The Witching Hour-Love... The Ultimate Ego Death?
I sat awake thinking of love.
I felt as if I was sitting back in the Temple of the Moon, this exact time last year in Cusco, Peru.
There was the same familiar feeling of embodying, once again, this huge, immense, universal grief for women and towards love.
The grief could feel like a burden, but I suppose I simultaneously embody what a gift it is to sit with the glory of the unrecognised woman.
To not only witness their resilience and perseverance, but to be feel it.
A humble sadness.
As the tears flow, I begin to find myself resting in peculiar oxymoron.
I arrive for a brief moment and tell myself… I hate love.
Bewildered by the thought. I lay in bed and let it brew.
The feelings linger and the thoughts provoke me as I dissect them.
Love should feel like home, it should feel warm and inviting, it should bring forth feelings of hope and yet it feels like a battle that I am bound to lose.
So many females opening their hearts only to walk away like a wounded soldier, an armoured heart with PTSD flashbacks as if they survived a war on their psyche.
The courting phase of love… I sit on the bench and witness it, on defence.
I say it out loud.
I will not fall again.
Yet, as Alan Watts once described, it is a fall.
To fall in love is a form of “divine madness” and a necessary “act of faith” that requires total surrender, he compares it to a terrifying, but essential leap into the unknown. He argued that true love is a voluntary, reckless abandonment of control and a “fall” rather than a “rise”.
And yet, I want to fall, as much as I want to rise. Sometimes with tears.
As much as I push it away, I want to rise above the fears.
I put the palms back into my eyes. Why? Not to cry, but to regain sight in the darkness of my tent. To focus and channel.
There’s something so auspicious and concerning, yet beautiful, as I strip away the layers of hardness.
Why is it so hard to admit, Love.
I sit and continue to reflect in the darkness of my tent. I want to express it, but I can’t.
I find excuses, that my laptop is broken, that it is too late. I should sleep, but as lay in a state of my own vulnerability I begin to consume the vulnerabilities of my peers…
I begin to cry for their pain and I rise up from bed realising there is no excuse.
Poets, intellectuals, even our most corrupt politicians have once sat there scribbling in a home that wasn’t a home.
In a book that wasn’t a book.
Under poorly lit circumstances with merely just a candle and a mind so dense that it feels like a heavy wet towel, ready to be rung out.
There’s something about not knowing how the lines will flow on an empty piece of paper.
I grab the nearest thing I can see, an abandoned planner from the end of 2025.
Love, is it the ultimate Ego death?
Where will this fit into the paragraphs? How will it flow? It doesn’t and it never will. I guess that’s the beauty of it.
Quickly scribbled lines that can’t quite be deciphered because they flow so effortlessly, that you don’t have time to think as your hand attempts to catch up with your thoughts.
The pages are as messy and hard to read as love.
Still, it feels so empowering in the moment, like some sort of torch for humanity.
I scrutinise myself as I write that, but deep down I have a knowing that in a decade from now, it will hold some place, not for humanity, but for the humanity in myself.
So, why? Why is it so scary to say, I have feelings, to question, is this love?
It could be so poetic and beautiful, like the ecstasy of a synchronised harmony.
And yet, I hate it, I find myself filled with grievances to admit, that as much as I love, love… I hate it.
The fear to be perceived, to be felt, to be vulnerable towards rejection, humility and grief.
It is 12 am and although it is dark, what a sight.
The witching hour often feels like the only time I have tender moments for myself.
The only time I can sit in the depths of thought and process it.
I breathe in. I breathe out.
Memories flood the banks of my mind, as something greater conceives, my visions of what is to come.
At least it’s a vision of the future instead of merely a reflection of the past.
I find some shimmer of hope in that moment.
It may not bring instant content if anything the thought of love brings me almost instant despair because somewhere deep down I believe that the thoughts will one day deceive me, however it’s still a vision of the future and there is something tranquil when the act of thought, feeling and imagination merge.
A part of me wants to so desperately shut it all down and as I continue to excavate into the depths of the darkness, I ask myself, why?
Because it is bound to fail?
Like many, I too am afraid to offer my heart when in an instance the other, might bail.
I’d rather build a trench than a bridge.
Build a wall, rather than an entrance.
I’d rather hide, than surrender.
And as I write, and as I think, and as I cry…
I realise that besides the attempt to control the future, which is uncontrollable and uncertain, that these fears and tears are not my ego speaking, instead… They are my surrender.
Half scribbled lines in midst of the night, is my white flag.
I let the thoughts consume me, until I lay what’s in my chest, to rest.
I often would not share these thoughts until they are fully formed in my mind, ready for jurisdiction.
Like a lawyer, prepared and ready for defence.
And yet, I feel called to share the vulnerability, the chaos that runs through our minds like the peak of a storm.
The unedited thoughts that linger on the page until it becomes a fully formed statement.
To let go of what is neat, polished or appropriate for the consumer.
I write that as the lines melt off my page, on an angle, the words become smaller as I try to squeeze them in and what is meant to be structured slowly slips away.
The paragraphs are imperfect and non linear, regardless of the font, the feeling and message still exist.
I cry and feel sad for my friends and other women in their battlefields with love, yet I honour the fight. I honour the fall.
Although, it terrifies me that our most primal instinct is weaponised.
Our divine current and sensitivities to be misconstrued and labelled as delusion.
I can’t help but recognise how more than ever we need the feelers, as they are the true healers.
Instead, I feel the epidemic of disabled, disconnected emotions.
A non physical field of risk.
Men who should be protecting the healer rather than another threat to sabotage the very essence of creation.