WHEN THE FALLING STOPS SO DO YOU
Do you ever have a day,
perhaps a lifetime – ?
where you’ve completely lost your spark and inspiration,
and you don’t even know how to be?
You feel nothing
nothing
nothing at all
Tied up in the endless necessity of doing,
yet not even doing that.
Do you ever have a day,
a minute or maybe a million of ’em?
Where it all feels so heavy
It’s all so very relentless
It’s all so very purposeless
and you KNOW that the way through is to completely let go,
but you’re not even sure what it is you need to let go of,
or of course,
you would.
Do you ever have a day?! A month, perhaps an entire compendium of months?
Where it drags
It sits
It refuses to move
you look look look for the fire
but the fire is nowhere to be found.
It’s certainly not in you.
It’s not on the Facebooks waiting for you. You checked, 1001x and nup – still not there!
It’s not even on your BOOKSHELF.
And so you sit.
And you stare.
And you slump somehow even FURTHER inward.
And you ask yourself –
what IS it all for anyway?
What AM I doing here, anyway?
What WOULD I be doing, anyway –
if it were not this?
And you wait.
And you wait.
And you wait.
And you stare.
And you stare.
And you stare.
And yet still,
it’s not there.
You don’t even know what ‘it’ is anymore.
You just know –
not this.
This place of feeling nothing knowing nothing being nothing and yet longing, SUCH a deep longing,
for something.
But perhaps, when you have this day –
this month –
this lifetime –
this BREATH of frustration and sorrow –
perhaps this time,
you pause.
You allow yourself to sink even further.
You stop trying to get OUT of the nothing, you stop trying to latch onto a something you can’t even see.
You go DEEPER into the void.
The yuck.
The MUCK.
And perhaps in that place,
after a hundred thousand years or maybe the flap of a single butterfly’s wings,
you look around.
And this blackest of black places, is still, well –
black.
dark.
vast beyond what your mind can conceive.
Still nothing!
Yet in the nothing, hmm … MAYBE.
The smallest of sparks. The faintest of flickers. Probably not even real! Yet –
you turn.
compelled.
drawn.
PULLED.
NOT, as you thought it would be, to grasp onto a rope, to pull you out.
Instead,
to tip backwards,
eyes cast to the relentless black heavens,
no idea of what lies beneath you,
and to fall
and fall
and fall
ever deeper
ever further
ever and ever
Amen
The falling has no end, can have no end, there is no available end, but yet somehow –
this no longer scares you.
Even as you drop, at the speed of light, a hundred worlds away from the one you were trying to cling to,
you are no longer scared.
Your eyes snap open.
You drop with a sudden THWACK back into your body.
The place you now realise you HAD to leave when you were clinging, scrounging to hold onto the edges of, desperately fighting to be part of,
that world. You know –
the one up there that you just couldn’t know how to be in.
And GOD knows you tried.
Eyes open.
Every cell vibrating.
LIFE pulsing through your veins.
Still.endlessly.falling.
Fear,
lostness,
void,
even though you are in it so deep you have become it –
gone.
DID YOU HEAR ME?!
And you realise.
So clearly now!
All this time.
ALL this time.
All this for the love of sweet baby Jesus time.
You thought you were lost,
because wherever you looked, you were not there.
And so you lived.
As best you could.
You played.
As best you could.
You created.
As best you could.
As best as one CAN,
with the absence of one’s SELF.
But never once did you look,
for where you were.
And if you had,
there you’d have been.
Because in the end,
the place you were running from, frozen stiff at the idea of, fighting to stop falling into,
and through,
was the instrument of you.
A poem, a thought, a little piece of prose suddenly falls from nowhere, and catches up with you as you continue this descent,
into you –
They made them so scared of themselves,
that their soul was the first thing they ran from.
And their greatest terror,
was falling into who they truly were.
So they clung.
Dirt under the fingernails and desperation their visage,
from the horrors of leaving the world they couldn’t breathe in,
and refused to fall a hundred worlds deep into the one that was made for them.
But not you,
no –
Not you.
Never you …
you whisper,
as you fall
and keep on falling
all the way through the other side and back again.
The secret of course is simple –
if the falling stops then so do you.