Being way too revved up on passion and dreams and sure, probably delusions that real love exists and it can save us all and we’ll overcome the odds and save the world baby.
I would like to talk about vulnerability. That unspeakably beautiful, delicate, shy, sumptuous, intensely fragile space that appears out of the thinnest air in quiet moments of unearned, almost heathen, trust and contains all the magic of the universe. “Here I am openness”, vulnerability says, and snatched from the march of time are fragile moments of purity and wonder.
In moments when it hurts, moments following a breaking point, a divergence; the pain is sharp, and it brings its companions shame, resentment and bitterness along. These are the attackers at the gates of our souls, and the overwhelming sentiment is to bar the door, fire the cannons, batten down the hatches. Shut off, turn off, tune out. This is because perhaps we believe that our souls are sensitive. Perhaps because they’ve been hurt before. And that pain is like the fear some ancient men and women had for the dangers of a world they couldn’t comprehend, a world of predators and natural disasters and plagues and pests. They couldn’t understand it and so they hated it, feared it, and lived in inarticulate superstition.
But what if our souls aren’t sensitive, what if they’re the strongest thing in the world? And not because we shield them with walls but because we let them roam free. Roam free in an imperfect world. Because we let them shine with blinding gorgeousness for the world to see, see exposed and not feel shame but feel proud. Because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
I do not want to sit cross-armed behind a stone wall, so deeply convinced that my pain reigns supreme. I do not want all that magic, all that wonder, all that rarity, all that potential to circle the drain of diffidence and arrogance and leak away from existence. Because I feel it. The urge to retreat. The moments following immediately after the breaking point it is all-encompassing. To slide back behind indifference, and maybe even cruelty. The simple, animal, casual, lazy easiness of indifference. But cruelty is so easy, it doesn’t make you special for choosing it.
What if there’s another option? What if I tune in? And I don’t mean to lose oneself in self-pity or misery. That’s as bad as the iron-bar-door-shut. I mean tune in for the ride. Really be there, awake, alert, ready. Bloody well conscious, my bru. Switched on, hey! You know, how Hunter said, Buy the ticket, take the ride…and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.
I take this little one-trick-pony which is my “desperately insecure attachment type” (quote verbatim from my mentor this very morning) out in the wilderness of yeah, probably trying way too hard, of not being cool enough, of caring way too much, of being way too revved up on passion and dreams and sure, probably delusions that real love exists and it can save us all and we’ll overcome the odds and save the world baby. And I take this little one-trick-pony out into the wilderness of letting someone in again.
All the way up until the point where it fails, where it dies, where it hurts like a bitch.
But now I think the edge of failure is a glorious thing. Because in failure; humility. And in humility, perhaps grace. With grace, transcendence. The doors of perception are open and wisdom may now enter. But there’s no free lunch in this world. You have to hold those doors open (“Hodor!”). You have to hold the line. You have to be brave now, in this moment, you have to hold the vulnerability.
Hold the quiet vulnerably delicately.
It’s so beautiful.
It’s like standing in the break where the waves are crashing. Or it’s like a perfect snowfall in a silent field or midnight stone city.
Can you feel it in this exact moment?
Can you imagine, standing with all that burden, that assault, that fight or flight… and instead opening your palms to receive the intense fragility? Your eyes have their silence, in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which I cannot touch because they are too near.
And so now I will say with utter truthfulness and the fullest heart that I love my intense vulnerability that I showed. I love that I opened myself up. And even though that is now over, that magic and light that was created will always be there. Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility: whose texture compels me with the colour of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing.
The torment of precaution is worse than the dangers it seeks to avoid. It is better to abandon yourself to destiny. Forward, I say. Forward. How delicious this wild, delicate, vulnerable freedom of acceptance.