This is a song I wrote in response to all that is going on in the world – wars, environmental crises, cost of living, the ways we relate with each other and this Earth.
For these are all issues born of the severance of a deep embodied knowing of our interrelatedness with all life.
A severance that cuts to the core. That gnaws at the great umbilicus that extends into all things and undermines all it means to be woven into the fabric of life. To be truly human.
At the heart of this severance is a great heaving grief.
My sense is that, were we to truly turn toward the grief that can become locked inside, then things may begin to shift.
Imagine if our world leaders could remember to tend to their hearts. If those entrusted to care and create policy for others could feel a wider web of greater support and holding for the more emotive and liminal facets of their lives in relationship…. (even better if this form of leadership could become more circular and fluid, shared more widely amongst humans and other-than-humans)…
There would be so much recognition within this great pause. There would need to be accountability. Likely, there would be rivers of tears shed and so so many preparations for apology and threads toward reconciliation to weave.
Sometimes I wonder if all this speed we glorify in the dominant cultures of the world, all this focus on “development” is just another way to prevent feeling the grief that gnaws inside.
Because, with such speed, we bull-dose through life, barely attuning to anything, let alone ourselves. Causing harm becomes something ‘necessary’ so some ‘greater good’ somewhere out there, in the future, can be realised.
But do we ever get there?
And can we ever cause harm without also storing it somewhere within our own pulsing fluid matrix? And, although hidden out of sight, pushed down, braced against, there it festers, waiting.
What will happen when we do finally surface to take a breath, eyes red raw, fingers and hands stiffened, body limp and flaccid?
We try to stay at ground level while the addictive lure of the screen-time, speed-grind, consumer-driven, sugar-numbed, power-hungry, indusrty-oriented anaesthetic tugs at us to return?
Close your eyes. Shut off your senses. Do not to look. Do not to feel.
Please look.
Please feel.
What will be left?
Will we recognise the world?
Will we recognise ourselves?
That feeling of aloneness, of isolation is stark. The human / tree / river / animal next to you feels so far away. You can reach out to them and touch them but you cannot feel them.
You can barely even find the edges of your own skin.
There is too much numbness containing too much feeling.
Because numbness feels more tolerable than to acknowledge the gaping hole that forgetting our relatedness has carved away at such an essential part of you.
Because numbness is more tolerable than grief.
Pause.
Let that settle.
What is stirring in you?
And what of your rage?
All the times you sang your sacred longings into empty space.
No one echoing them back to you. No responsive gesture of meeting and nurturing the longings of your innocent, wildly beating heart.
You reached and reached into space, desperately trying to feel the edges of your self through meeting another. To know that you could flow into another and another could flow into you.
Until you began to build wall after wall after wall, cold and hard against any hand that should ever try to reach toward you.
You learned it is better to push back, to fight or not care than to risk the pain of loving.
Yet, which part of you cowers within those walls, waiting?
Curled up, quietly humming their longings still, full of the innocence of youth and the fear of your wounding.
If the walls began to crack, how many rivers would flow through the crevices?
Does your grief lie at the heart of your rage?
The water within you, the water within all life, needs to flow.
Life needs to endlessly give itself to life in a regenerative cycle that extends far beyond each of us.
Old systems need to crumble when they are no longer in service of life.
When we damn up the flow, we do not die.
We cease to live fully.
To die is to allow the flow of life.
Listen.
There is choice here.
Somewhere inside, something is humming a song of remembrance.
Can you hear it?
Can you feel the way it thrums a little louder when you offer the listening of your skin? How it responds when you sink beyond your surface and allow muscle, bone, organ and the woven matrix of your facial body to receive this ancient song of the worlds longing.
Until.
Every cell of you is buzzing with this sweet music, whose name is Life.
Who is your mother, your father, your sister, your brother. Who sings through each and every river and dances wildly within the wind.
Life, your most ancient ancestor.
Life who remembers you, related with all things.
You inhale. You are life.
You exhale. You are interrelated.
Life pulses through you with every breath.
You take in your environment and you give yourself back to it in each and every moment.
You are inextricably woven in.
You are Love in all its forms.
You are Nature.
You are all things and they are you.
And what is the doorway, to this web of remembrance?
The doorway, Life responds, is grief.
Song words:
When the tears can fall
And the grief can be felt
Then the world can heal
And we can remember Love
Another verse could be:
When the fear can be owned
And the rage finds its place
Then our hearts can mend
And we can remember Love.
(It’s a rough recording as I did it on my phone beside our crackling fire.)
My hope is this may be helpful and heartful for you.