Articles from June 2017

Published

longing

Your eyes are burning with a longing most of us are afraid to see — we turn away, drown in distraction, pretend it’s imaginary, try to protect our own disappointment with the way things are. Your longing is a fire that emits intense heat. It’s raw and visceral and inflames each draw of breath so that you gasp on your inhales and pour out great plumes of fire on your exhales. It’s a longing for wholeness, for depth, for connection, for a kind of beauty you thought was natural until you were taught that no one else believed it was true. But I believe in it. And I’ve been dreaming of finding you. As I drift into sleep, lie on warm grass gazing at clouds, or scratch words into a notebook as fast as my hand will allow, I whisper softly to the universe, “I am here! I am alive! I want to build a new world with you!”

— heidi kalyani, 2017 
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line

Published

being with water

Perched on the edge of the dock, the smallest amount of my flesh possible in contact with the wood, I try to appear casual, as if slipping into the water below is as routine and natural as drinking tea. A thing to do alone or with company. A commonplace activity we all learned to be comfortable with long ago. But it’s not. The tightness in my stomach tells me so. There are too many unknowns, suffocating memories, habitually reactivated fears. There is clearly a way to be with water that I haven’t discovered yet. An ease that exists, is present in those near me, but rushes into dark corners whenever I’m around. It’s not a thing to fake; “Look at me jumping, splashing, diving in!” Choking. Gasping. Drowning. Dead. Not a game of “breathe and push through it”, although I’ve played that one before and enjoyed the outcome. Sometimes fear is fear. The knot in my stomach tells me so. So I sit, chatting with the nearest soul, sunning myself, counting minutes off like elongated years, hoping no one will notice that I’m not yet wet.

— heidi kalyani, 2017 
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line

Published

so many silences

Silence is the stillness of my breath when I wake up from an intense dream at the beginning of dawn, when mine is the only body in the vastness of space, when I’m small and trembling and way too weary to tuck my damp hair and glistening collar bone back under the protective blankets. Silence is the absence of traffic on the highway between three and five am, when I lose track of time because cars no longer arrive, hum, and vanish. Silence is the suspended moment after I ask you how you really are and you’re calculating how to answer. Silence is a condition I create when I need to escape the tension of the world around me, when parents are yelling at their children in the row in front of me on the train, when jack hammers are breaking up asphalt as I wait for the light to turn green, when friends are cutting each other with words that are sharper than my kitchen knives, when things are so overwhelming that retreat seems like the only safe, sane, or possible thing to do. Silence is the tension after a heavy down pour, when the earth soaks up the sudden and overwhelming abundance of water, when vast rivers sweep insects miles off course, when birds are still nervous of damaging their feathers. Silence is the raw pain in my heart when I realize, after a disagreement, that I’ve allowed pride to infiltrate my mouth again, and say things I want to delete. Silence is an enormous, multi-limbed creature that slinks though the night, distracting me from sleep by offering me way too much to think about.

— heidi kalyani, 2017 
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line