“Oh, yeah? Let’s see if you still believe this when your husband decides that he wants to wander off and become a poet and stops paying your bills!”
He spat the angry words in my face. He was angry. The idea of doing what he wants in life being of the highest importance made him angry.
He brought up arguments, reasons, all familiar. I can’t do it because … and off it went: money, time, survival, food, shelter. I listened. He was right.
“You are right,” I said. “Inside of your paradigm you are absolutely right. You have to fight, work, struggle to survive and the survival is paramount to everything else. Doing what you want is a frivolous waste of time, a luxury. You must focus on making money.”
“You are right,” I said, “inside of your paradigm. Change the paradigm. Do not change what you do — you can’t do that, what you do is necessary. Change the paradigm.”
There are other paradigms, there are many other ways to live life and experience the world. In some we work hard and expect a just reward to come from a power beyond us. We deserve that reward, we are entitled to it.
In others we are the power. We do not deserve, we are not entitled — we simply create what we want.
“They are all so sullen” I thought looking around me. Art classes took me to a city college, I hurried to the studio among throngs of young people. Tired, angry, sad, harried and sullen looking young people. Oh, not all of them of course, some were smiling, laughing and chatting animatedly, but a fair percentage did not.
“I can see why they are like this” I thought to myself. They were told what to do, how to see, how to think, how to relate, since they were born. Their ways, their instincts, their ideas were disregarded once they stopped being cute, once they went against “how things are”.
I remember it. I remember the training I received. I remember being told countless times that “this is how it is”, “this is how it works”, “that’s life”. It took me many years to learn that that’s not life – that’s just somebody’s life. My parents’ life, my teachers’ life.
It took me many years to come to the conclusion that I am going to look for my life. I am going to retrace my steps and find out how my life looked like before someone else told me that I was wrong.
I am going to look for that life, and grow into it.
Feel yourself, and speak. Speak words that are the extensions of yourself, another part of your experience. Speak words that feel right, that express and resonate. Not the words that “mean something” according to a dictionary – but those that “mean something” according to you.
Feel yourself and speak, and your words will not hide you – they will reveal you.
Feel yourself and speak, and your words will have the power of your being behind them.
Feel yourself and speak, and your words will be heard.
“Speak!”
I squirmed in my chair in a discomfort acute enough to be called pain.
“Speak,” the wizard said, but I only chocked harder. There was a wall, a thick strong wall between my experience and speech. Words would not come, there was blankness. My experience did not connect to the place where words live.
“Speak!” the wizard said again, and I tried. I spoke a word. It was a ball of barb wire in my throat. It hurt, it hurt like growing a new limb would, it hurt the way giving birth does, and I hated it even as I understood the importance of the exercise.
“When you speak your experience you reaffirm it in reality. When you speak from the experience, truly speak from the experience, your words have the power to create.”
When you speak as what you are, from the depth of your experience of life, your words are the words of God.
If I had my way we would celebrate happiness. We would have national holidays to commemorate wonderful, happy events: the birth of a genius, the creation of a masterpiece, the coming of spring.
If I had my way happy people would be treated with utmost care and attention. They would be supported and coddled, nothing negative or critical could ever be said to them. They could not be hurt, they could not be put down.
If I had my way happiness would be the way to attract attention, to make others notice and take care of you.
Pain? We would notice pain. We would acknowledge it, feel it, heal it, let it go.
It is happiness that would be one’s claim to distinction. It is happiness that would make us stronger. It is happiness that would make one a hero.
It is happiness that would be sacred.
