Russian Dolls of Self

Recently the past has been coming into the present and I've been very much feeling the emotional landscape of several younger selves. There were some difficult times and they live on in each other and in me now like Russian dolls nested inside each other- events and developments at successive ages. Sometimes one particular doll or age seems very present and it's easy to forget how the previous ones were at different times more or less active in that one. As was true then so it is now. Ourself is a layered conditioned ongoing process. In my own case I also see this another way. There are at least three lives playing out to greater or lesser extents - the chronological life which unfolds, the life that might have been if conditions had been a little more aligned with my temperament and the life that I avoided. The life that might have been would have been easier and more fun in childhood and adolescence and might have made me an easier adult but it would likely have produced a flatter person. It's a life that lives now in grief. That grief has been unfolded; the loss of experience that wasn't, the connection with other the connection with self and at its root the cost of abandonment. There are deeper layers there too no doubt. The life I avoided is in a way the life that fear has tried to keep safe from. But sometimes that fear was too influenced by the smallest of those dolls and almost caused the thing it wanted to avoid. The avoided life is the one that died in bud, that failed in every way to flower. There were times when the clock ticked very close to that. In the tapestry of time and tide where the Russian dolls live and fill each other with their empty rattling there is stillness, spaciousness. Fear is the knowing of the empty rattling whilst we cling to the painted faces. And thank every nothing there isn't that it is so! For we only flower in our fullest in our pain and joy our depth and magnificent flash in the dark because we have some of it. At some level the smallest doll knows it's all empty but it must grow, it must flower. And so on Wednesday in ecstatic dance to jazz funk feeling into the body-mind moving as the embodiment of the dolls and the music the tapestry of time and tide... breathing... there was release and there was I now and I from then, and I from before, and held, the three of us child, adolescent and adult all in the embrace of time and tide. And in this way the stillness comes to dance and sees. And the music was flowing, and exuberant and joyous and sad and still and alive and vibrant. And there was Nina Simone singing Black is the colour of my true love's hair and the tears ran down my face and I placed my hands as if to set reverently upon the floor that which she articulated in its known unknowable and breathed. And the jazz came back and it was blue and funky... and the flower shone.

And returning home there was DC and he holds me as we continue to weave our tapestry in time and tide. And I hope in his time and tide he feels me hold him.