Editor's Remarks: "The Wound That Never Heals Meets The Fire That Never Goes Out"

         Mayastar CC



​"To 
storm survivors, 
storm transformers,
and those who
live and work in
storm's heart"
 
​
"When one asks if a falling tree makes a sound if no one hears it, is one also asking what becomes of a feeling if no one responds?

Aliveness, Kabbalah teaches us, is shattered, sparks thrown in all directions. Wherever you find yourself, there are sparks waiting to be redeemed, waiting for your partnership, your work. To work with shattered sparks, the work of lifetimes. To offer a place to talk about life, explore one's truth, to taste experience and perhaps build a capacity to let experience build.

Are there resources that are beyond self-interest and guilt to make us want to help each other? The look of a face? The appeal of a plight? Maybe if we ignore it, look the other way, that empathic sensation will pass or lighten, and we can carry on. Do we wish or dare to help only if we can afford to? It is possible to go through life ignoring the still small voice that asks, "Can we afford not to?"
 
We need to learn to speak inside the storm, to hear storm's voice. How is it possible to stay respectful and caring in a storm? How to respect and care for storm, our stormy states, emotional storms? A receptive sensing and speaking from the storm center that goes with expressive reaching out? A capacity we need to discover and nourish. It is, after all, something of what we mean when we say we value speaking heart to heart." 

--Michael Eigen


         Heart to heart, hurt to hurt. All too many of us have had to make due with compromised and shattered states. Sleepless nights praying (although never quite sure to what) that the pain in us would just go silent. A funny thing began to happen when we realized that it wouldn't. Words welled up from the place where we had expected some impossible God to step in and just withdraw the deep arrow of our sorrow. Words like; I'm still here and this is not all that happened to me. There is more, and in time, we learn to nurture it as best we can.

         Growing up I was taught to feel small. I was small. Damaged adult's could take everything that was wrong in them out on me. Hollowed out rooms that have kept still, small shadows, lurching and longing in me for belonging ever since. Sometimes those hollowed out parts found willing ears, understanding spaces, gentle hearts, how few and far between. Can we ever say we have enough spaces for caring?

         Endings are bittersweet. Letting go can often be harder than holding on. I want to say a few words about the incredible writers in our last issue. They are the reason for caring and creating space for storm survivors/transformers, those who rise up out of the dark heart of storm and redeem their shattered sparks.

       Community isn't something that can be left unattended, it calls for us to work with each other in often daunting and unpredictable ways. We can't know unless we've been there, and so many of us have. Fewer still have been there together; that is community. If one breaks, I too break. These are not just words, it is the very tie that binds - more incommon than outcommon. 

          Our featured poet, Kristin Ryan, writes nearly the impossible. How does one even begin to speak the place where lines were crossed in us so young, so early? Ryan's poems remind us of the horrific damage that can be done to the most vulnerable. But also, of what survives, life clinging to a branch in flood waters.  Annie Rogers writes; "What has been wordless now is coming into words.” In her poem, The Therapist Says, Ryan threads the darkest of the dark into an impossible speech. It is a poem that lights the way.

       Julianne Carew's "Water" is like a sister piece to Ryan's. Both writers have found the words for something that feels too huge for words. Too painful to hold in two, small, trembling hands. Carew and Ryan both point toward the unbearable place Annie Rogers charted in her heartbreaking book, A Shining Affliction, a few words that I think bear repeating here;

         “The future has already been laid down in the vanishing tracks of the past. It is as though I have forgotten that those tracks were laid down someplace within my child’s body. This child could already foretell the future through the past…All my life it becomes clear, I’ve been living within a particular play in the endless past…The pain of it is so unbearable that it surrounds [one.] When there are no words for this, no thoughts, then it can only be lived out… My fear of being abandoned, a terror in my body like the terror of immanent death, is the play I have lived all my life trying to escape… Fleeing my own terror, I created a play of vigilance and waiting – waiting for the appearance of my (remembered) mother and father, or waiting for their surrogates in later years. To stop this vigilance is to know the terror of “I will die.” Perhaps if I could play my part just right, I could magically find the feelings and gestures that would conjure up the mother who sometimes comforted me, the father who swept me up off the floor and sometimes danced with me. Who has ever loved and not learned to do this – to conjure oneself and others with the most loving gestures?” -Annie Rogers

          When what we have been through is too much to bear we must dissociate parts of our experience lest storm waters take us totally under. A poem, a story, these are like a box for all of our “things and missing things“. If this space has served even a fraction of such for those who have shared their missing things with us, then what a small but miraculous happening. There has not been a single poem or story or stroke of the artist's brush, or lilt of the singer's voice that hasn't floored me, fed me, watered thirsty and aching roots inside me these past four years. I write to heal and I suspect every one I know does too. Isn't it amazing how easily we can sometimes forget that? If we remembered it more often we might see that our differences make no damn difference.

           I wish I could say something about everyone's contributions to our last issue. Suffice it to say that every single piece here is here for a reason. You are here for a reason. You make the world not just a better place, seeing as it's the only place we have - you show us the road map for communing inside the storm. Your work brings us close to something Eigen points to, with many bells left ringing in the heart; "There is another love, deeper love, that helps, or tries to. We have a deep need – but I cannot quite say what it is. Faith is part of it, but it is much more.” 

        The thing itself, is that what we are, together, in any space where more than one meets another and another and another? On down the road, sometimes together, sometimes alone. Faith, scattered sparks, in every single word, every voice, every story. 

'One day you will see yourself coming down the road to meet yourself and you will say, 'yes'.

Yes. Yes.

​
James Diaz
Founding Editor
Anti-Heroin Chic
2016-2019


Safe Passage to you all, on every road, in every hour, in every life.
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