Still Sundays

February 27th.

Freedom is not a delusion. bell hooks: ‘an anguished heart is never a brave heart.’ Jung:  “the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.” Trust.

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.

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It’s Sunday and I can’t believe I am writing.

Earlier this week I had decided I just couldn’t write anymore. In fact, I felt I couldn’t do much of anything anymore. I was paralyzed by the disillusion that came with the dissolution of a friendship. Having said that, people, including myself, have endured far worse: loss of loved ones to death or a terminal illness, betrayal by a significant other or “irreconcilable differences,” or taken advantage of in a business venture etc. So, in the grand scheme of things, this was a minor incident. Yet. Yet the unexpectedness of it felt like an acupuncture needle hitting all the nerves that flipped my trust scrambled when all I desired was over-easy, given sunny-side up was not an option.

So I made a grand announcement (to no one who actually believed me): I will not write anymore. Because no one believed me, I tried to be “rational”: I will not write for some time. I wanted to disappear from every end where my energy could reach. I didn’t care if it was selfish. I didn’t care if it was destructive. I just didn’t care. I was so flabbergasted by another’s lack of caring that I wanted to do the same!

But because I have a very consistent yoga practice, very much on autopilot, I continued to attend Marco Rojas demanding and intense yoga classes. If through Marianne Elliot I have learned, “Just bring yourself to the mat even on those days you can’t move,” then it is through Marco Rojas I have permanently acquired, “Whatever happens—do not leave the mat. Rest, cry, go slower, but do.not.leave.the.mat.”

Mind over matter can only happen when, quite paradoxically, the body reminds the mind what it has forgotten: you are so much stronger than you know. It requires a persistent engaged dialogue with the physical self to trump the mindchatter, but it is liberating to know what is now.

So as I bathe in today’s stillness, I am in awe of a very obvious realization: today is not yesterday! I no longer have to feel the loss I did a week ago the same way I do now, although the memory of the loss is very much there.

So here I am, not with as many of my own words, but I share the words of others that kept me afloat this week, although not per se contextually related to the specific incident, but relevant nonetheless.

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Someone once said, “Freedom is a delusion.” I agree: it is a delusion if you are perpetually hurting yourself or others. If one can ignore another being hurting as a discarded banana peel that has become part of the dirt road, yes, then freedom is indeed a delusion for he or she is under the grips of darkness (and by ‘darkness’ I am not implying any ‘mental illness’) where no freedom can bloom. It is our ability to look beyond oneself that creates the foundation to feel freedom.

I have been re-reading bell hooks’ remembered rapture: the writer at work this week. She mentions Toni Cade Bambara quite a bit. In one chapter she writes,

A key message in Toni Cade Bambara’s novel The Salt Eaters, which tells the story of Velma’s suicide attempt, her breakdown, is expressed when the healer asks her,  “Are you sure sweetheart, that you want to be well?”

Then bell hooks shares some thoughts from her very early journal entries when she felt she couldn’t write: “I know now that an anguished heart is never a brave heart. It’s like some wounded body part that keeps bleeding, that can’t stop itself.”

There is no freedom in attachment to anguish. And although I too am surrounded by Darkness, I choose Light. I want freedom to breakdown as much as I want the freedom to get back up.  In the end, I want the freedom to explore more than I have ever known or felt and it is that curiosity that keeps me afloat despite the shadows that feel like an exhale with every inhale of light.

Freedom is not an illusion. How complacent and self-serving to say otherwise! People in so many parts of the world are dying and sacrificing for the freedom to be, freedom to feel, and freedom to understand and be understood.  Even if freedom is indeed merely an illusion, I still volunteer for that fight of possibility.

Are you sure sweetheart, that you want to be well?

Yes. And I want freedom.

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I am often dumbstruck when I read certain works online (poetry, essays, articles, “posts”)—and I recognize same is available in print as well but online makes it more involuntarily available—that are celebrated, “retweeted” on Twitter, applauded for being “honest” and “raw” merely because the writing sensationalizes perversions that are very much within all of us and make us human. The subject could be incest, rape, romance, or simply experiencing the pleasures of sex described in poetic verses that are no doubt creamy and juicy given words are a tool and anyone who truly knows how to use words can use them for the intentional affect.

It is not so much whether I consider that ‘art’ or not—but as someone who knows how she can use words, especially as a woman, I am, frankly, unimpressed. Here is why: it is easy. And I don’t mean it is easy in the sense that it doesn’t take courage to ‘share’ something personal (although people sharing such material are often ‘anonymous’) or erotic poetry has no skill or talent. Not at all. Quite the contrary, actually. As someone who writes, I recognize and appreciate the elegant use of words regardless of the overall content or message. But there is a gap in the consciousness.

Either people offer their craft under the halo of Light or out of the thrust of Darkness regardless of the subject. Give me light and give me dark. For that is the interplay of our reality. The unconscious and conscious are in a tango that we don’t quite comprehend but the desire for integration exists nonetheless. Duality is as much part of human nature as is the desire to reconcile that duality. That is not easy to do. I make no claim if I am successful myself but I know I try damn hard. That is why most people’s materials will remain buried online (or even if published the reach is limited). But perhaps that is the intent after all? A foreplay for instant gratification.

bell hooks continues,

In Lyn Cowan’s Jungian discussion of masochism she describes that moment when we learn to “embrace the shadow” as a necessary stage in the psychic journey leading to recovery and the restoration of well-being.  She comments: “Jung said the shadow connects an individual to the collective unconscious, and beyond that to animal life at its most primitive level. The shadow is the tunnel, channel, or connector through which one reaches the deepest, most elemental layers of psyche.”  Confronting that shadow-self can humiliate and humble. Humiliation in the face of aspects of the self we think are unsound, inappropriate, ugly, or downright nasty blocks one’s ability to see the possibility for transformation that such a facing of one’s reality promises.

So if I am going to read unsound, inappropriate, downright nasty, make it real! It is recognition of transformation that is titillating and anything less, however well done, is one dimensional.

I want the real even in my dreams.

Although bell hooks fully admits how writing can be very therapeutic and even encourages its utilization as such, she states,

A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we are clinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a space where we are able to confront reality in such a way that we live more fully.

Toni Morrison suggests that the therapeutic ways writing can function are at odds with, or at least inferior to, a commitment to writing that is purely about the desire to engage language imaginatively. She contends: “I have always doubted and disliked the therapeutic claims made on behalf of writing and writers…I know now, more than I ever did (and I always on some level knew it), that I need that intimate, sustained surrender to the company of my own mind while it touches another…”

It is even more fitting to quote Carl Jung here:

But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upwards from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness.

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.

In order for the erotic or dark to actually impress and stand the test of time, it must be conscious. Which essentially means to deal with the unconscious no matter how creatively the unconscious is portrayed.

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“We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of of represents,”  Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay, “Self Reliance.”

When someone betrays your trust, you can’t function in this life by not trusting another again. Trust is demanded when we ask a stranger for directions to when another extends the hand of friendship that may not last. The only way to reconcile one’s lack of judgment is by learning to trust oneself again.

We fall. It doesn’t mean we  have forgotten in its entirety what it takes to get back up.

This Sunday I feel liberated by all that is possible despite all that is lost. But I would never have known this if I didn’t bring myself to the mat of this stillness or leave it when I felt like quitting.

I am not ashamed of all that I or my work may represent.

~a.q.s.