Posts Tagged with love

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becoming

If I knew my name, I’d tell you. I’d whisper it in your ear, my lips brushing the skin of your face, my breath warming the space between us. Or I’d yell it from the top of the hill everyone calls a mountain, my voice reaching the top branches of the trees where the ravens circle. I’d tell you other things about me too, if I knew. I’d place words on leaves in the splashing stream, waiting until you’d read one to send another. I’d fold sentences into pieces of scrap paper and fly them to you on gusts of wind. I’d share everything with a handful of dried grasses, light a fire, and let you read the smoke messages that curled through the night air. I’d introduce you to who I am about to become… if I thought I was done.

— heidi kalyani, 2019 
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line

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imperfect

I lie here nurturing my imperfect self, with my imperfect bear (worn thin from so many years of silent giving). Sometimes the tears puddle like a lake on my pillow (and Bear’s ears get wet), and sometimes I laugh so hard my body shakes. Freedom after so many years of suppression actually hurts. I’m unaccustomed to taking up so much space, to breathing so deeply, to expressing myself so fully. I know I’ve made mistakes, hurt others when I didn’t intend to, misunderstood, miscalculated, fallen down and hit my head so hard my jaw slammed shut. I know that. The reminders are everywhere for me to see (and sometimes shouted at me). What I forget is how resilient I am, how much courage and flexibility I’ve cultivated. How much awareness. I’m relearning how to love my imperfect self, as I love my imperfect bear — with curiosity, compassion, kindness and warmth.

— heidi kalyani, 2018 
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line

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cut open

I’m being cut like a frozen river by the blade of a skate. It stings and seethes — for awhile — then heals over with fresh snow or the thaw and re-freeze of a sunny afternoon. I’m tracing circles through the layers of my life — trying to make sense of patterns that aren’t clear, or perhaps aren’t there. I’m looking at myself in the mirror, on the shiny surfaces of the technology that surrounds me, in the reflective eyes of the people in my sphere. And I’m seeing a crust, a veneer, a peel. But what am I beneath my outer layers — the ones that I ritually put on for protection when I walk out the door, or that I let others slip over me so that my packaging pleases them more? What leaks through when I’m cut by loss or fear — or love? (For when it’s open and deep, love makes a cut too.) Is it emotion? Vulnerability? Honesty? Integrity? The wildness of possibility? And how beautiful would it be if we let ourselves, and others, bleed our glorious life-juices all over the fresh white snow, instead of trying to pretend that we’re perfectly smooth and together both above and below the surface — especially when there’s a vibrant, messy, unruly fire burning in us!

— heidi kalyani, 2018 
from the *nothing is black and white* project: illustration created out of meditation with a single unbroken line

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project 139 – eight

when you sing to me, my heart expands slowly, petal by petal, like the blooming of a time-lapse flower, and my cheeks grow sore from smiling.

heidi kalyani, 2017, from *project 139 (or less)*

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strings of words

 

For me, writing is love. And when I’m in love, everything tingles! I am awake to more sensations, more feelings, more energy, and more insights. I’m existing in a juicy “in between place” — a place between the known and the unknown, a place of both intention and surrender, a place where the extraordinary and the ordinary co-exist, a place that is so raw and beautiful and eternal that it hurts in that delicious way that being in love hurts, because it’s breaking me open, it’s pushing at my walls and limits, and vibrating so intensely that all I can do is sing… or dance… or string words together in long, unfurling sentences.

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

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i see you

Fellow human, I see you.

I see most of what you intend to show me, and much of what you don’t.

I see radiant eyes filled with sparks of deep compassion as well as great sadness.

I see swirls of energy that could move mountains, or bring them down around you.

I see an unfaltering knowing masked by years of conditioning, of doing what you thought you were supposed to do, of being rewarded for falling into place rather than honouring who you really are.

I see a heart ready to explode.

I see a wild, nearly untameable, desire to be free, to speak your mind, to say the things that feel true to you.

I see a shadow of regret, a heaviness in the way you carry your body, the weight of all the things you’ve left unsaid, the hearts you were too afraid to touch, the hugs and human connection you have turned away.

I see an infinite soul being squeezed into the space of a walnut shell by a society afraid of love, afraid of vision, afraid of anyone who doesn’t make themselves small.

I see an intellect that’s on fire, that’s juicy and vital and deeply alive, but which has every inspired idea shoved aside by someone with more fear than courage, or snuffed out by a kind of collective jealousy.

I see a body that is leaking out everywhere, trying to express itself, trying to resist the pressure of conforming to someone else’s comfort level or some manufactured idea of beauty, trying to ignore the message that it’s somehow not good enough just they way it is, even though in the deepest reaches of your inside, your body knows it just needs love.

I see a will that can change the flow of rivers, rearrange the stars and planets, bring life back to shrivelled trees, and yet still shrink to the size of a pea under outside scrutiny.

I see an abundant courage that shows up with love,  that accepts difficulties as openly as it accepts gifts, that knows that growth is imperative but rarely easy.

I see a radical optimism that strikes like lightning, transforming the night sky with its intense energy, awakening the darkest corners of our inner and outer worlds with its jolting honesty, then resting quietly while gathering enough charge to shine again.

I see hands that are filled with strength, with scars and a million tiny creases of individuality, hands that grip, that chop, that type, hands that offer support and yearn  for comfort, hands that are sources of sensuality, that are the connection between being hungry and being full, hands that are capable of almost anything.

I see an intuition that speaks loudly and asks to be heard, that can be overshadowed by the fallacy of fact, that never lies and yet is lied to.

I see a friend, a lover, a co-creator.

And I feel your pain, because some of it is mine too. We breathe the same air, you and I. Eat the same nutrients. Drink the same water. Are sustained by the same sun.

Our stories are both different and alike. It’s the uniqueness within the sameness that appeals to me, that fuels my attraction to you, that helps me hear you when you speak (with your mouth or with other parts of your being), that fills our conversations with such intense potential and transformative power, that builds the path of an open and compassionate way forward for all of us… if we let it.

Fellow human, I see you.

You are not alone.

 

— heidi kalyani, 2017

{Thanks to the lovely folks at Rebelle Society for publishing these words in the “you and me” section of their inspiring website!}

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project 139 – five

i watch as you disappear, your red coat the only colour in my monochrome existence, until you turn, catch me watching you, and i blush.

heidi kalyani, 2017, from *project 139 (or less)*

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what do I hunger for?


When the moon is full, and the stars are faded by its light, I hunger for your touch — your rough, calloused fingers sliding up and down my spine, or tracing circles around the tender skin of my throat. When the rain is moving horizontally, and my body feels as ripped and torn as an old flag from the battering of the wind, I hunger for a blanket in front of the fire, or a long, deep soak in a tub. When I’ve been tossed back and forth to the point of overwhelm on a sea of powerful emotions (mine or others), I hunger for tears and a cup of tea. In the depths of winter, on days that are so cold the insides of my nose freeze when I breathe, and every person I pass on the street is a hunched and smoking dragon, I hunger for those days we spent snowbound in a cabin — stories, decadent food and curiosity keeping us warm. When I’m surrounded by concrete and glass and other hard edges, I hunger for the smoothness of well-worn rocks in water, the roundness of flower petals heavy with dew, the softness of fruit beneath its skin. On humid afternoons in the middle of summer, when my head is so swollen my brain no longer works and my body so heavy and foreign I feel like my soul has been displaced, I hunger for the photos of king penguins on ice floes that barely registered when I first saw them, but now seem like gifts from another world. When the room is noisy and full of people spitting words, trying to mark their territory as a way of facing the intense sense of scarcity that throbs in their veins, I hunger for a space where we hold each other in the light so thoroughly and with such care, that none of us hurts for long. On a moonless night, when the stars are the brightest thing in the sky, I hunger for solitude and a quiet walk with the fire of my own light.

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

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the more beautiful world my heart knows is possible


When each breath is full and deep, and my belly is a bowl of softness, when the madness of the world slows down enough that I can see each muscle shift, each weight change, of the great universal somersault, when the light from the stars on a moonless night is brighter than anything humans have created, that’s the more beautiful world my heart knows is possible.

When your arms flash around me and your lips, with a gentle kiss, brush the top of my head in a gesture both intimate and fleeting, when words flow out of me in thin, rising, entangling streams, like the curly smoke of incense in warm moist air, when my throat is so open and the room so resonant, that the resulting vibrations finally loosen everything I’ve been trying not to hold onto, that’s the more beautiful world my heart knows is possible.

When I’ve pushed my brain into a dark corner, just before the claustrophobic panic sets in, I breathe and remember how light and vast the world can be, when your hand slides onto my thigh while we’re driving in the darkness and leaves a five-pointed pool of warmth that I retrace with my own hand for days afterwards, when the combination of garlic, basil and olive oil bites my tongue with a near orgasmic splendour, that’s the more beautiful world my heart knows is possible.

When I’m tense and tired and your late-night email makes me laugh so hard everything melts away, when in the stillness of deeply listening to music, I see the shine of tears running down your face, when the sun illuminates a golden path through my room, inching slowly because this time I’ve remembered to notice, that’s the more beautiful world my heart knows is possible.

When the air and ground are so cold that the snow beneath my boots is the only thing brave enough to make a sound, when the tea in my mug is too hot to drink, but I sip it anyway knowing that some kinds of pain actually feel good, when my cry for help in the dark hours of the night is answered by the love of people I am grateful to call friends, that’s the more beautiful world my heart knows is possible.

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

 

Published

self-love

I finally know — really know with every cell of my body — that I’m okay, that I will be okay, that the pain of falling, crashing and being shattered will dissipate and fade, that I will learn to love myself again… fully… with my whole heart, instead of just the sliver I allowed myself before. I see now that I was defensive, quick to explain and justify, to compromise, to acquiesce… wanting to hide anything I thought you might not approve of. I wanted to be loved, to be included, to be invited, but I didn’t fully love, include, or invite myself. I wasn’t breathing deeply and my feet weren’t connected to the ground. Like a black cloth on a sunny day, I soaked up the fear and anger you projected. I was penetrable. Vulnerable. Unboundaried. I believed the fear and anger were mine, even though they were as foreign to me as a third and fourth arm. I believed that I had forgotten how to be with people, how to be whole, how to hold a friend in the light. And in that state of instability, I wanted your bravado, your energy, your seeming sureness to refresh me, to give me strength and encouragement to be how I wanted to be. I wanted your love to coat me in resolve, in knowledge, in grace. But it didn’t. It brought me down. Brought us both down. Because it wasn’t real. It was a mask you use to cover over your insecurities, a way of hiding from yourself, a way of shifting responsibility for your unhappiness onto others. Rupi Kaur says, “How you love yourself is how you teach others to love you.” And so, I’m learning to love myself fully, unconditionally and with a soft gentleness that both rocks me to sleep and ignites the wildest fires!

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