Articles from December 2016

Published

offering to the wind

Let me take some of your pain ― I won’t ingest it, or digest it, or claim it as my own, but I will hold it long enough to see it and feel it and know it. Then, if you want, I’ll raise my arms and offer it to the wind, where it will swirl around us and depart, unable to re-enter us because we’re no longer porous when we stand together. So tell me what’s in the bottom of your heart ― in the hardest, darkest, most guarded layers of feeling. In the place where you pile all the things you think you can’t handle ― the hurts, the betrayals, the guilt, the perceived failures. I know those layers are still tender on the inside, even if they’ve scabbed over on the surface. I know it’s painful to dislodge them, and that it might feel like removing even one of them will rip your entire heart open. And, my lovely friend, it might. It might also sting like hell. And it might cause a spaciousness that is foreign and terrifying since you’ve grown so accustomed to how a heavy, damaged heart feels. You might grieve the loss of the solidity, the familiarity, the constancy of the pain you’ve been carrying for so long. And as you remove the rocks and walls of the fortress you’ve built to protect your innermost self, you might also discover a capacity for love, for healing, for lightness you didn’t know you had. You might wonder how you ever lifted your body through the day with so much weight attached to it. You might feel suddenly dizzy and free and wild with possibility. You might cry. Or laugh. Or sleep. You might scream for hours or sing from the highest hill you can climb. So, I invite you to dig out your doubts, your fears, your shame, your confusion. And together, we’ll hold them up, honour them, and offer them to the wind.

— heidi kalyani, 2016
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line

Published

night sky

Sometimes when you fall asleep in my arms, I whisper things that I’ve never spoken to you ― or anyone ― out loud before. I speak of how much I love the curvy topography of your ears, and how the distribution of freckles on your back reminds me of drops on a windshield when it first starts to rain. Of how the richness of your voice resonates through my head in the quiet hours of the night, as well as in the loudest moments of the day, warming me from the inside out, and clearing the static from my system with its vibration. I tell you about a pain in my heart that I’ve had as long as I can remember ― a pain that has thick and thin places, a pain of separation that eases when I’m alone in the woods or wrapped around your reciprocating body. I tell you about the visions I have in the middle of the night, when almost every other creature is still and silent, but my mind is racing in circles trying to make sense of the day’s words and images before they fade away. I tell you what it’s like to feel the emotions of everything around me, human and non-human alike, how it overwhelms my internal sensors, fries my nervous system, makes me believe I am someone I’m not. And I whisper that, for years, I’ve looked up at the night sky, hoping to find you, somehow mixed in with the stars.

— heidi kalyani, 2016
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line

Published

x and y

I accept your offer of an embrace as I crave your touch more than anything… connection, communication, the reassurance of being alive. And yet, I hold back too ― my eyes shift from yours to the wall, my shoulders pull up towards my ears, my breath becomes shallow so that my chest and belly don’t move, so I don’t risk inadvertently pressing into you. I hold myself in place, a stone statue, cold, hard, immobile. Sometimes when I reach out across the void (the line that has been drawn between us by others, because I am X and you are Y), I do it with a deep courage, with a full on I-don’t-care-what-people-say confidence, or a quiet this-is-how-it-ought-to-be simplicity. And sometimes I shrink into the space I’ve been given by a culture that’s way too afraid to deal with me at full size.

— heidi kalyani, 2016
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line

Published

project 139 – three

if i could manifest extra arms at will, i would make two for encircling you, two for pouring tea, and two more for juggling the cosmos.

heidi kalyani, 2016, from *project 139 (or less)*

Published

woodsmoke

43_woodsmoke

As I press my face into your shoulder, I can still smell the woodsmoke in your hair. If I close my eyes, the warm light of the fire on your face reappears, shifting, hiding, illuminating, teaching me about sides of you I didn’t know before. I see pains that had been invisible, disappointments and rejections that ride in your heart and reveal themselves in your eyes. I see a simmering confidence, steady, quiet, patient, just waiting for enough heat to burst out of its usual state of reserve. I see a reverence for beauty, for silence, for *being* rather than *doing* that matches my own. I see a human I’d like to escape into the woods with more often!

— heidi kalyani, 2016
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line