a siren song

it was a searing of the soul.

shsss shsss. that’s what happens when they brand animals. a burn to the surface.

only the maverick has no mark, no scar.

the rest of us are nearly defined by them, if not entirely, then at least in part.

i had an encounter this evening that was the progression of a void, a magnetizing opposition. such intensity of connection combined with complete denial.

not rejection, but denial.

negado

i didn’t know what the word meant when i first heard it. sounded like negative, or pessimistic. denied is something different entirely.

this evening i saw it — negado.

that which is denied from me and that which i deny myself.

there i was on the beach, a single woman surrounded by various men i have previously and/or presently vibed with, along with a bunch i do not know.

vibed, as in connected.

flirting is a strong word but some might call it that. sometimes you have a conversation, other times it’s a vibe.

you know when you know.

often there are echoes of vibes, because vibes are energetic, and energy is music. these are always the most fun to navigate — almost like a venus retrograde moments, the honeymoon phase of a wedding that never happened.

“it is all fun and games until you burned.”

until the scar itself burns.

usually i know what to do, how to navigate things. usually i have a natural flow of action and inaction, action and consequence. usually i have a plan.

this time i am at a loss.

the only thing that makes any sense at all is the Korean zen koan: Only don’t know.

i don’t know if any situation in my life has ever fit it better.

some part of me would love to tell you the whole story, because obviously there is both a story and a back story, but another side wants to preserve a modicum of privacy and respect for myself and others and just distill the present lesson as best i can.

truth is, it is very visceral.

the burn of the connection drew me into myself in a way that felt vertical, everything pulling in towards the central channel of my being, which is of course meditation.

he looked the way he looked when i met him 20 years ago.

it was as if nothing had changed, and yet everything had passed.

the more precise sensation, now that i’m considering it, wasn’t really the burn of a brand. it was more like a hot knife. a scalpel. cutting into the heart of my soul in order to release some substance that has been there for years…

the pain around the fact that i was never branded to begin with, left unclaimed.

i am a maverick.

i love you, you love me, but you are not in love with me, as you say, and i’m in love with you.

maybe you were in love with me for a moment. maybe you never were or still are.

i keep avoiding this human, and today they were unavoidable.

joy followed by denial.

a siren song.

.,.

like many of us, i saw the Odyssey recently, and despite listening to it dubbed in Spanish i caught an aspect of the song i’d never heard before — something about all the possibility of your dreams, and having them never come true, and the soul just bleeding.

sometimes they tell you to ‘bleed it out.’

who tells you this — historical stories from hundreds of years ago? fishermen?

i have no idea really who says this. but it make sense.

bleeding out a wound. bleeding in the red tent.

i’m understand it on a physical level, and the analogy feels just as real.

leave it open. don’t try to put a band-aid on it. bleed it out.

something on the inside needs to come out.

some kind of guttural scream still needs to be heard. or felt. or seen.

there he is, strapped to the mast, suffering more than he’d ever suffered before.

the crazy thing is, he chose it.

…

you see, it’s not just about what is denied to us by another or by the universe, it is also what we deny ourselves. which comes down to permission, after all.

permission to feel, permission to share, permission to speak.

what can i say, my friend Samara Bay chose a great word to focus on — it just encompasses that and means so much. there i was in the middle of this beach party, overlapping vibes and wounds with histories still bleeding, and i could feel myself being awkward, as in, not fully open, not my authentic self.

there was a filter, conscious but involuntary. i did not want it to be there and it was.

i saw the group of people surrounding me and my distance to them as a unit. i felt the different way i was able to be myself when i was just one-on-one with someone. i felt always already exiled, so i exile myself.

one-on-ones are what lead to vibes, and vibes lead to problems. that’s been my lived experience. primed for complication and loss, i am. therefore my subconscious has programmed itself not to be fully open. when i’m fully open life gets complicated.

that’s my lived experience.

then i got it — negado.

i deny myself the possibility of being fully me because i don’t know if the consequences are manageable. i don’t know if the consequences are what i truly want. but then what else could i ever want, other than to be me?

it’s a cliffhanger people. see to be seen.

truth is i know what i want. i want a partner. i want to be held energetically in a private container that i am only partially responsible for maintaining. i don’t want potential vibes to sprout just because i’m being myself with whomever is around. i want to be myself with the person i want to be with, and create a life.

it’s both my dream and siren song.

…

i drove myself home just after sunset because i don’t love driving at night with everyone’s fancy fluorescente highbeams. it was making me think about all the possibilities. for example, if it wasn’t just me making sure i get home alright, i’d stay out later, or go to parties even if i didn’t want to drive because i wouldn’t have to drive. all the things i could see, looking out the window…

some say we are denied when we are punished for breaking the rules, but that might be a complicated and ultimately pointless argument to pursue. after all, the rules always depend on the house you’re in, & even if i’m in your house they’re not my rules.

today i was a trespasser. literally.

all i wanted to do was touch the ocean and it was impossible because erosion is destroying our beach. i am one of those crazy women fully obsessed with the ocean because she is my mirror and my home and my energetic regulator.

if i am nothing else, i am a woman of the sea.

today, i couldn’t get to her. it made my cry, which made me want to feel her salty waves on my face all that much more. so i went where i used to be able to go, which was never public but not quite private, a place where you could go on the rocks, where previously you could touch sand or the beach.

now there are 4 lines of barbed wire and padlocks but god bless us we got through anyway, 2 dogs and a crazy woman in a bikini.

all i wanted to do was touch the ocean.

i ended up backtracking and perched on a rock waiting for sea spray. there was a guy and his friend who had been eyeing me as i made my way through barbed wire and onto the rocks. i realized that they might be concerned that i was going to “do something,” as in throw myself off a rock or walk into the impossible sea…

i mean, it’s be done.

but no, that wasn’t my motivation this evening, and as i made my way to my perch where i would most definitely be seen (which is of course what i was trying to avoid), i could smell them smoking a joint and everyone is having their Sunday right?

so i said fuck it, and sat on my rock, waiting for the sea.

this is who i am. i am a woman of the sea.

people like to talk about “bad karma” and “good karma” but this is misunderstanding of the concept. karma is neither good nor bad. in its essence, all karma is “bad” karma, because the whole “point” of the Buddha’s teachings was final cesassion, and karma, good or bad, just means perpetuation.

more rocks by more seas. eventually you tire of it, even if you don’t want to.

there are consequence here. is something being pardoned, past present or future? or again, is that just an echo of a vibe, a scar that has healed but still left a mark?

are we just reliving the old story because we haven’t yet thought of a new one?

…

i could sit on these thoughts for another few days but everything is going to continue and change and indeed it did. now it is Sunday already and i am being confronted with multiple trains of thought and what feels like real breakthrough.

you see the thing is, breakthroughs come when they’re ready, but more often than not that happens when we finally see and know what is.

i had to let go of a part of me tonight in order to see myself as i truly am.

this has been coming for a while and really it’s a separate story, so i’ll save that for another time. truth is, if i’ve been feeling denied, it’s because i haven’t been being the right person for me at the right time.

i’m not a woman of echoes. i am blood and breath and soul.

strap yourself to a pole if you can’t live with that.

life is too short to lie to ourselves.

rsvp: vidabierta

ps. i have another account in which i speak more precisely about the body and the nervous system. this is the first piece, lmk what you think!

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