Words that sing

I’m fed up with the idea of kissing frogs in the hope they’ll turn into princes. It’s all part of the feminine myth that we need to go and change men - to tolerate them and reform them until we get our reward by changing them into a prince. I’ve had enough of the idea that I can solve someone else’s problems by setting aside mine. If someone can’t solve their own problems, or is at such a difficult stage in the process that they lash out at those around them, then no patience or love of mine can change them.

Which isn’t to say that I’m demanding a prince, either. One of my favourite of Robin McKinley’s retellings of the story of Beauty and the Beast ends with the beast not transformed into a prince, but remaining as a lovable Beast – as the heroine says, “I love my Beast, and would be very unhappy if someone were to take him away and leave me with a handsome stranger in his place”. People are flawed, and not fairytale perfect. And they deserve to be loved warts and all!

I want to find someone who is strong enough in themselves that their light shines through despite their flaws. Someone who will not squirt poison at me if I get too close or try to touch them the wrong way. Someone who I can love as they are without always living in hope of a magical transformation of those flaws. Someone who takes responsibility for his own problems, and does not try to take his pain out on me.

Is this a mad dream? It reminds me of the song Sapo Cancionero, about a toad adoring the moon – the message of the song is that life would be sad without illusions. And even if the dreams never come true, it is important to dream.

And yet I’m not just a toad with delusions of grandeur. By no means! I have come to know my own light, my own strength and attractiveness. There’s a strange contradictoriness in the feminine myths – as well as the woman who saves frogs through her kisses, we’re also encouraged to be both the moon (remote and pure and passively adored) and the adoring toad that looks up to the shining example of manhood in the sky above her. I’ve been trapped by both these myths simultaneously, and neither is at all helpful in having an authentic relationship.

I am not perfect, but neither am ugly or earthbound. I am a frog whose inner light shines like the moon. A light of inner strength and beauty that outshines the warts of my weaknesses and fears.

I want to fall in love with another frog whose inner glow outshines their warts. Not someone whose warts I need to ignore or transform, but which in some way are part of the lovable whole. Someone whose warts feel like my warts too.

And while I’m not going to sit by the pond waiting passively to find that frog, I’m also not going to settle for less. I’d rather hop around the swamp in an endless quest for the right frog than settle down in the mud with the wrong one.

Yes, life would be sad if lived without illusions. But it’s also important not to underestimate our own strength, and worth, and beauty. A frog, in its way, can be just as beautiful as the moon, so long as it is content to be itself.

This is another writing practice on a topic from red ravine - this week on frogs and toads. I was rather surprised by the direction it took me in.

The beautiful picture, which also appears in the youtube video of the song, is called Moon Viewing Frog by Hikari Hirose, and was loaded onto flickr by berczeller.

“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. To ”Why am I here?” To uselessness. It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.” Enid Bagnold

I don’t believe in miracles

Or at least, I’ve never seen one that struck me
As truly miraculous, beyond chance and doubt.

And where others see miracles
I see the chances of life
The vitality of thousands of interactions
Seen through the prism
Of the human wish to see patterns.

A wish to see the world
As a movie which we star in
Where divine gifts and mysterious forces
Bless or curse our path - with intent.

(like a puddle, thinking how perfectly
the hole around it
seems to have been made
to fit its unique contours)

I’m just an extra, enjoying my journey through the backstage of the world
It’s not about me, but I am me. And I enjoy what I see.

Who am I to say,
that the pattern you see
Is chance, is pure illusion?
It’s clear to me that’s all it can be
But I don’t want to hurt your dreams.
- though I will, if I think they will hurt you too

For there are people who exploit
This wish to believe -
Cold reading. Horoscopes. Psychological tricks.
Exploiting the wish to believe in miracles
To create a financial miracle of their own.

I have been hurt, too, by the illusions that others believe,
the special sensitivity they claimed to possess,
the fear-driven intuition they called extrasensory guidance.

I have nearly been killed by a driver who thought himself
Divinely protected and therefore able to take risks
With the lives of himself and his passengers

(It matters, oh how it matters, what we believe.
For what we believe shapes what we do and what we are.)

Is it a gift, to believe in miracles?
Is it deprivation, to believe they are not miraculous?

I don’t feel deprived… I just enjoy
The passing slideshow of the diverse earth
And take joy when my searching eye
Finds a special beauty in random chance.
Without making it more
Than a natural thing.

(The joy of rolling a double six
just when you needed it. Of drawing just that card
from the shuffled deck.

Almost more pleasing, for being random!)

Everyone is always at the centre of their own rainbow.
Not because of rainbows.
But because of humans being human.
Our creativity. Our hopes. The stories we tell.
These, if you like, are miracles I can believe in.

This poem-ish reflection was a response to a post over on red ravine, about miracles. I wrote in response:

I think it’s all about what you want to see. We are very good at finding patterns when we want to see them. Some people see the dot of earth on the iris… Others just random splashes. Others see a pointy-nosed mouse face looking out from her left collarbone…

Is it a gift to believe in miracles? Should sceptics like me butt in when people talk about them? I don’t know. I know people take a lot of comfort in miracles and strange coincidences.

But I’ve also been hurt by people who believed in things like this, who believed in signs and patterns relating to me when there was really no such pattern. At the end of the day, I think it does matter what we believe in. And for me, believing that such appearances are random chance rather than miraculous doesn’t actually take the comfort away.

And the dark times in our lives make us appreciate the good moments even more.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sugar-bliss/409158249/

Reading recent posts, it occurs to me that regular readers of this blog could be forgiven for think that I am still obsessed with my ex and having real difficulty moving on. Which is strange for me, because my life is very full with other things, and there are days when I don’t think about him at all. And yet somehow most of the entries on this blog are in some way related to our relationship. Even when given different and challenging prompts for poems, somehow the same story seems to keep recurring… I think there are two reasons for this.

Firstly, one of my original reasons for starting to write, and starting to write this blog specifically, was to give myself the opportunity to express the feelings that, because of his silence, I had been unable to express to him. Somehow to be able to express these feelings publicly and permanently has had a really healing effect - probably much more effective than expressing them to him would have been! This blog is the place where I express my thoughts about this relationship. In many posts, I have expressed some pain, or anger, or fear, and in the process taken another step towards healing it. They’re not painful emotions any more. But if I didn’t write about these things, I would be denying emotions that are part of my journey.

But I think there’s a more important reason.  What I have experienced in the last year has been an intense and powerful personal version of a universal human story. And like so many poets and writers and singers before me, it seems a neverending source of inspiration for creativity. (Judging by page views and comments, people also seem to be most interested in my posts about this relationship, which again says something.)

And I also hope that what I write can be helpful and inspiring for others. I am so vividly aware of how much I have learnt from this relationship and its painful ending, and how much stronger I am as a result of what I have been through. I hope that through my writing, and my songwriting, I can reach out to people and encourage them to see just how brilliant the light at the end of their own dark tunnels can be. 

On a pyre of sandalwood and aloes,
My heart burnt with bitter tears
Perfumes and dreams dwindling in smoke
In the consummation of my deepest fears.

The fire exhausts itself at last
Unable to believe in burning again.
All the brilliance of our love
Turned to ash-caked tears and pain

Yet somehow one crystal tear
Strikes fire from the vanishing sun
And in a rainbow of sudden life
A fledgling life breathes, ember-spun.

New life arises, gold and scarlet
With strength hard won from the heart of pain
Amber and indigo feathers reborn
Wings remember how to fly again.

And I awaken to glorious day
A life where hopes outshine fears.
My heart knows a mystery old as life;
I was weeping phoenix tears.

This poem was inspired by the monday mural at poefusion. Do visit the site and have a look at the poems other people have written based on this picture.

Suspended in rushing darkness,
Where movement is only a sound.
Alone in the packed compartment,
Far from the anchoring ground

A cargo of hopes and memories.
Strange worlds of scattered thought.
We speed alone together
To destinations unsought.

A limbo of time passing slowly.
A space where distraction is all.
Suspended between past and future
The present as blank as a wall

Obsessed by the past my mind fidgets
The ragged flotsam of old dreams.
Alone with my faded longings -
The tears, the smiles, the screams.

Yet all the time we rush forward
To a future still hidden in night.
Waiting for plan to become reality -
For darkness to give way to light.

 (Photo by anurag prashar at flickr)

There’s a fine line between taking much needed thinking/recovery time and just being lazy - and I’m not quite sure which side I’m on just now!

Towards the end of last year I was struggling to deal with the double whammy of a break up and a series of set-backs in taking forward singing professionally. And I made things much harder by pushing myself to recover quickly - I couldn’t mend the relationship but I hoped at least to be able to take forward the singing. But I underestimated just how deeply these blows had affected me, and how long I really needed to recover.

Having problems simultaneously in different parts of your life makes it so much harder to cope with each than it would be if they came along individually. The problems were also all compressed into such a short period of time that I had almost no time to process my emotions as they came up, so lots of the stored up emotion took time to really make itself felt. My ex’s sudden termination of communication left me with a lot of unanswered questions and unexpressed feelings. And all the time I heard in my head a drumbeat of “it’s almost too late, it may already be too late” to take forward my singing - which was tormenting me because at that time I was unable to practice, still less take forward my audition plans. It all added up to a really difficult time.

Eventually, with the help of some wise friends, I started to give myself space to
recuperate, to accept just how much I needed space and time - to think, to feel deeply, to recover. And almost immediately I started to feel so much better!

That was several weeks ago, and I’m doing hugely better. So I wonder now if I’m getting too comfortable. There’s something addictive about having low expectations of yourself, and allowing yourself to do whatever you like, because you’re convalescing. Yes, I needed some down time. But there are also things I want to do, plans I want to take forward, and I don’t want to get stuck in an endless period of reflection!

My favourite of Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements is the last: always do your best (no more and no less) and recognise that this changes from day to day. It’s a good principle to try to live by!

What is this fear
that leaps at me
out of the night?
out of my heart?

How does it freeze
to sudden silence
the will to sing?
the will to speak?

What sun will come
with healing warmth
to thaw my speech?
to thaw my life?

For my heart’s song
is caged like a bird.
What key releases?
What key frees song?

No-one else can,
and I must choose:
Be my own cage?
Be my own sun?

(A poem reflecting on my recent post Taking a risk - in singing.)

A few days ago I wrote about how surviving a very personal rejection made me much more confident in expressing my own truth (taking a risk). I also wrote about my fears about contemplating a professional career as a singer (creativity, confidence and love).

Today I was amazed by the way these two issues came together in a singing lesson. (Not from my regular singing teacher, who’s not around much at the moment, but one of her former students, whose doing very well at present!) Essentially her approach was to focus on one very specific sensation in the cheekbones, and follow that sensation, allowing the rest of the body to be relaxed and responsive. And not to manufacture or influence the sound in any way.

It’s really hard, because up until the last 2 years I’d been doing all sorts of little tricks to make the voice come out the way I wanted. But the intervention actually gets in the way of the full resonance of the voice. It makes the voice much more “produced”, and less immediate and intimate.

I’ve been working to get rid of all the little tricks and tensions - but every time I felt a little nervous about a note, or wanted a phrase to come out a particular way, they would creep straight back in, and I’d lose more than I gained. A frustrating process.

Anyway, towards the end of the lesson the teacher said that what I really needed now was to own my voice. To dare to reveal it the way it is. To stop tweaking and listening and interfering. To let go of expectations of what sound I want to produce, and just let my body sing the way it knows best.

And so, in effect, to present my authentic voice - as I had been learning the confidence to be my authentic self.

I’d been thinking that the break-up, in stopping me singing for a few months, had really got in the way of my professional aspirations. But the break up also taught me some important lessons about confidence and trust in myself, and above all shown me that I can survive being rejected. I’ve taken a real step forward in applying that confidence to my life. I want to see if I can now apply it to my singing.

Rejections come thick and fast in the early stages of being a professional singer, and some people never get beyond that stage. Having your voice and performance rejected by a panel of auditioners, often without any explanation, is painful, because both voice and performance are very personal.

But I have survived a rejection of me on a deeply personal level, at the hands of an intimate and trusted lover. Why should I be afraid of being rejected as a singer by an audition panel of strangers?