Clarity

I am desperately trying to gain some clarity.

 

The Invitation

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, ‘Yes.’

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

–Oriah Mountain Dreamer

This poem speaks to the very center of my soul, which I believe resides somewhere between my heart and my lungs, pulsing in time to my breathing and my heartbeat. It’s why, when I am so full of joy that my soul expands, that I feel as if my whole chest is expanding and life is bubbling up through my airways. It’s also why, when my soul suddenly spasms and contracts in sadness, that I feel as if my heart is suddenly on the wrong tempo and I can’t catch my breath. It’s as if my heart and my lungs don’t know how to keep rhythm properly in the sudden void, without my soul keeping them in place and on pace.

I meditated on this poem a lot in the months after making the decision to quit IVF. I was trying to remember who I was without my entire life being consumed by the cycles. Remember is the wrong word; because you can never go back to who you are after that kind of soul-wrenching. Yes, soul-wrenching as a noun, or perhaps an event, rather than an adjective. There are times in your life when it is like someone puts your soul in a vise and screws it tighter than it feels like it could possibly go.

   I imagine it looks something like this.

When they release the pressure, the shape of who you are is changed forever. Your soul is only so elastic. So I was not trying to remember who I was, but decide who I was going to be with this newly shaped soul of mine residing somewhere deep between my heart and lungs. I did the work, and I listened to the voice asking me those questions, and I found the peace and the resilience and the resolve. This poem is now the touchstone for my emotional and mental health.

Now I sit here, checking in with myself, ensuring that I am still living and breathing in alignment with this.

I ask myself the same question about my husband, and the answer is no, to every single stanza.