Morbid Curiosity

Let’s face it together: morbid curiosity brought us here. 

Once from in my house I heard a terrible heart-breaking cry out on the street and rushed out to see who was hurting.  It was part compassion, part morbid curiosity that drew me.  I found a woman, a mother, crumpled on the ground.  I approached her and asked her if she was alright with my heart open and my mind suspicious.  Her two little boys, one old enough to be embarrassed/shut down/tough and scared, the other young enough to be scared and silent for survival.  She smelled unbathed and had the energy and unstable temperament of someone who has done hard drugs.  She sprung up, scooped up the little one and launched into a panicked emotional hurried complaint/request that her car was broken down, her friend had kicked her out and wouldn’t give her a ride, she needed a ride and no one would help her.  I was slow to respond as my instincts cued me: move slow, speak slow, think slow, breathe deep… and slow.  Despite this, things were going very fast.  I did not even have an opportunity to pause before responding and she had whipped around on her heels, stormed off down the street in a rage ranting and crying about how no one would help her.  I said “wait”, and “I’ll give you a ride”.  And I did.  It occurred to me today as I sobbed on my bedroom/bathroom floor and said to my swollen red face in the mirror “I need help and no one will help me, no one will be with me in this”, that if I went and cried out on the street, someone would come along and help me. 

Going to Radical Honesty Workshop is my attempt to get the affect of sobbing on the street, without actually doing it.  This blog is perhaps closer to sobbing on the street than going to the workshop, hence I have been putting it off and may never even publish a blog about this journey.  But then again, by the time you have hit bottom enough to wail on the sidewalk, who fucking cares?  When I am here I am reminded of the evolutionary emergency feature of women’s tears lowering men’s testosterone, and so in war times you will often see women sobbing out in the streets.  What would it be like if we all did all of our crying out on the streets?  Our tears healing the concrete laid by war?

I feel like I was born into a war zone.   Not because of my parents, they were born into a similarly hostile environment.  It’s the collective state we’re in on this planet, each us created it however innocent we may seem or feel in a really messed up game of forgetting who we are.  When I was a teenager and I began thinking critically along with my awakening empathic nature.  I would look out on parking lots and shopping centers and my heart would bleat for the nature once there, suffocated by concrete.  I grew up as environmentalism emerged more into the main stream, yet it still somehow does not feel it’s in the main stream, though it is more so. Maybe it’s because environmentalism has become it’s own war among all the other kinds of wars that are killing off our beauty and health in these bodies, homogenizing and numbing us to extinction on this celestial body. 

I was in a fighting mood in my adolescence, I could afford to fight and have a magical perspective, though mostly I was just looking for contact of any kind and recognition of the insanity we accept as normal.  But as I became more and more overwhelmed by the evidence of war, grief, destruction and suffering, and not equipped with mentors to guide me in my feeling gift, I worked hard to cultivate the numbness I saw all around me as normal; it was an act of survival.  It is among my biggest challenges to recognize that I chose to be without a mentor to shape my own growth and I still fantasize about if I had had a guide.  I recall in my early twenties deciding to start to muffle my light, to do more of what is expected of me, to pretend to be normal and fine, and to give up on being an artist –not that I was any good at it (muffling my light and acting normal, that is!).  It hadn’t really occurred to me at that time that I was a healer too, so my growth went underground.  I continued to learn and remember who I am via my sensitive body getting sick: my spirit’s own evolutionary emergency feature through the archetype of the wounded healer.  If I would not step into learning healing ways, allow myself to be seen with my eyes open, seeing others and helping them awaken, remember and heal, I would do it in my own body until I had the courage to look around me and realize that much of what I feel does not belong to me.  Ultimately, it does not even exist, but that’s for a later letter, right now I’m writing from this dualistic existence that allows us to experience the greatness of us as well as the not-so-greatness of not-us.