Dancing Upside Down

Altering the Fabric of Life

This post is from a letter I wrote to a friend a number of years ago. 

Dear Sarah,

Try not to be so hard on yourself. I still have the feeling that you are trying to muscle your way through.

You and I (and many others) were not given an easy path. We didn't get a soft and cuddly life. We have to keep working on what we were given because it is our only way through to something different.

The way I look at life is like each of us is a woven fabric.

We are constantly in a process of unraveling places to pull out the unhealthy or useless strings and threads (baling twine, barbed wire, duct tape, etc.) and weave in new strong ones.

You are a fabric of many wonderful fibers - You have strong gold threads of courage and love, broad deep hued bands of faith laced with waves of trust. There is so much good there yet there are still old damaged fibers which contaminate the whole. Your work is to get the old poison threads out. They are woven in tightly.

Working on ourselves is a process of looking at those threads, exploring how they are interlocked in there and working to loosen them till eventually they fall away.  If you keep with it you can unravel the beliefs that are holding you down and keeping you trapped in the same behavior pattern. Its like following a thread back and saying "Oh, I see! It goes underneath this one and then comes out and ties in here." Then you can tease at it; see if you can loosen it or even pull it out. And while you are doing that, you will be threading in a new strong healthy fiber into your fabric that you can pull against and it will hold firm.

Affirmations and statements of enlightenment or goals and plans are all great - but they seem like sort of like an icing layer. Unless the fabric has been changed, there will be conflict between the affirmation and reality.  The heat of the conflict will melt all those bold words  and they will saturate the fabric making it sticky and harder to work on. 

The fabric needs care and steady, methodical work. Though we long to whack it with a magic wand and change it into what we want, it seems to not be capable of changing that instantaneously - or maybe God has put a charm on it to make it impervious to a quick fix.  Maybe the unraveling and the weaving are His gift to us to give us the wisdom we need to be fully who we can become.

I don't understand the ways of God, but I have to trust - if just to maintain my own sanity - that he has given me this path because what I will learn by working the weave is what He wants for me to learn this time around and if I just stay with it - it will let me become the person and soul I am supposed to become in God's plan.

Footnotes:

1. The artwork in this post is by Gregory Euclide.  His work is amazing.  You can see a whole collection of related work here http://www.gregoryeuclide.com/Euclide_RELIEF.html
2. The first piece above is entitled: Struggling swept canyon's focus toward tangents
3. The piece directly above is entitled: Held on history's material desire

The Unbroken

There is a brokenness
Out of which comes the unbroken,
A shatteredness out
Of which blooms the unshatterable,
There is a sorrow
Beyond all grief which leads to joy
And a fragility
Out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space
Too vast for words
Through which we pass with each loss,
Out of whose darkness
We are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound
Whose serrated edges cut the heart
As we break open
To the place inside which is unbreakable
And whole,
While learning to sing.

                                        -Rashani

Whosit, Whatsit, Wheresit

Once upon a time,
Can't remember when,
Way back there,
Way back then,
Someone told me something,
Can't remember who,
Can't remember what it was
But if I ever do
I'll write it on a thingum
And put it somewhere safe--
I think the little whatsit
Would be the perfect place.
I wouldn't trust the whosit
With the thingamy because
I can't remember where it is
Or where it ever was.
My memory is excellent,
It's never failed me yet,
The only things it can't recall
Are things that I forget.

                  --Charles Wilkins