The Kindness of Summer

This summer was a season of healing and happiness. Of course no time is free of challenges, small disappointments, little losses, like some months old and half-remembered trauma inhibited behaviour came home and I could be hard on myself about it, or resentful of compassion or kindness not offered when I could really use some. Instead I'm looking at how differently I feel today than last winter and spring, how the months of summer warmed some life back into me. I'm grateful instead, to not feel like someone whose is bleeding vulnerability all the time, easily hurt and hurtful, struggling to remember one day to the next. Its remarkable to become someone you finally recognise and also feel entirely new. There was so much room for transformation, so much darkness to emerge from into warm bright air. I loved summer for the first time in my life. Particularly after a year of tragedy and trauma and near death experiences, this summer season, with its vibrant colours and peaceful heat drenched landscapes, offered me so much joy in subtle yet significant and ways.

Moving through the sharp edges of you own shattered nervous system is like swimming a steel ocean.  No one goes in thinking they are coming back, you wade into the distance of your self, the wildness of who you are - this is the paradox of the process: every part is painful but there is only one place to go. Healing and Accountability are processes. Doing 'the work' is pretty meaningless if it's just reading a book. Living is the only way you can grow to understand these are paths with no destination  - not for anyone. The redemption, the healing, is the living. It's showing up and being better than your worst moments. Healing and Accountability are verbs.

The goal of goodness, I think is to be good in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires and all the honesty we are capable of in the moment (even if its not enough). And yet, because a person is a confederacy of parts often at odds and sometimes at war with each other, sometimes hurt and struggling, sometimes exhausted - being good is not a promise to be cohesive, ever predictable and perfectly self-consistent. The impossibility of that is obvious, the cruelty of holding others to it in their hardest most damaged moments is palpable. You do it others while knowing in your body it is wrong when done to you. I can promise to try and own every part of my self, even those that challenge my self-image and falsify my best nature, but i can not promise not to fail.

You get hurt and you hurt people. There is a peace that comes from living this truth and surviving. A truth that renders life truer, mistakes more understandable, and maybe kindness easier to offer. If life were simply a debate it would be easy to win, but its not, its something far more complex, kindness isn't a gossamer web over the hard parts, its part of the hard part. It's the overcoming. This summer I tried to be kind to myself. When I imagine courage I envision a person, loving with every inch of themselves - loving despite the past, and I tried very hard to be brave. For most of winter and spring i felt like a skeleton house, haunted. In the summer I wrote poems and licked the sunset, touched the oldest stones.

As it turns out, there is a wrong way to tell a story

the one where you grow an axe in your mouth

but its never wrong for someone to tell you

how multi-true everything is

find the feeling in your body that says

it would be truer to say nothing

and know it was planted in you by power

I’d like to talk with you about other things,

in quiet context, in safety

It could have gone so many ways.

This is just one of the ways it went

Tell me another

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