I see the prism, it is floating

"if there's no seat in the sky (will you forgive me?)... i'm the image of your enemy, a reflection of a friend or a temporary lover" - saya

Despite my complaints of coldness, obaachan (grandma) always hears my moaning. Through pine forest gnawed to death by voracious beetles, wood turning spongey, she is somewhere in the distance hearing me. I grind the wood to dust between my fingers, sensing how the solid things we were told we could build homes of are now soft and crumbling around us, urging us to bore deeper into the wood which we won’t give up on to study the matrices that bind the material together, the material which we need, won’t give up on the trees like how they won’t give up on us, even as they collapse around us we lay on our backs on their fallen bodies which create bridges across waterways and pretend like we understand what to do with all of this death, pretend like we know how to navigate through ceaseless departures, disadvantaged as we may feel without the intimacy of our ancestors’ worlds, without their immersion in customs inherited from the stars and passed down through the generations, crisscrossing sticks bound together for us to sit in amidst this great mystery, contained as chaos spirals around us, chaos that moves against the order of creation but is also of creation, four sticks to sit between and have our hair stroked by wind and know that these questions are not ours to hold alone, that these questions do not exist in the vacuum of the mind but are being held by all of creation, the greatest mindless minds, handless hands that knead and smooth out wrinkles, lipless lips that mouth ways forward without a mouth, toothless tongues that whisper into the bellies of snakes, snakes that carry prayers into earth in slithering bodies.

We are greater than any one body or even a collective body (I remember the three of us chanting in the winter desert, i am not the body, i am not even the mind). I find myself sitting at the center of those sticks, the ones I just wrote did not make it to us, were obliterated in the waves of enforced forgetting that happened over the last several thousand years. I find myself at their center now, those sticks that did not survive, bundling cedar. I touch it with my hands which are real, this cedar which is real. And my obaachan calls me, hearing my moaning.

kawase hasui

Growing up involves the integration of consciousness into reality as it is, rather than as we’ve been conditioned to imagine it or were enabled to experience it in the care of others. Family offered me a cocoon of safety that was not real. I have now touched and deeply grieved its limitations. I decided I will no longer invest my heart in illusions of safety. Ancestral shame is offered the means of protection from wild winds of being loved exquisitely in the ways only the whole of creation truly can. Capitalism and white supremacy say I will insulate you, you whom my logic spares, from the excruciating expansiveness of fully being here.

A loved one asked me, what does your shame need? I sat with the question for three days and today the understanding arrived. Shame, you protected the belief that to be known is to be hated - I trace it through my fathers line, the long persecuted now cosigning annihilation in reckless rage and fear and festering - this belief protected me by encouraging our isolation - within this fortress we could live without community and without accountability and without joy and without belonging - shame you were the shell that absorbed the impact of the consequences of the lies I told myself and others, thinking the truth would leave me unloved forever - shame you were the love-proof vest that has cracked with the impact of the universe’s fierce and ferocious love that came to blaze my armoring down. The heart, thank god, is still soft, tender, and luscious, blazing quietly at the foot of all wreckage.

I see the prism, it is floating. I see the prism of reality as I’ve known it, that nightmarish matrix that once consumed me as I consumed myself as I was entrained to consume others. I see the matrix, it is floating. Once the entire universe, I see it as an island, one story. I can breathe seeing its edges. Its edges show me there is life beyond it.