The lifelong learning of witnessing and being in the inbetween. The both/and as well as the neither. The feminine is everything within itself. And is nothing without the masculine. The masculine is everything within itself and is nothing without the feminine. If neither were present, there would be no need for the other. In this, I’m learning how to let many energies that are all true yet might look condescending to each other coexist simultaneously.
I’ve gone along for most of my life playing second role-adjacent to my body. It’s always been there, and I’ve only just started calling it home. It’s a crisis amongst the masses. The ever changing and evolving consciousness of the body is only now becoming a true embodied subject. Meaning most people, including myself, are just now beginning to feel within the ever present life-force that governs everything on this planet.
It’s really easy to want union with others. The melting of bodies, in the spirit of aliveness. It may even be really easy to want to union with yourself. And something I’m coming to learn is that thinking it, isn’t the same as embodying it. The way I’m seeing it right now is, embodiment comes in its own time, after diligent effort within your process. It has no calendar, nor time. It simply shows up and you know it’s different now.
That’s how I felt when I was standing in my shower, hands on my heart, witnessing the aliveness within me travel up and around my being. And I felt the merge of who I am integrate into one, whole body. Suddenly, all grey. No black, No white. All black, All white. Grey. There was no ego death. Because in the grey, ego lives as well. Simply happy to belong and be seen. When you can’t tell what is what, because it all is. No longer in separation, in union.
And in that moment, there was nothing. And there was everything. To me, that’s what it means to be alive. To be sure of everything and nothing all at once. And to embrace that dance. I stayed within this sense for a few hours. Transferring it to the canvas. And then some separation started to occur, as I began to realize there is me, and there is the world. Integration takes time. It’s a little bit and then nothing, then a little more, then nothing, then a continuous embedded embodiment. Maybe it’s just like a muscle, the more it gets engaged, the stronger and more consistent it gets.
Union with self creates solitude instead of loneliness. It creates the ability to have two individuals in a relationship, familiar with each other and strangers to each other. Union with self allows the strangeness, the unknown to be embraced curiously. Because your world is known within you, and it is home. And the realization that there exists a whole nother world within another person, and you get to experience it on your own level is the reason why we’re here. And that union with another person is fleeting. And it’s necessary to maintain a level of separateness with others in order to remain whole within your union with self.
And that can scare you, or it can enliven you to know that you’re the only person you can really know. And life is about learning and experiencing other individuals as their whole selves and the only person they really know. And the moments of true union with another person is held for such sacred moments that you must be willing to dance with the void to truly experience it.
In this piece, I hope to show the peace I felt during this moment. That nothing matters, because everything matters. And that our bodies belong to us. All of our bodies, from the most concrete, to the most ethereal. And they exist for us to learn and embody our learnings. Because that’s how we uplift the planet, and make the world a better place.
I chose to keep the pencil marks within the body present as a reminder that we are constantly writing what is true for us. That even the final draft is still a rough draft, and it’s still worth sharing what we’ve got. We are complete the day our soul is born, and incomplete until the day our soul dies.
Prints of this piece will be available soon.