A Song And A Storm


I Live My Life In Widening Circles

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

— Rainer Maria Rilke

2013

I am a great song. My music is grand and soft, harmonious and discordant, all in turn. My words describe a life and all lives, in their poetry and symmetry and simplicity.

I am the rhythm of an ocean wave, a beating heart, a cycle of breath. I cycle and repeat like the planets and galaxies and all the universes that have been and will be.

There is suffering and victory, banality and redemption, divinity and chaos. Can you hear the melody, hummed between your own lips, or the words vibrating in your thoughts? Are you in time, in harmony or in round?

The song is sung, not by me, but through me. My emptiness is the chamber in which vibration becomes sound becomes meaning. What you hear is my space and your space, my wounds and your wounds, my song and your song. 

Is it a symphony or a cacophony? 
Is it deafening or ecstatic? 
Can you hear it?
 

2014

I only ever saw the sweetness of the song before now.

In this moment, the storm within me sings the loudest. She is the pulse, the energy, the electricity built over a lifetime of holding. The gathering clouds may appear to be darkening the sky, but in truth they are the soul’s washcloth, ready to scrub clean whatever needs it.

Like Shiva, it’s not all about destruction. It’s about making space for what needs to be born. It’s about whitening the palette so that the colors are no longer muddy and dull. It’s about pushing against the universe’s drive towards entropy so that what is soft and still and quiet can find a patch of earth to root.

Maybe I will pull up trees, tumble the seas and shake what should not have been built. Savor the possibility of starting again, and starting again, like the inhale that must follow an exhale.

Don’t be afraid.

Let it rain.

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