A Flame to the Moth

I sit in a house that has become too big for me. I seem to have shrunk in the wash. I was once a part of a family and now I am alone. Shedding branches in a storm I was oblivious to. Awaking to the aftermath as the storm continued to rage within me. I am alone, but I am not lonely. Not anymore. At long last I have plugged that particular hole in the dam that holds me together. I drink my tea and I look around at my surroundings and what my life has become and I give gentle thanks for it.

This time around, the pain was an invisible and invincible monster hell bent on revenge. For what, I did not know. I was in its grip and I knew there was no way that it would let go. Dragging me down and crushing me. For more than two years I could not fully breath. I gasped stolen sips of air. The trauma rubble on my chest threatened to shatter my ribs so I dared not sob for the life I had lost.

Another life lost.

I had never known pain like it and in knowing it I began to understand that its roots had dwelt within me for an age. But I was not born like this. None of us are. We are products of our raging environment.

My environment was an empty house that had once contained all my hopes and dreams. A fairy tale palace once filled with wonder. A fantasy that was too good to be true, but it wasn’t reality that lay siege to this life of mine. It was another fantasy. The opposite of mine. A nightmare that was more than equal to everything I had ever desired.

Desire is a wonderfully destructive bedfellow. After all, we always want what we cannot have. Raiding the dressing up box until we find the outfit that suits us best. Then we play at a form of illusory happiness as we experience a high that no drug can ever provide. Addicted to the thought of someone who will never exist. And yet we still dare to believe we can conjure them from thin air and impose them upon the host we have chosen. Wilful possession and control when we ourselves are out of control.

Belief is the powerhouse of our lives and the prison within which we dwell in order to shun the reality we fear. We weave a series of stories over and over again until they become sticky and then they eventually solidify around us. Armour against a world that we learned to mistrust. Protection from the hurt we know is coming for us. We cower within our belief systems and deny this about ourselves. All too aware that the truth would expose us and leave us for the wolves we bred for this very purpose. We are afraid. Always afraid. Those wolves guard us from all the fear-fuelled lies we have told.

Fear compels us to drift along the river of life like so much flotsam and jetsam. Darting this way and that but never with a real destination in mind. Out of control whilst harbouring vengeful thoughts of controlling all that will never be ours to control. And all the while we are carried to the eternal ocean of death. The mouth of the river yawning wide and vomiting us out when it so chooses. We have no say in this, but we fight it all the same.

We have a say in so little of our lives. And where we do have the floor. In the space where we could be heard and understood. We fall silent.

For far too long I believed silence was golden. A benign respite from the hammers and drills of life. And I believed that absence was a refuge. Time out from the relentless energy sapping shifts at the coalface.

Absence does not make the heart grow fonder. Absence is a hungry darkness that eats hearts for breakfast. The very antithesis of living, it sucks the marrow from our bones and whispers prayers of death in our ear during the cold depths of the witching hour. Waking us up to the nightmare of our existence in the dead of night. Cocooning us in a cold sweat that speaks to us of our final moments. Daring us to leave the comparative safety of our empty bed and haunt the house that was once a home. Depriving us of the energy to rise up and face the day when the sun probes through the curtains and asks questions that we’d rather not answer.

Hiding from the answers we need to hear and embrace, by asking the wrong questions. We spend lifetimes in this deranged pursuit. Running from a pain that is trying to speak to us. A pain that is whispering truths that we must hear in order for us to be released from a burden that was never ours.

Carrying so much that is not ours. We are a palace filled with junk and we wonder why we are bruised, scraped and wounded as we clamber through the rooms in which we dwell. Our ignorance is taught at first and then we self-inflict it with an insane gusto. We stare at the obstacles before us and wish them away and they dutifully ignore us.

Ignoring so much. Choosing instead to blame others for our plight. Visual creatures, we spot movement and associate it with our pain. Expect others to address what we have not. Expecting there to be a piece in the puzzle of us that lays somewhere out in the world. Embarking upon the quest for a scapegoat for all that we fail to do.

Love is twisted into the shape of a key that will unlock the prison of our pain. If only we can find the needle in this haystack of humanity. Find The One. The One who will have all the answers to us and for us. The One who will give us all we want, but never what we need.

Painting a suitable candidate with the colours of The One and loving our selfish handiwork as we live out a doomed fantasy. Indulging that person in their own efforts to make of us a travesty of broken dreams. Floating in a bubble bath of self-imposed euphoria and holding onto the trip of a lifetime for as long as the moon is coated with honey. Shivering in the waters that grow cold around us.

When the honied moon waxes and wanes, the projection of lust and desire greys into a game of blame. A competition of who can play the victim most effectively. Appropriating as much of the shared hurt as possible and shouting from the roof tops of the injustice exacted upon us. By our very own hands.

Hands with opposable thumbs opened us up to the myriad possibilities of adaptation. To manipulate the world around us for the greater good. Holding the world in our hands and nurturing it. Gardeners passing through a paradise. Learning from our forebears and handing down sacred knowledge to our children.

Holding new born life in the palm of our hand and gazing upon a pure miracle in speechless wonder. Vowing to be a better person for something external to us, when we should have been doing this all along. Forgetting that vow as we forgot the promise that we once were. Thoughts and words turning to ashes. Shrivelling on the bough in the drought of inaction.

Love is lived. And when it is lived it flows through us. The lifeblood of the soul. The nourishment that encourages our growth towards the light. Our growth. Our life. The fundamental responsibility we were tasked with when we were gifted with the spark of light that we are temporary custodians of. The eternal part of us that we ignore at our cost.

I sit and I drink more of my tea. I feel the sun on my arm and I smile at the simplicity of the moment. Dust motes dance in the light. They understand their brief. And now I understand mine at last. I am a spinner of plates. Rushing around between them like a busy bee so that none shall fall and shatter. Now I examine each and every plate and some I pluck and place carefully to one side. I get to choose which plates to spin and where I position those plates. This is my life after all.

We are not born with a manual. We don’t need one when we are born. And there is no manual for the unnecessary complexities we have bestowed upon us. Nor for those that we add to the pile. Where there is noise there is a source of noise. The smoke rises up from the fire. All that is to be done is to see what is causing the commotion and waft the mists of chaos and confusion away in order to see clearly once again.

The insipid fog of a thousand riddled and knotted hidden belief systems. The sins of our fathers and of our mothers. All our fathers and all our mothers. Every one that existed before we came into this life. Our parents inculcate the seeds of belief systems within us from the off. We hold them dear with never a thought for what they actually mean for us and the life they compel us to live.

But where do our beliefs come from?

Do we ever ask ourselves this?

Do we drag these squatters out into the light and interrogate them?

Why are you here?

What do you want from me?

Why are you preventing me from living the life that was always intended for me?

We are a hive of chaos dressed up prettily as a facsimile of order and control. A smiling lie. We pretend we are something we can never be as we drift out into the deep dark waters and we continue pretending as our captainless ship sinks lower and lower and lower. We are aware of the abandoned ship’s wheel rolling this way and that. We are aware of the water rising up to the deck. Our feet are wet and we stare down at them in favour of doing anything about our predicament.

Our precarious condition is thanks to the growing weight of a cocktail of beliefs that make no sense to anyone. And that cocktail is laced with poison that tastes of the honey we so desire. We drink it down and succumb to a confused stupor and tell ourselves sweet little lies as we fall into darkness.

It’s not my fault.

Never is it our fault. We can never admit that we hurt ourselves. And yet the price of living is consequence. Consequences, there are always consequences. We act and there is a result to our action. Ripples in the river of life. Failure to act does not lead to an absence of consequence. The consequence is absence. A drought in the midst of abundance.

As I wash my mug and look out upon a world that is mine if only I will accept it, it seems that a large part of life is to roll up our sleeves and remove the clutter and start again. To begin again and become who we always were. I do not know why we have to learn the hard way. Perhaps this is the legacy of those we must honour.

We wander into the seductive wilderness and perform for charlatans. The more we perform the deeper we go into a place that was never meant for us. We lose ourselves in the back of a wardrobe and clap our hands to our ears to mute the birdsong that sings to our soul.

There is nothing beyond the wood panel of the wardrobe. Only a blank wall that blocks our way. Yet we push on in the dark when behind us is all the light we will ever need.

The light blinds us when we venture out at last. All that is good is overwhelming as we have hidden from it for far too long. Opening up to the light illuminates our very nature. We are vulnerable and in our vulnerability we are beautiful.

Beauty is truth.

And the truth burns the lies away.

The truth dismantles the redundant scaffolding of our belief systems and allows us to breathe again.

I laboured upon a self-imposed delusion. I knew that hurt people hurt people. I trekked through the world and I saw that there was too much of that about. The gift of pain encouraging us all to pay yet more pain forward.

As I walked my path I also saw that hurt people could help others. That the initial remedy in healing one’s self was only the first step in a lifelong journey. To reach out a hand and love others in the pursuit of love we crave for ourselves. Only in giving do we receive.

And yet here I am. Alone again. Struggling with the conundrum of me. Passing through a phase of wanting to remain alone. Knowing that my splendid isolation is preferable to the world of hurt I managed to escape this time. Aware that I may not escape the next time around. I don’t many goes left at this. One last roll of the dice before the casino of life casts me out.

And there will be a next time. I know this much. As there have been previous times, there will be another. We are creatures of habit. We say one thing, but it’s what we do that counts.

Isolation is another prison. Another wardrobe. A stagnation of a vibrant soul. We shine more brightly in our connection. Walling up our hearts and hiding our light is a betrayal of what is meant. And we all need meaning in this life of ours. We need to emerge from the soil and reach out. To dare to be and in that endeavour we will be beautiful.

If I am to believe in anything it must be the potential for us all to be beautiful in the short time we have in this world.

I am hurt and I am afraid. But I have always had a choice. I can choose to remain here in the pretence of a safety that stifles and allow all my hurt to grow. Or I can step out into the world again and find another way forward.

And I choose living.

I will not wait for life to dole out my next instalment of pain. I will face it and I will walk right through it. The storms come whether we like them or not. They are a fact of this existence of ours.

Time to face facts. There’s a wonderful moment that occurs as I turn around and allow the sun to warm my face. The complexity of ropes that I thought had held me back unravels and I step over my former bonds.

Yes, they hurt me.

But I had a choice.

I always had a choice.

Hurt people hurt people.

I went out and I found someone to hurt me. I invited them into my life to do just that. I did so willingly and I encouraged them to keep going. This was my bad habit. A habit I developed thanks to the legacy I inherited.

Hurt people heal others.

This is my choice. And I choose to heal at last. Time to place the costumes of the martyr and the saviour back in the dressing up box and take my clothes from the wardrobe I have dwelt in for far too long.

Time to be me.

I choose to be me.

That can’t hurt, can it?

Oh! I think it will, but it’s a pain I am choosing. The ache of honest labour to build something worthwhile. I’ll take that over the hurt that results from not living well. And I will laugh at the absurdity of choosing to do what I was always meant to do and be what I was always meant to be. Smile at the foolishness with which I resisted my simple destiny.

And I will choose to forgive. Forgive myself and everyone who has wronged me. For I have to accept this is the way of things. We know not what we do, right up to the point when we begin to think for ourselves and take ownership of our deeds. In that there is a release and a rebirth. The second start. The new beginning when I really do live this life of mine and truly mean it this time.