(No. 53) Empty Page

emotional vacancy, and words i met this week

How I am moving through this world, in these times, changes every moment of everyday. But also every moment of everyday I am moving as slowly as I can.

There is a kind of vacancy¹ that replaces occupancy in the emotional body when there is so much loss. Even more so when loss - whether it is death, whether it is unwanted change, transition or transformation - is not expressed, not shared, not acknowledged; when we do not handle life with sacred care.

Now you may ask, want to know, how one fills this vacancy. And I cannot tell you. And I do not even know that you fill it, but I do know, you do feel it.

As I have been feeling and moving through and within my own vacancies, I have been meeting and re-meeting words. When I am struggling I seek out language because if I can name a thing I can see it with more clarity. I can process it, digest it, and express it so that the weight of it doesn’t just sit, it alchemizes.

So I have been meeting words. Meeting them like I meet people. Bumping up against them. Words and people. But words are different than people.

Words are like an empty page. Even as they bare themselves, openly, ready, willing for you to savor them, words ask for nothing from you but welcome all of you, all that you are willing and able to give, all that you are willing to allow and all that you are willing to take in.

This week I kept bumping into language of revelation of revolution and I had this thought about the letter “r” and how each of these words can stand alone with out it but take on different meaning with it.

Revelation | Elevation (a rearrangement of letters, evelation = elevation)

Revolution | Evolution

What if the “r” stands for Rebirth?

What if we are birthed once by our mothers and then rebirthed again through life’s vacancies?

In an instagram post earlier this week, artistic intellectual and longtime friend, Amanda Seales wrote, “Each of us is a revolution.”

and then from Joél Leon I read, “Revolution is a love language.”

The thought I will end with is this:

I believe many of us have revolutionary hearts. It’s our minds that lag behind, still needing to learn how to speak the language. The televised revolution is what happens after our minds meet our hearts and the fluency in its language evolves, not just into actions but into new ways of being. New ways of occupying vacancies.

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Interviewer: The revolution wasn’t televised in the 60’s. Is it going to be televised in the 90’s?

Gil Scott-Heron: Well you know, the catch phrase, what that was all about, that was all about the first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you’re living and the way you move. So when we said, ‘The revolution will not be televised’, we were saying the thing that’s going to change people is something that no-one will ever be able to capture on film, it will just be something that you see and all of a sudden you realize, I’m on the wrong page, or, I’m on the right page but I’m on the wrong note and I’ve got to get in sync with everyone else to understand what’s happening in this country.

- Ẹniafẹ Isis, Words, As Fruit

1. Writer’s Note:

I want to begin sharing more on the doorways through which some pieces come. For me they almost always come through conversations. Conversations with myself, with Spirit (through dreams), with nature, with others. Words, As Fruit No. 53 came from a conversation with my Mother this past Sunday. The day prior we attended the funeral of a family friend who passed suddenly at the age of 36. Growing up my Mother always spoke about death as a sort of agreement. It is because we live that we will die and in the same way we rejoice and honor and hopefully dance in life, death deserves the same joy, honor and dance. Both are a gift, both are sacred but what I have come to realize is that while we invite the joy of one, we often don’t know, haven’t been taught or advised on how to see or hold the joy in the other. And in america, death, grief, and most often life, is not held with sacred care, if held at all.

Often the grieving and grief are something tolerated. We are expected to get over it, get past it. Some of us learn to stuff grief down, hide it, and then are even hardened by it and so there is this space that is created wherein even as we may feel it, we (try) to separate ourselves from it, avoid it but grief is still there, sometimes showing up as a vacancy…empty space where something that once existed, someone that once filled it, is no longer there and we often don’t know what to do with it…

This piece is just a toe dip into what may become a larger essay but for now I’m sharing what I had in the moment, standing in the doorway of conversation with my Mother about life, death, grief, vacancy and its connection to revolution and revelation.