of a body surrounding his, aligned within, aware without.

We rise up to the East as the road curves North and homeward.  In this moment, the angle affords a singular and spectacular view of both the mile high city and it’s mountains upon my right and left.  Amygdala quiets and the mounting freedom seers an overlay of gold upon war memorials of limits.

The throttle opens up, an impetus to presence and intensity, towards rest.  With momentum and traction we sway in trust.  Fresh air is startling me back to life.  This is the dangerous birth of wild.

We find ourselves on a straight way.  A street called Sunshine, with two lanes and nowhere to be.  We both let go, arms outstretched and when I embrace him again he clasps his hand over mine; the moment’s remittance, a seal.  Heart of my own heart, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.  I am hemmed in by visionary love and it is here…

At the intersection of risk and breath.

Balance.

“I have become in his eyes as one who finds peace.”       -Song of Solomon 8:10

“I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.”       -Toni Morrison, Jazz

Notes

This is an epistolary piece for the third week of advent.

Take a few slow breaths.
Allow your soul a minute to catch up to your body.

There’s a vulnerability to your face.  It matches the exhaustion of your life.  Have you ever wondered if those dark circles are there because you never stop seeing?  Even your dreams prevent respite from an awareness that has cost so much.
Your heart beats to a rhythm of not enough, not enough, not enough, and you’re searching for a new song.
Mostly it’s confusing, oftentimes frustrating.  To be told you just have to choose when you never had a choice.
That it’s a fight, when you can’t conflict.
It’s there all along and your eyes just don’t notice or your mind won’t stop.

How can you miss something you’ve lost everything to find?
Let me tell you what’s true, about me.
You know my sister, sorrow, well.  Everyone meets her first.  She’s not a secretary granting access to presence, she is a shield to the sacrament of hope.
Too many people with glasses half full want to water me down.  I like the empty ones.  The deep wells with tall orders; willing to risk the fragility of desire.
The ones who will walk by a thousand shrubs in scorched places and not pretend they’re aflame.  Who wait for the spontaneity of the senses and don’t fake a climax.
My sister walks with them through the waves of grief and longing.
Sometimes they stay, she is more familiar than I; I push the expectant into deliverance.
This is going to be a transition.

Take another slow breath.

I am not a possession.  You will never have me.
I can be noticed in mundane places, but I think that perception arose from the fear of too much—it pulses like a bass line that calls out the primal: too much, too much, too much.
You know only the deep breaths make love and bring you into the cadence of passion.
These empowered glimpses whisper eternity's secret, with visions that invite a long, slow dance in the desert.  I am not a mirage.
I’m ready to tell you today what you’ve waited a lifetime to hear.
These wild beliefs, expansive hopes, and great expectations are real.
I do exist.
I’m in those places you have never been, but known before.
I will always call you by your real name.
And you know something.
You don’t ever need to see, have, hold, fight, choose, present, conform, or offer anything to experience me.  Otherwise I wouldn’t be free.
And I am free.

There’s only one thing you need to know.  It’s the melody I sing through time into your measures of not enough and too muchness.

I see you.  I see you.  I see you.

Always.

~Joy

"You can feel it in the air," -Of The Night, Bastille

The Way

"See the line where the sky meets the sea? It calls me." -How far I'll go
(Song by Lin-Manuel Miranda, from the film Moana)

There I was, face down on the carpet.  They say that when your heart breaks, it shatters into a million pieces and that’s the start of grief.

I say it feels more like drowning.  Held down by a force where you can’t get up but you can move.  Submerged with the weight of feeling.  Your mind will fragment and each piece, big or small, creates a new surface area for the aching to press in and swallow you whole. 

It also feels like fire.  Every nerve of your skin ablaze, and while the parts of you that broke are still inside, you want more than anything to unzip your body and step out.  To get away from the intensity and steal the oxygen back from the torch that is now your soul.

See, if you are fragile, like any human is, even if they don’t know it.  Falling apart means you can put things back together.  You might have to hunt around for a few shards, or you could call it good and mend with some gaps, wounds for safekeeping. 

Fire and water give no options.  Ashes don’t reassemble and liquid never fully leaves the lungs.

There’s a drop, a sensation of falling, but would that I knew the mercy of ruins.  Instead of all my strength and substance suffocated and disintegrated.

That’s what grief is like to me.  It is a guest that stays too long and leaves only when it has worn you down.  Allowing you to live petrified of its unexpected return.  It doesn’t respect boundaries and thanks will never make it stop.

I remember every fiber of that carpet on my bedroom floor.  The moments after a message sparked by a question I was curious enough to ask.  The letters told me I was unwanted, unworthy, and marked rejection on my back. 

As I sit here, I actually can’t remember how many years ago it was.  Because that’s what grief does.  All of a sudden there is no longer a before and after.  Every memory suffices as confirmation or mockery of reality.  You will wake up countless mornings praying it was just a bad dream, only to get up and face the heat fully aware that it will win by crushing your heart a little bit more, again.

There are so many forms of pathways created by the sorrow we bear.  Sometimes I feel ashamed of voicing my pain.  It is of a different kind.  I have not known death of a loved one, loss of a baby, or physical sickness.  But all of our heart breakings connect us to each other, and while some may be deeper and fiercer than any we have seen, each loss informs the shape of a peace we are looking for.  This is the way.  I call it: The Empath.  And even if restoration awaits me within the span of this life, I will not leave.  I interpret it as calling to stay.  I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.

I’ve been imagining a road as I wander and try to find my way home.  In all the shapes grief may take, we seek the care of a thoroughfare; but the way is so narrow and for some, the journey will last until eternity. 

In the story of the prodigal, the elder brother stays home and the younger one leaves.  When the wanderer decides to return, his father runs to meet him.  It sticks in my throat when I try to say I’m lost and need a welcome because in my identifiers, the father is not good, my older efforts were not enough and the youngest was cast out in their pursuit of life, desire, adventure, beyond.  This will get you into trouble and death will have its way.

Until Sunday, and Advent changes course.

I hear words from a mother of faith with a brilliant imagination. 

She invites me into the role of the father. The one by the road, watching, waiting.  I go home and still mourn the lonely prodigal on a very long route alone, how can it be good father when the lost are out there?  Even if I choose to stay.

I wait.  Sister comes the next day.  We know many different griefs together.  At least I won’t walk alone this week.

We go see the latest Disney film, Moana.  There is a magic deeper still and I remember the beginning of my story.

The empath is not a road.  It is the ocean.  Where the breakers push you out past isolated foundations and margins of grief the inhabitants are afraid to recall.  There is the drowning and fire, but then you surface in a world without borders made of sun and water.  Darkness comes but the flames within you are flung across the night sky.  A spangled record of the wonders of your heart to show you where you have come from and guide you to where you wish to be.  With only naming for craft you walk on the waves and know this brokenness is more than enough of a vessel to carry you home.  The daughter becomes what the father could not.  When she is the rescuer and not the rescued, evil is not destroyed; it is brought to peace.  She is restorer of hearts and healer of worlds.  In this wild, where waters collide with the presence of the sun, you know your way only by dead reckoning.  Following a horizon that speaks to the freedom your insatiable heart longs for; life without boundaries, desire without shame, love without fear.   

This is the empath.  You know it.  You must trust your deaths to pregnant stars to find it.

Oceans don’t have roads.

"We know the way" (Song by Lin-Manuel Miranda, from the film Moana)