Inner Voice Art

And when you have an intense contact of love with nature

or another human being,

like a spark,

then you understand that there is no time

and that everything is eternal.

The beloved has appeared, in one of her fierce or more wrathful forms, carrying the power to undo the familiar arrangement of who we have taken ourselves to be.

This is part of what makes healing and awakening so disagreeable at times. We imagine they will make us feel better, safer, more certain, perhaps even more whole. And sometimes they do.

But initiation has another movement. It contradicts the persona. It disturbs the world it has so carefully arranged. It brings us into contact with a life that may bear little resemblance to the one we were certain we were going to live.

Something unexpected enters the room and pulls the rug out from underneath us.

There is a mercurial intelligence in the psyche that does not seem particularly interested in preserving who we think we are. It disturbs what has become fixed, opens what has become closed, and returns movement to places that have crystallized around certainty.

Perhaps this is one of the deeper purposes of regulation: not to become increasingly undisturbable, but to develop enough ground that we can allow ourselves to be genuinely moved.

To be touched by beauty. Undone by love. Rearranged by grief. Astonished by what we cannot explain.

Not every disturbance is a sign that we have lost our way. Sometimes the path itself comes to disturb us.

- Matt Licata

“Sometimes since I've been in the garden I've looked up through the trees at the sky and I have had a strange feeling of being happy as if something was pushing and drawing in my chest and making me breathe fast. Magic is always pushing and drawing and making things out of nothing. Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden - in all the places.”

- Frances Hodgson Burnett - The Secret Garden

“Courtship is to sit next to someone and discover what they love.”

~ Martín Prechtel

When great hills dream apart,

And far blue leagues of distance

Call to the Gypsy Heart."

— The Vagabond Poets and Muses Love Poetry

Photo: Gypsies in Spain, 1973 Photo by Josef Koudelka

~ Anaïs Nin

Image by Ana Grigolia.

Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up

To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain

When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,

Taking time to open the well of color

That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone

Until its calmness can claim you.

Be excessively gentle with yourself.

- JOHN O'DONOHUE

“I have been in the dark; I have been hidden.”

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves