He shared a poem that he had written about the experience he describes in the video. After finishing that first poem he said “okay, now that we have gotten that out of the way, it’s time for a lovebomb*”.
Then he read this…
1971
Daphne’s diary spun a wish too precious to speak.
I want a man who smiles when he talks about me.
Smiles because he knows all of me and loves all
of me and does not want to change any of me.
I want a man like that. A man whose voice
is the pressure on my hips when he calls
my name. Whose shallow breathing traces
the arousal of my nipples as I cook him dinner.
Whose laugh dips between my legs, catching
me by surprise and rocking. Whose hands
are rough when he touches my face honestly.
Whose embrace is desperate as though
I were the only thing keeping him from drowning.
Whose lips are moist with desire when he kisses me
and whose eyes dance with a dangerous fire.
I want, I want, I want a man like that.
and when he finished he said “so if any of you are looking for a man like that, just come see me after the reading”.
I was smitten, I decided my only course of action was to lovebomb him myself, and so I cut the line of students and hugged and kissed him until my arms went limp. I did that not just for me but for all of us.
“…what would it mean to look at ourselves as though we really believed this were true? The Tibetans have a saying: Who looks not with compassion sees not what the eyes of compassion see.”
I read an article recently that brought attention to how uncomfortable it can be for us when we see an image of ourselves that a friend or family member has chosen to frame or treasure. Often times, our need to keep up with an “idealized version of ourselves” takes control and “we fail to appreciate the face that is there…for those who truly see it.”
I have been trying to remind myself of this when someone pays me a compliment or when I look in the mirror. I take a moment to remind myself of what others who love me see.
What a wonderful excercise to gift ourselves, to ask our friends to describe what they see when they look at a photo of us. Why they selected that particular photo as thier favorite? It is an act of love to have the courage to sit and listen to how someone sees you, really sees you, then embrace yourself int hose words.
posted by Myriam
P.S. I chose this picture of Jemen because this is the face I see when she is generously listening to me, reminding me that I am powerful. This is the face I see that convinces my heart to believe her.
Disclaimer- the following text may be unsuitable for all audiences, read on at your risk.
You know how sometimes after sex, with the wrong person, in the wrong place and in the wrong frame of mind you realize too late that the condom broke, and you are absolutely convinced you are pregnant and you call your closest friends and everyone comes over to assure you that you aren’t pregnant but you don’t believe them, and then for the next month everywhere you go you see babies, babies, babies everywhere and every single commercial has to do with motherhood or childhood or pregnancy and you know in your heart that all signs point to you being pregnant, until of course your period comes.
Well, that’s been happening to me so much in the last few weeks, though not with pregnancy or motherhood or childhood but with love. Everywhere I look I see images of love. It can be anything, a leaf shaped like a heart or a cloud. Love is everywhere!!! It’s on the radio when the Celine Dion/John Denver/Roberta Flack/Beatles medley brings me to tears. It’s almost too much to take. If this keeps up, I may need rehab.
Don’t get me wrong, I recognize and appreciate that for all my years of resistance to self-love, I still have people and experiences that fill the empty spaces inside me with love and I welcome those opportunities, I really do. However, this is just unnerving, all at once, love everywhere? In a conversation with Jemen, I ask her earnestly “what do all these love signs mean Jemen, what does receiving all this love look like, what am I supposed to be doing?” she replied in the most loving, nurturing voice “Oh, Myriam, it hardly matters what it looks like…can you just be”. I swear, that is what she said! Can you believe the incredulity of such a statement?? I had to write it down and post on the shelf above my computer. What is love if we aren’t analyzing it, thinking about it, hoping for it, hoarding it, demanding it, rebuking it, questioning it, or trying to outdo it?
Shortly thereafter I received a call from a friend in the throes of pre-relationship angst. She cried and cried about how to strategize her love. I looked up at the sticky note and said to her “Oh love, it hardly matters what you think it looks like…can you just be in love?”. She was appalled, appalled I tell you, then almost as if on cue, out flowed the resistance. She poured it on me like a nasty, rancid oil.
I recognize her as me, poor thing, trying so hard to fight or beat love. It just cannot be done, for love always wins, always, always, always.
What about you, are you trying to out do love? Who’s winning?
I took my love, I took it down
Climbed a mountain and I turned around
I saw my reflection in the snow covered hills
till the landslide brought me down
Oh, mirror in the sky
What is love
Can the child within my heart rise above
Can I sail thru the changing ocean tides
Can I handle the seasons of my life
Well, Ive been afraid of changing
cause Ive built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Children get older
Im getting older too
Oh, take my love, take it down
Climb a mountain and turn around
If you see my reflection in the snow covered hills
Well the landslide will bring it down
If you see my reflection in the snow covered hills
Well maybe the landslide will bring it down
Lately, I’ve been consciously observing some of my unconscious behaviors. In particular, the one where I try to make everyone else in the room comfortable about what I’m discussing so I make a crude or tasteless joke about something that is significant to me. Yeah, that one is quite peculiar to say the least. I was describing a particularly inappropriate joke I made recently with a dear friend and she just cringed when I told her how I had spoken about myself. She summed it up best when she said “that must be exhausting”. Damn right it’s exhausting, if I could just get the people around me to be more sensitive to my needs and insecurities I wouldn’t have to put them at ease about my miscarriage, parents divorce, siblings’ illness, exotic-ness, Haitian culture, skin color, or eating disorders. I need new people.
I know the old adage that laughter is the best medicine, yet there is something just downright icky about this type of laughter. It’s the “I know they are laughing with me because I made the joke, but it’s actually not funny” laugh. It’s the “you can see in peoples’ eyes the pain you feel reflected back to you; but no one wants to talk about it so everyone keeps laughing” laugh. Oh, I’m sick just thinking about it.
At some point through the years I lost my edge. I know I had it as a child, we all do. I know because I recognize it in my nieces when they are speaking and make absolutely no apologies (or jokes) about whom they are. It’s just delicious to watch. Some describe it as sassy or feisty. I prefer to call it flavor. I just love it when people bring their flavor to the mix. Especially tiny little big people we refer to as children. Flavor honors our truest selves. My niece, all 4 years of her, will walk into a room; one hand on her hip and the other holding her precious heart, reminding us that it IS actually all about her and it is no laughing matter.
The reality is that yes, life comes with challenges, and, so? All of the “challenges” create this incredible blend of stories that deserve to be applauded not ridiculed. I attach shame to profound experiences and then the shame translates into a need to make others feel at ease about something that is important or relevant to me. Can I let go of self-deprecation and just really share my truths? This would require honoring myself, both the parts of me that are fierce and those parts of me that are frail. Perhaps if I listen to my 4-year-old heart, reminding me that it actually is all about me I would not only speak my truths but hold them precious as well.
Can you try this on for size today? Bring us your flavor and let us hold your precious heart.
Can we please talk about black hair care? I know it would seem that this issue may have no relevance in your life but I am having a sense of urgency to bend your ear for a minute. It’s not really the black or the hair care that’s the issue, it’s my reluctance to charge into new territory, to learn more about myself, to submit to a practice.
This past weekend I went to have my hair trimmed, a task I have committed to for only the 4th time in my entire 39 years of life. While sitting in the stylists chair, my anxiety rose as it always does, when a hairdresser starts to explain a suggested daily routine. Good heavens, twist, pomade, leave-in, deep condition…suddenly his voice starts to sound like white noise, or better yet, the teacher’s voice on an episode of Charlie Brown…WHA, WHA, WHA. It overwhelms me. How is it possible that a person can have such little understanding and such grave fear of something that they have been connected to their entire life?
The more I thought about this, I realized that this theme is prevalent in many areas of my life. Interestingly, this apprehension only presents itself when the task at hand has to do with my own creative expression. I’m not afraid of everything mind you, I can and have boarded a plane to a far away country with no map, contacts, or hotel room. Now worries there, but put a can of mousse in front of me and my world falls apart. I recognize this pattern exists because my life circumstances have taught me more about survival than gentle practice. I approach my life and tasks as a warrior, and projects of the creative nature require care and patience. Not so much on the gladiator front.
So back to my hair, well, my hair is natural, no chemicals, no style either for that matter. It just sits on top of my head, expressionless. I left the salon with $30 worth of product and a very simple method of bringing a little something, something to my look. My instructions are to twist every so gently and patiently my beautiful locks of hair that have been with me for 39 years. Of course, my exercise and lesson requires I go where I’m most afraid.
And so I twist, one lock at time, breathing, welcoming and reminding myself…it’s a practice, it’s a practice.
guest post by Myriam Joseph
What simple thing do you need to do to practice being present with your creative life? Where do you need to begin, even though you’re most afraid?
With that Moon Language
- Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky)
Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud; otherwise,
someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us
to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon
in each eye that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language
what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?
This week a year ago, Odette and I spent five days all day telling stories about love in honor of Valentine’s Day. At first I was excited because Odette had so many sweet and wonderful stories to tell me about her life and her mother and the way the old women sang over the younger ones before they left their houses to be married and how they found love when they least expected it. But then it was my turn to tell my stories and I realized that some of my stories were incredibly sad and that I didn’t really want to say them out loud still after so many years and that there was more heaviness there than I cared to admit. But I told my stories anyway, and Odette held them in her hands with so much tenderness, and through her eyes I realized my heart was still cracked in some places and that it was still a bit bruised, and I think I might of even cried which is saying something because I don’t cry easily or very often.
That week was big for me, and after that I paid a bit more attention to my heart than usual and I noticed that if I dared to press ever so gently on the cracked places that my heart cracked the tiniest bit more and that was when the light shone a little brighter, not only from the inside out, like I supposed it would happen, but also from the outside in. That was before a lot of things, before I had any idea I would ever go to Rwanda, before I actually went and came back, before I was completely cracked open and turned into another person I never knew before, but who had been there all along, waiting to find out what it would be like to just be.
Through all this the Universe sent me everything I needed at just the right moment–one friend came everyday and sat on the couch and held my hand without speaking while I stared at the wall wondering what was happening to me. Another showed up whenever I was just about to do something brave and hard and she would busy herself around the house until the second the storm passed, sometimes not leaving until five or six in the morning all the while without saying a word. Another called just in time to talk me off ledges. Another called to collect my tears when I most needed to cry.
And then there was Myriam. Myriam called in the middle of the night and asked me how I was doing and I’d talk in my sleep for five minutes or a half hour or God knows how long as she gathered my stories and worries and uncensored truth like so many ingredients of an ancient family soup. Then I’d call her back the next morning and ask her how I was really and she’d sing me a song or tell me a little story about the future or this girl or that one who needed to be loved.
It has taken me a long, long time to understand that the future and the girl she was talking about was me.
I’m going into a little cave for a while to take care of some things that desperately need tending. I am asking Myriam to help me in this space for a little while, to leave little bits of goodness here for you to find, to tell you stories, to ask you questions, to confess her worries and fears so that you can know you are not alone. I hope you will give her a warm welcome; I hope you will let her lean against the cracked places in your heart, so the love and light can get in.
Hey guys! (waving) Remember me? That girl who used to blog fanatically on the weekends so there’d be a pretty picture and something nice to read all week long? I have no idea what happened to that girl, but there’s someone else who looks remarkably like her up in the tower painting, sorting out orders, looking for more bubble wrap, wondering what it was like back when she didn’t make a small career out of hard drive crashes and borrowed computers. I’m thinking she must be secretly enjoying being cut off from the whole of society, though the fires blazing in her inbox are formidable.
The quiet of the brush against the paper
The little creaking sound the desk makes when she leans back in the chair
The hum of the work lamp, metal vibrating against metal
The silence of snow
The tapping of the brush against the glass as the water now as pale as the winter sky drips down
All this against the raucous discussion in her head, the chatter, the clamour, the despair, the voices insisting…
This is a disaster.
Nothing will come of this.
Oh God. Why did you do that?
No one will love them but you.
Who do you think you are?
This is ridiculous.
And then after a few hours of that, this:
You are not your thoughts.
And that thought makes her laugh. All the silence, all the noise. It’s not that serious after all. It’s just a paper and a brush and a girl and a room and a house and a street and a city and a country and a continent and a world tucked in a Universe where no fighting is required. Where your truest life comes to you, one breath, one tiny painting at a time.
My name is Jen Lemen. I'm messy, hopeful,
enthusiastic and helplessly in love with the idea
that stories can change you and me forever.