Listen to yourself.
Somewhere in there - in your silences or in your pain, your spirit is saying something. Find it and cherish it. Listen well.
Some things you cannot let go. Memory. Grief. You cannot let go. You try, and they remain, and you become hopeless and lost.
Understand that there are things you cannot let go. Understand that your pain lives with you, shares your body, shares your spirit. Listen to your pain. Hear what it wants, but be wary of what you give it. Do not give yourself to your pain, no matter how it cries. There is no innate peace in surrender. There is no innate peace in leaving, or in forgetting. All things come as they will, even if we do not linger to witness them, and even if we do not remember. The pain is still there. The wound will not heal.
All wounds of the spirit are wounds of the body. The self is the self regardless of form. There is no separation of the self into halves. There is no chasm between pain and pain.
| pain | relief |
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All wounds of the spirit are wounds of the body. The self is the self regardless of form. There is no separation of the self into halves. There is no chasm between pain and pain. There is no necessary higher purpose. Not all pain is functional. Not all pain is fair. Pain is neither deserved nor underserved, not innately. And the deserving has no impact on whether the pain can or should be left behind or remembered, held close or cast away. There is no innate difference. There is no fairness, no purity, no absolute. Pain is pain. In the egalitarian nature of pain there is almost an innate unfairness. Undeserved suffering goes unpunished. It cannot be avoided and it cannot be assuaged. Sometimes there is no perpetrator, no circumstance, no failing which precipitates the suffering. Some pain is born of nothing and will not die. This is not fair. |
All wounds of the spirit are wounds of the body. The self is the self regardless of form. There is no separation of the self into halves. There is no chasm between pain and pain. In the ultimate unfairness of the nature of pain, the way we bend and twist to it, the way it forms itself around our lives and does not let go, will not be left behind, will not die; in this, there is a kind of forgiveness rarely sought. We are not all the same. We are all the same. In healing there is innate grief. There is something to be left behind. When a wound will not heal, will not be left behind, then what do we have? An unfairness, maybe, but also a promise. A commitment. A daily work of self-relief, of intense self-focus. This is also unfair and unkind. We have recognition of this. We make it into a weapon instead of a comfort. We let the hurt consume us and change us because we cannot let it go. This change is not innately evil any more than anything else. We choose how to wield it. We choose how to hold our pain, how to confront or soothe it. It will always shape us. We can shape it as well. |
we should do as desired with memories; they are our own to be kept or discarded. in this... some memories are always lost to time or trauma, some remain untouched by all efforts and refuse to fade, and some bury themselves deeply in order to keep themselves safe.
when anyone talks of forgetting... there are often equal measures of pain and relief, of grief and gratitude. of growth and loss. there is no immunity to change. there is no immunity to regret, not even in forgetting. not even in memory.
what stays through a lifetime is not always that which is worth keeping. sometimes there is no deciding.
the mind works to its own ends. the mind wants to keep itself safe. it does not always know how to do it:it casts about for something, anything, with which to protect itself. it reaches for memories, or it denies them. it seeks to uncover that which has been buried. it buries old loves we want to keep.
there is no true forgetting, no true remembering. there is no sincere memory unclouded by time and change and grief.
the things which we carry with us are sometimes not our own, not anybody's. there is no pain without memory, no memory without distortion, and no quantifiable distance between all the scattered points. we will not find it. we try anyway.
we protect ourselves and hurt ourselves. we hurt. there is pain.
there is also comfort. love. distance. growth. imagination. healing. peace. tireless joy. it does exist even in the darkest boxes we can conjure to hide our pain. love persists most profoundly in the places which seek to destroy it. we need only look to witness it there. listen to your pain, and in it hear the love which you also carry for your world. hear it. listen well.