this is 40…

 

There are two white hairs in my left eyebrow, eyebrows that I now get tinted every now and then to hide those white hairs. There are a couple of white hairs on my head and in my pubes but I don’t mind those much. It’s the two in that eyebrow that bother me. There are two frown lines between my brows from frowning over fervent words, over broken hearts, over bright sunshine, over things that frighten me, my entire life. There are soft lines next to and under my eyes as well but I like those. They feel genuine and vulnerable and raw. But the ones from frowning too often annoy me.

 

These simple mementoes that the human body is transient, that everything dies one day, that the blossom and bloom of life are followed by dissolution. The physical aspects are just one tiny part, I am so much more than what I appear to be on the outside, but a reminder of the physical decay in physical life on a physical planet. I think about death often. I always have. My moon is in Scorpio, it’s in my human operating system, and also death has accompanied me from a young age, a cherished reminder to live each day well, fully, wholly, because tomorrow may not come.

 

What frightens me more than death is grief. Life implies death. Death implies life. But grief implies the cycle of love and loss and grief and joy that makes up life. The journey between the two portals. I have spent most of my life in devotion to words trying to pull together the fragments of the human experience into something beautiful, something I can hold on to. In grief, we taste our own fragility and in love we drink in the raptured, breathing joy of life being a miracle. This magic-making interlaced by words like spells is running stronger and stringer through me and I wonder where it is taking me.

 

The past year I have found myself in the grief of a world as I had known it ending. I have been grieving all that I have never been taught, all that has been lost to my diasporic living and a craving for a home that I have never known. This is the grief of the spiritual orphan. There are no road signs or directions teaching us right relationship with ourselves and our lands. We have to find these answers within ourselves through remembering the sacred words and rituals that run through our bloodlines. There is a voice inside my body that always tells me right from wrong. All I have to do is ask it. But sometimes I wish someone would just tell me. Not that I would believe them.

 

My 30’s were about reparenting myself. I worked to heal generational trauma and heal my broken heart and turn that into art in the hopes that it would in turn inspire and heal others and move the needle of our evolution forwards. My 30’s were about digging deeper and filling the cracks with the moist richness of a life lived and loved at its edge. I look around and see myself banded to a generation that is raising itself. Fostering and nurturing the inner children that weren’t given the parentage they needed because those parents were, for the most part, not entirely available.

 

My 40’s are a mystery to me. I’m curious where I will be guided to next. Over and over I find myself divested from mainstream society. I feel a deep desire to walk away from and reject the linear path of capitalist culture but I don’t know where to find a life that acquiescences to the wildness beauty creativity nature community that I seek. I am tired of the anxiety that follows me like a shadow within the well-organised cities of this modern culture. The rivers of my body craving movement after having been stagnant, a sure sign of grief cut off from the natural fluidity that it knows best from a year contained with four walls.

 

This is not the first time I felt disenchanted. But I do not know yet where my path is taking me.

 

I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. Please show me. Please show me. Please show me.

 

My devotion, further, is to keep picking apart the old programs quietly running my life from the basement of my consciousness. The comforting old beliefs keep trying to rule with notions that belong to generations past suffering and struggling to survive but they are not my stories. I smile whenever they rise up and gently close them out. “Thank you,” I tell them. “You are no longer needed here.” as they go to die. Another death amongst many in this life.

 

My devotion, moreover,  is to keep creating space. In my mind. In my heart. In my body. To keep tuning in to the quiet whispers that land like breadcrumbs for me to pick up and follow as I wander along a forest floor where I cannot see more than a few feet before me. That is another thing that has changed. My eyesight has become more myopic and I blame the endless hours I have spent in front of a screen these past 10 years. I digress…

 

What I’m learning, more recently, is that it’s less about wanting and more about allowing because when I get out of my own way and listen there’s always a much better path beckoning me. What I’ve discovered, this year is that my body holds the answers accessed most easily within movement.

 

There are two things I do know.

 

1. I am at the leading edge of my own existence.

 

2. The best is yet to come.