On a first day of a new year, as celebrated by a single one-of-many calendars, I officially shed old skin, wiggling my way out of a shabby worn old coat – bare, exposed, vulnerable… open to the elements of a new world I’ve always secretly, subconsciously inhabited but sidelined, as I was blind-folded in the now old world.
I leave behind a collective that once consumed and assimilated me, in my totality – mind, heart and soul. The detachment is painful and joyful at the same time. There was comfort in the whole, there was monotony, there was stability of sorts, there was ease, and…boredom: A killing of heart. A suffocation of creativity; the very force of life without which there was absolute nothingness, a darkness so dazzling it looked like light – deceptive, tempting, and…hollow.
The mind opened to the point of tears. There’s actual light out there, or rather, in there – its sharp long-suppressed beams pierce through the newly generated skin like blades. It hurts, so beautifully. I welcome the pain, the openness of heart and soul with mind, the overwhelming uncertainty bringing in a new view, or perhaps new eyes to see the old anew, to project rather than receive light into receptors worn and damaged by forced exposure to images imposed by a deceiving order. Eyes that create, not receive; eyes that choose to see or not to see… that is the question.
The heart poured out, one massive pump of blood boiling inward for way too long, now erupting like a sick volcano recovering from holding in too much puke pressure. I wipe the puke off my mouth, that once way too often blocked a passage of words accumulating, longing for an outlet, for a hole to release fury and love. The words flow like flood through a broken dam, overwhelmingly drunk, colliding – freedom to flow and grow and go wherever the hell they want. No whole to abide by, no right or wrong, just be.
And the soul froze there for a moment. It’s too cold outside the warmth of the whole. I’m on my own now. Alone. But for once, not really lonely. I can steer this thing however I want, but it is cold still. The soul looks for a fire, and the heart delivers, generously, instantaneously. I welcome the heat. A heat that boils little red and grey cells to the point of resurrection. To the point of regeneration – a forgetting of what the old whole has destroyed. Nothing is truly destroyed. Now, it is building time. Creating, painfully and joyfully, an unknown so familiar it is immediately absorbed – no pauses, no questions asked.
And so the new phase begins, stretching out from an ending of a previous phase, like a thinning stretch of gum chewed and wetted with foul-smelling saliva until…snap! None of the old remains. It drools and drops and curls into dry rotten decay of a past not so long gone.
And with that, mind, heart, and soul surrender, lovingly embrace the new skin inside and out, caress it into calmness and cool acceptance; a realisation that what is, is what has always been; an existence that can only be itself. So here begins a new journey of being, creating, and loving it all.
