What if a More Beautiful Love Comes Out of This?

Holding Space

It’s breaking my heart to see you suffer
feeling as though you’ve nothing to offer
diseased and weak you can’t quite see
just how you brought this all to be

These games we play
these lives we lead
are hollow in the ways we feed
there’s so much in this world to know
learning to love
and letting go
it’s harder than we ever thought
but what other options have we got
to give or take is all a choice
so take a stand and find your voice

We’re holding space for those to come
we’re asking others how they feel
we’re holding strong
we’ll never give in
don’t you dare
don’t ever
give in

This world doesn’t have to be this way
oh, please won’t you listen to the words we say
are you learning to sing the songs forgotten
or clinging to the world we’ve been running from

These masks are tiring my strength and will
we can no longer take to fill
our needs are simpler than we realize
living loving and dying and grieving

Finding the grace to keep on feeling
don’t let it drown out what is yours
let the gift be your guiding force
it’s time to stop filling these voids with voids

Seeking the words that express what I’m feeling
living loving and dying and grieving
finding the roads through time and space
that illuminate just how we create
it’s time for change
it’s time for healing
the endless cries are
praying through pain
I can’t avoid it
I can’t stop listening
oh, won’t you please see
we are not alone

We’re holding space for those to come
we’re asking others how they feel
we’re holding strong
we’ll never give in
don’t you dare
don’t ever
give in

All we can do is change

Above is a song I wrote in 2013 and shared with no one. Moreso one that came through me. Youthful exuberance and absolute foresight with wisdom and ignorance. If only I’d known then the path I was already being pushed towards, mostly with me kicking and screaming and resisting it along the way. Like somehow my inner child and young old soul already knew what was coming, and I didn’t want anything to do with it.

I tried to hide away in the forests and exist visibly outward minimally shortly thereafter, but here I am. I’ve fallen a whole lot, I’ve a few failed projects prior and in between, testing and forging my intentions, resiliency, nature, and fidelity, but here I am. Like most, I am a creative. All my failures were, hindsight, each preparation and necessary for me. For me to most know me. Now jumping into the ether with all those lessons within and behind me. This jump appearing ridiculous given what factually my reality in relation to it is at present. But faith has me, or I have it. Maybe a bit of both.

Truthfully, I loved the whole of life and the world until life crashed down upon me and broke me as though trying to make me not to. It’s something that has happened to so many the last many years, isn’t it? It told me I couldn’t be anything that I was. Certainly that I could not love myself unconditionally, nor love how I loved either ecology or heritages at large. And certainly me as a European American, that I could love nothing that I come from. That there were untold volumes of rules that must be followed, and my very existence in this time was a crime because I loved how love cannot be. Not from someone like me.

Enter the glorious inconveniences of my lived inheritances.

Learning from works through the ages, there is merit to that. That there are rules that is. The game is as old as time. Even AI readily confesses to it. Its merit or existence is not under question. It’s actually a source for utmost compassion. Through an arduous process of life bottoming out, ripping me to shreds, burning me to extremes, as so many through and since Covid have experienced, I’ve actually somewhat grown to love it and see the fidelity therein. The ways the world works that is.

I’m letting myself be playful again without apology. The punitive nature about it, however, may be born of a different beast. Certainly of a heritage foreign to me still, nothing birthed from Europe, and not necessarily leveraged as law with much integrity moment to moment. Perhaps that too is changing, or the foundations are getting into place for that to be so. Only time will tell.

My Celtic memory surely has remembrance of very different spiritual governance laws for both justice and balance, but that is for another day.

If you want to know how to abide by the rules in the present perfectly, to excel through those ways, I am not someone you want to gift any of your attention to. Look away and never look back now. I would suggest you look for those who know them differently and well, and there are many. Many a scholars of Abrahamic law too, have both calculated out and participate in weaving and upholding the bondaged web of enforcements for how to live calculatedly and obediently with more predictable gains. Contrary to all presumptions, projections, biases, and judgements, mostly why the world is the way that it is. Has long been.

Quite ironic of a reconciliation for someone who, from a rather young age, rejected the formality of religious institutions and texts wholeheartedly. I view them very differently now. No longer do they muddle my love obscuring me from loving the good God that is. Hell, I cringed at the word God until I made it through all the aforementioned.

Now I can smile with glimmer in my eye for all that is, has been.

Having said all that, it’s not that I don’t still love the whole of life and the world, my heart of renewal and innocence can’t not do so, it’s moreso that I understand our hearts indeed have limits. That our time here is brief and passing. That the healthiest and most courageous thing we can do is understand and cherish the boundaries that our hearts are led to come to know. That they are intentionally somewhat different for everyone. I would go so far as to say that God teaches each of us them for our own selfs, our very souls.

With that confession, I have bled and died more times than I can attest to love and move openly in the ways I am moved to. Paid in full, attuning me to how it is I was meant to. The world is full of wonder and mystery and awe and so much life. Life brimming with life. So many beautiful heritages and cultures and humans all across the world where one could look.

America is a great revealer for teaching individuals willing to see it, the beauty of heritages and cultures, the need for time in psychospiritual wilderness, wilderness culture nowhere stronger in the world than it is here, but also the myths of wilderness itself. Yet, most importantly, the need for tending the renewal of self, belonging, and beauty, which is to say aesthetic cultural landscapes and ecologies in rhythm with the secrets between night and day. That the universe and cosmos, God and consciousness if you will, does not want these things left in the dust and cast to the winds to be forgotten as bygones of yesteryear.

Home is where we are right? But what if it isn’t? What if it is in our heart sense, that we are always home within, but then what too if it is where the heart is called most home? All these illusions and tensions. So much energy pretending tensions and noise matter. There are not illusions that have hold over me as a result of having been forced to learn to live needing nobody.

I’m not interested in pretending to be anything I’m not. To Europe, my heart will always belong.

That’s awfully tricky in the world we’re in, isn’t it?

Me, a European American, but one generation out from legal right of return. Boxed in by barbaric and fear driven laws from the clashing shadows of the overemphasized and outright ignored in collective consciousness terrains to this day horrors of the well-recognized formal World Wars. Truthfully, fear and ignorance won when looked at from the larger interconnected context and world ecosystem shaping forces created from out of all that mass decades of unfathomable deaths.

How many on both sides of the pond may wish someone wouldn’t speak such a thing into existence? How many want everyone to just shut up and live and love where they are, right? But what if that’s not all true nor honest? I’ve met far too many Americans through the years who feel similarly to just brush it off as an isolated anomaly of an experience. Though I certainly recognize it not for everybody.

America is a mask for me. It never won’t be. This land that has gifted me so much. Yet, I’m grateful to have the courage to say it openly and lovingly. The eyes to see it as a mask of a much older wounding and severing. The healing of which matters most to me. The gifts of the hardships of my ancestors directly.

In my explorations and reaching into my Europeanness, in the precise tensioned times we are pulling through, wherein so much about the heritages of European humans has been seemingly wanted cast aside and discarded, further displaced, negated, or ghosted away, peering into that step back mirroring my untellable numbers of falls, all that I have known truly, felt like the moment a light of a different kind went off inside.

Neither witchy nor rooted foreignly, but an honest witnessing of ancestral indigeneity and renewal birthing from within me. A holism with belonging that can’t be taken from anybody.

Though surely it has brought me more tears than smiles as of yet, to have to come to see it in those measures, something that too is alas changing in that I sense at last it’s a blessing what has happened to me. What it is that comes through me. All that I have suffered for to see. That it always has been. Not just for me, but for others too to learn more about interiority trusting through. To ease up interior struggles about where things are amidst all the noise rushing about and stirring up in the world. About what has been lost, but therein moreso about what is accessible and possible between and from within. Not simply God about it, but the intimate and personal of tensions in a world where so many have lost so seemingly much. I am living proof that that is rubbish.

The gift that it is to learn to smile about the absurdities.

Cultures are hurting, so many severing’s, so much is perceived to have been lost. And how many pendulum from clinging to what little there is, twisting and perverting it, risking often growing more fears around it, to conversely reaching for only some new that too somewhat evaporates in meaning? And for descendants of Europe, that which is most beloved to me culturally and in heritage senses, so many are coming to feel somewhat empty in what remains as all encompassing. Is that not why there’s ever so much looking outwardly culturally and symbolic as diversity? But I have testimony that nothing needed for the present or the future can truly be lost. Not for anyone. So long as we’ve the courage to renew all we are. To cherish who and what it is we are and offer in gift the world.

That holism of understanding everything that has been, could be needed for heritage, and culture, and meaning, that it exists accessible within us in every living generation potentially. There is an honesty and fidelity in having lost near so much. Fore in the return, is the renewal too of faith multidimensionally, individually and interdependently. All rock bottoms teach of the potential and beauty to rise anew.