We are all familiar with the voices in our heads. The constant ringing and pinging of something alien that has become so familiar as to appear indigenous; a constant companion reminding us of what we should do and who we should be while distracting us enough to have us forget who we really are.
The voice sounds so much like our own, yet it never was. If we listened hard enough we’d hear our parents, our partners, our community all suddenly mimicking the way we sound. The tone and inflection of the voice morphed more to our liking, yet at its source remains nothing like our own. We are often like Charlie McCarthy settling down on the lap of our subjugator, suckling on the teat of mothers long gone and of judges who have no vested interest in our happiness save we are miserable like them. We have long become blocks of wood who have surrendered their souls to a chisel, puppets lost to the ventriloquist, children lost to the insanity begotten to their parents and who never fully grow up.
We have bequeathed our courage to the misery of a society gone mad in material pools of expectation and assumption. We willfully place our wounded wrists in iron shackles and parlay our freedom on a rustic shack we willingly call our home. We find security in the walls that keep us from the essence of who we are in the everything that is, believing that if we sit still in the palaces we have built that the Universe will come to us instead of us going to it. As long as the iron binds us to the walls we call home we believe we are free, secure, and alive. The real living is done as we tear ourselves free of it all, and lose ourselves in the fear of something different. The bold live out there, warriors as they are.
Who shall come to me in true love, forgetting all they’ve loved and lost to a new space as open as the Universe itself? To my self I say, forget the fragrance of past flowers and bask in the newness of the Spring. See the buds blooming anew, and be brave enough to bend at the knee to enjoy their sweet smell. Get muddy and wet and wounded and bruised, for there has been no joy in the secure shelters on which you’ve rested. Forget this place too so that you may, in the truest form of who you are, love the seasons equally for the unique gifts they offer. There is great beauty in the ice, in the snow, in the colors of dozing trees, and in the running streams of warming climes. Do not search for flowers in the ice, or snowflakes in the hot Sun. Enjoy what is there, and know this place for what it offers you now, regardless of what the voices say.
A vow I make to the voices shouting at me from nowhere in particular.
I will not succumb to you. I know well the voice that is mine, and it sounds nothing like you. It comforts me even when you lash me to your iron bars. It guides me even when you blind me with tears not my own. It demands of me strength in the face of your weakness and seeks the best of me when you attempt to coax me to a lesser idea. You may wallow in your shallow grave, but I shall rise above your pit to heights unimagined in the glory of simplicity, truth, and wonderment. This is the truest stoicism, the truest mark of a warrior.
A challenge I issue to the warrior within.
Do not hasten your own suffering by catering to the whims of those voices. Do not chasten yourself in the melancholy of voices others may have spilling out of their innards. Stand firm and tall with the sword of your heart beside you, and wield what is necessary for your own protection. Feel all that you know to be true surge through your Being, and let it own your actions without regard to the insanity around you. Your heart will be your sword, and your spirit shall be the sword that defends your happiness with all its might. Let others wield the blades of their displeasure as their bronze falls bent and misshapen against the steel of your design.
Whistle as the sirens may, heed only the call of the lover who comes to you from a place of Paradise and who seeks from you nothing but your sword and your shield. Stand by ready and the willing, knowing what love has brought you no voices can take away. Walk with the wind at your back, knowing the Sun’s warmth as she wipes the beads of blood and sweat from your brow. Know her not in the cravings of the flesh but in the song your heart sings in her presence. Feel all that she is as her light thaws the iced formed in the dark corners of your mind, and know that work that you have done was to give her a place of comfortable discomfort. She will rise to your occasion and you, in turn, will stand ready to receive her without pause. She will take you in without restraint, and you will then surround her with the shroud of a lover’s making. Eternally.
Wow. This resonates so much, and is so much something I was needing to read today. Thank you for sharing your heart and soul with the world in this way.