Hard and Soft

I feel a resistance to many things I pulled towards. What does it mean to empty? I am sorting through myself. Sometimes I make things very noticeable so I can find them. I forget I do this.

Like the body enlarges toxins so it can identify and eliminate them, we do the same. Our patterns, habits, addictions or whatever you like to call them, get louder, more painful, more disruptive and less deniable so we can do something different. But, most of the time, we don’t want to change.

I once wrote the following: “Mouse: ‘I work nights getting acid poured on my face’. I put this quote with accompanying drawing on a recent collage I made; a collage I destroyed just a couple weeks ago. My destruction did not remove the mouse. The mouse came back last weekend – as me, a mouse in a cage, not filling up my own space. My god, my pattern of being a victim of the environment, just like a mouse in a cage is ridiculous. How I run around feeling trapped and unable to take action, at the mercy of anything I perceive as foreign and not ‘home’. I’m running around screeching and squeaking in small cages inside medium cages inside large cages inside giant cages. ALL CAGES! At this point I want to eat my own limbs off. More acid please…self-cruelty is the best. I want you to keep pouring it on.”

My mouse-self isn’t gone and I still feel myself going back into my various cages. At times, I find myself outside the cages and can really see them. I see the worn away ground where my body has curled in on itself, time after time. Something about seeing my form’s physical impact in the cement-like ground is sad. It’s a hard home I’ve been nesting in and I made it…for myself.

What does it take to change? I propose that it doesn’t matter if we stay in or get out of our cages. Does it really matter where I am? Does it really matter where you are? The bigger issue for me is that I often don’t want to be where I am, no matter where it is. And I know what this means. It means I don’t want to be with me.

I am choosing to stay with me more and more. I used to watch myself a lot, like an observer. I liked to control what I would see, and in turn, what anyone else would see. I was kind of making myself from the outside in. When I go in, and let the inside come out, I don’t know how it will look. I do like to look good, but this ‘good’, what does it mean?

I want to look like me. I don’t want a self-created image forced around my guts. I want to radiate from my heart into form. My true form being is soft around the edges. I’m soft so my light can permeate, curve, dance and absorb. My soft being can hold my light, in my heart. In my soft heart, there is room for my light to glow forever.