This is not what I was going to write today.

My compatriot wrote a lovely piece today that echoed, precisely (and far more eloquently) what my previous post was getting at, so first, a big ol' thank you for that, love.  The picture of the horse made me cry, though.

I called my mom today because she knows about energy medicine, because I realized 'where it hurt'.  (This is a real thing, I swear....the next time you're in a situation and you're angry, frustrated, excited, sad, overjoyed, take a moment, close your eyes, and pay attention to how your body feels.  It knows what the hell's up.  Once you learn to listen to this amazing machine we lug around and bitch about all the damned time, it'll tell you stuff before your brain [who likes to overcomplicate and overanalyze] even knows there's a problem.)  It hurts from my throat to my belly button.  My throat, well, it's obvious...for all I'm not saying, I'm literally swallowing thousands of words a day.  It doesn't feel good. The rest?  Because swallowing all those words robs us of our personhood.  It forces our energy into stagnation, forces us to spend our resources to NOT create.  Forces us to deny who and what we are, to assert that our experience is not real, that our perception is wrong, our feelings, invalid.

Energy spent on the suppression of creativity is not simply wrong; it is a crime against ourselves.

Too many of us are in this position of having to deny our existence to be able to survive.  How beautifully, tragically, paradoxical is that?  In order to ensure that we can meet our most basic needs, we have to ignore the most basic part of our human nature?

So how do we carry on in this situation?  How do we go to a place, every day, that demands or requires our silence, without running the risk of losing the ability to express anything at all?  How do we shut down only temporarily?  Or better, how do we find a way to ensure that we can turn all of those feelings, all of that expression, back on when it's safe?

I'm still working on it, but this whole writing thing is part of it.  (It's no wonder, in a way, why the whole blog thing has taken off, if you consider how many of us are just biting our tongues all day.)  Create a place where it's ok to say the things you're not allowed to say, and say them.  Scream them.  Write them down. Carve them into a tree limb and set the damned thing on fire.  So long as you are creating something.

Remind yourself that you are.