Softening and Making Peace.

Words, As Fruit #46

A few years ago someone asked, “What are the hardest words to write.” To this day, my answer is the same. The hardest words to write are the words that haven’t been written yet. The words stuck somewhere in the space between feeling and comprehending.

As it happens, today is the birth date of Toni Morrison. Born February 18, 1931, I cannot let this day go by without acknowledging Morrison’s persistent presence and impact on my growth and evolution as a writer. What better way to honor her than through words; through attempting to, in her own words, “reach the ineffable.” It is the ineffable that is my experience as both a spiritual being having a human experience¹ and a human being have a spiritual experience.

"Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names." – Toni Morrison

As a writer one of my duties is to go searching for the language I do not have and so the process of writing often looks like long periods of quiet, long periods of cocooning so that I may sit in silence in order to hear the inward conversations between heart and mind.

Recently this period has brought me to conversations on softening…

I have been wondering, sometimes more so marveling, at those who have gone through what we might describe as the worst kinds of hell, and still choose to, strive to, become more kind, more caring, Loving, and understanding. I equally wonder about those who have gone the opposite way, allowing their experiences to turn them into mirrored replicas of the hellishness – embodiments of the ugly they have witnessed or been subjected to.

I have been thinking on this difference in outcome, in how we choose to wear our experiences and it has led me to this idea of softening – the willing allowance to let our experiences mold us into more gentle and compassionate beings, versus more callous and cruel ones. I have been thinking about the moments in my life where I have been brought to the edges of ache and I choose, even as I fall, how I will land and what this landing will make of me. It’s taken me years to understand that despite the hard grounds I may reach, I can remain the soft thing.

Much of this softening has come by way of learning to hold multitudes and turn the weight this may add to my heart and mind into an anchoring. I have been holding faith and anger, sadness and joy, heartache, grief, gratitude, release, relief, breath and breathlessness. With it all I have also been learning to make my own recipes of peace. Making peace with even the most disturbing of realities.

This making of peace does not come easily. It requires an incredible amount of presence and feeling – being present in and with my feeling. Feeling, as I have learned recently, is not the same as emotion. Instead it is the story we make up and tell ourselves about our emotions. So I am choosing my stories more carefully, more mindfully and intentionally.

Making peace does not always mean I am in agreement with the moments, circumstances, and situations that bring about emotion and the often unsettling stories that can result in the harshest of feeling. However, making peace does require my willful participation and so this means that I am choosing, and to have choice is to have freedom.

Lately I am choosing to remain not just “love and light” but Love and truth, acknowledging, interrogating, and accepting so I continue on, let go, maintain, and remain in my most heartfull state. Not allowing myself to be dragged into states of unfruitful rage and hateful fury, not allowing myself to become the weapon formed against others and so, in connection, a weapon formed against myself.

Softening is a state of grace. And right now this softening is the thing that is saving me…keeping me sane, and at peace.

“Accept and receive all that is happening and keep what softens you.” – Love More

– Ẹniafẹ Isis, Words, As Fruit.

1. "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin“