When being is a coming out

 

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I am a moth cocooned. 
Seed breaking open in the earth. 
Match flame flickering on cave walls. 
A waxing crescent moon. 
A chick sodden in birth's yolk, pecking her way out to bigger life.

* * * * * 

I stood in a barn on Saturday and watched these chicks behind glass, incubating, stumbling around on shaky legs, fluffing feathers as they dried. A row of eggs in front showed varying signs of birth in process. A beak poking through webbing cracks. The upper half of a tiny body wriggling, struggling in slow motion, to emerge. 

She looked so alone in that foreground, the only one breaking this far out. I wanted to stay and cheer her on. I needed to know she'd make it. Instead, I finally whispered to her and walked away among the children clamoring around the farm.

* * * * * 

In passing conversation, people often ask, What's new? and the most honest and compelling answer would be - Me. I'm new. 

But this, of course, is not for words exchanged in a hurry. 

It's one of those seasons where most of life seems to be happening beneath the surface and I forget how hard it is to translate this kind of life into words at all, let alone here, in my writing. My writing, in so many ways, has become my way of seeing. My gauge of sight. If I am not writing, I fear it is because I am not seeing. Anxiety swoops in, strings her web across the walkway, and I feel it on my skin, trying to shake free. All the things I am not doing in order to live the life I desire, all the ways I am not being that normally open my eyes to see, taunt me.

Until I STOP. 

And remember where I am. For maybe it's true that I need, for the rest of my soul, for the care of my body, to slow down and sit and rest in these places of seeing. But scolding myself only makes me curl in a ball of shame.

And maybe it's true, too, that be-ing isn't always a quiet rest and slowing down, as much as this is what I crave. Maybe be-ing can also be a coming out and into who I am, who I've been all along and who I'm still becoming. And this, right here, is not a quiet process. It's turbulent, exhausting, unnerving, compelling. Yes, this. I am compelled to come out. To become this person I can't quite see yet, but who is slowly coming into focus.

It's a season of staring from the inside at walls that are cracking, opening, breaking. A pushing up and out of the earth. A shaking out of birth's dampened wings. And I am learning, ever so slowly, to be more gentle with myself, for it's hard to see in here.

Harder, still, to grasp for words. And yet, I reach.

* * * * *

Joining the beautiful, gracious community at Unforced Rhythms.