Worthy: Unfinished, yet Thriving.

A poem to messiness of life.

To live with pain is to live.

The wound of aliveness is Sacred.

To write with pain,

to share it in anyway,

is to expose a raw and vibrating nerve.

Does it heal it?

The sharing?

Sometimes…

but there is more to it than that.

There is the “holding”.

The deep holding,

which can feel so still it is akin to death.

Death.

Peace.

Resurrection.

Spring having Her way with Life.

We have to hold ourselves within,

through the crumbling,

the undoing,

the dismantling

—letting the pain sink into the loamy soil of our psyche,

letting it rot.

Decay.

Letting it root and bloom,

and become something else…

something nourishing.

And…

We have to excavate the pain,

giving it somewhere else to live,

somewhere besides our body.

How?

We sing it!

We howl.

We writhe.

We speak it to caring ears.

We let our fingers dance over the keyboard typing a staccato into the world that announces:

“I am not alone.”

“I exist!"

We dance.

We pray.

We put our hands into soil,

and wrap our fingers around red slippery clay.

Flesh!

We give shape to the mess within us when we express it in some way.

And…

In the meantime,

in the times when the pain is raw and rumbling,

when tears run down our face,

body trembling

The child within yearns to be seen,

to be held,

to heard,

to be cared for.

We get to be a Gawd awful mess.

And…

We are still lovable.

Whether we have integrated the wounds into “lessons”.

Whether we have properly bandaged our bleeding heart.

Whether we are “put together” today,

or whether we are howling our rage and hurt into the canyons of:

“No one cares”

because it feels like that sometimes.

We are worthy.

We are worthy of care, of consideration, of a shoulder to cry on.

We don’t have to come to the altar fully assembled,

not when we can fall apart on the forest’s floor.

We don’t have to rally and feed the masses,

not when we can lie in the pine brush,

letting the squirrels nibble our hair,

and steal our buttons.

We don’t have to “pick ourselves up,

dust ourselves off…”

Not when dust itself is sacred.

That place from which we begin and end.

Soil.

We don’t have to extract forgiveness from our bones…

our rage, hurt, and worry is holy, too.

No…

You don’t have to be finished.

Not today.

Not tomorrow.

Not next week,

or even next year.

You get to be a work in progress for the rest of your life

Because that’s what life is.

And we are all so worthy!

*note*

Someone “chastised” me for writing from a place of pain, for being a “victim” and speaking as a “little girl”. I am these things and more.

I am the Gawd-blessed force of life—and She bleeds. And she is here for the bleeding. And though sometimes my own wounds still howl with a fury. I am here. I am here for myself, for life, and I am here for you.

Today I am grieving the loss of a good man—a “father figure”—the man I mentioned my last post having possibly passed is, in fact, gone. It seems many of us have been losing people lately, and I just want to say my heart goes out to anyone who has, and to anyone who is grieving a loss like that or any other.

The sun shines down on us and encourages our growth through the holy Dark.

And…

We get to linger in those places as long as we need to, in the sacredness of the quiet, yet riotous womb.

The sun will be here. And so will I.

Love.

~Justice