My Magnetic Heart: Finding The Magic Within Me.
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I awoke that morning and I knew, as I caught the light spilling through the window, caressing my insides alive, nothing would ever be the same. I was forever changed.
And there it was again: the most dazzling treachery. The riptide of my heart. The fluttering heartbeats suffusing magic through my veins, the mysterious call of my wild nature to own my magnetic heart.
And this magic was countered by a devastatingly tragic and panicked This is too much-I am not enough-how will I ever go on — the automated and visceral message from my nervous system to retreat to safety, to abort mission.
Me, on the edge of my entire universe, having split myself open, having spilled my truth, having spit the butterflies from my gut out into the world. Beauty & terror. Love and fear. Flight and fight. Light and dark. Everything hung in the silent ender of my soul.
In that exact moment, with the butterflies of transformation cascading in the light of my Self, my Soul and my Spirit, I recognized a voice I knew as my truth. First in a whisper, and then louder, and louder, and louder. I heard: go deeper.
I thought I had lived in the depths of me. I’ve fallen in love more times than days I have lived, I’ve cried myself to sleep on the cold bathroom tiles of every square-shaped fortress I’ve called home, and I’ve worn my heart’s suffering like a badge of honor, a rite of passage, my scarlet letter of the sin of having loved and lost.
I have loved ferociously. I have handed my heart over to the most precariously unwitting hands. And I’ve lost. And loss after loss, time and time again, I never backed down. My heart never succumbed to the plight of love. It would have been easy to be jaded, but at 25 I found myself just as much of a hopeless romantic as ever.
I packed a palpable level of uncertainty in my suitcase, swallowed my beating heart, and flew across the world for love. I let go of control. I let go of certainty. I let go of comfort. And I let go of others’ opinions. I didn’t have a job, any idea what my life would look like or when I would return home. And it was the best decision I ever made.
To everyone who encouraged me: a resounding Thank You. To everyone who doubted me: a resounding Thank You. Both parties only echoed the two sides of my being I am faced with every morning — to risk or not to risk, to be or not to be. Ultimately this choice is, and always has been, my own.
Admittedly, I’ve played it safe a lot in life (I just climbed a tree for the first time three days ago), but never, never, I thought, in matters of the heart.
But even for someone accustomed to falling heart-first off the deep end for the idea of love — something, by the way, I find to be anything but hopeless — the fear has never subsided.
My greatest highs have been those moments of looking fear in the face, the dizzy headspin before the jump — then with my hair billowing wildly, the wind kissing my ears deaf, my heart in free fall.
But, then I’d hit the ground. Hard. And it would hurt. And a big, bossy voice inside of me would say, “I told you so.” And something would respond softly, “I should’ve known.” And I’d tailspin into a predictable victim’s narrative, effectively handing over any power or ownership over the experience.
This is where I chalked up my experience as loss. In retrospect, the only thing I was losing was my own power.
Please hear me now. Falling in love is who I am and my state of ecstatic, exuberant rapture. Me, at my best, is me with a twinkle in my eye and my heart in my hands. When I let myself fall in love with the world, when I recklessly abandon to those riptides within me, I fall in love with myself.
No one loses. Least of all me.
And sitting in a room, tucked away in a jungle, on a little island, with the morning’s first light spilling through the window warming my bones and igniting my heart, I realize that is the person I want to be. I want to go deeper. I don’t want to hold back ever again. All feeling. All heart. All love. Recklessly abandoned to my voracious, magnetic heart.
No bullshit — I am terrified. I recognize this feeling as vulnerability, and if I am being honest with myself now, I didn’t always live in these depths of mine. Especially not in love. I am forever changed knowing I can’t pick and choose when to express my heart’s truth.
In the past week, I’ve looked 20 people in the eye and shown them my heart. With everything in me trembling, I have written handwritten love letters to people who have had a hand in forever changing me.
I am high on the notion that a little of my love, a slice of my light, has poured through someone’s open window.
Listen, the butterflies are out and about. There is no Rewind button, I can’t swallow them back up. And I don’t want to. I promise you this: the dizzying feeling of looking fear square in the eye and then spitting your truth in its face is freedom… is joy… is love. Spit up your truth, swallow your pride.
Love is not about possession. Beauty cannot be captured. I’ve been entranced by this idea of immortalizing the fleeting moments of joy in my life, but the pursuit of holding them has made me seasick, and nauseated with the butterflies of truth swimming inside me.
And when I couldn’t hold on tight enough, when moments, people, places slipped through my fingers into the fabric of time, I experienced loss.
I am profoundly changed knowing I don’t have to hold on to anything, save for my heart’s ineffable power to exist in a cascading waterfall of love. Falling in love takes nothing, but gives much. The narrative of my life used to be Unrequited. Today and forevermore, I choose Magic. I choose Me.
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Megan Shaina Bakva is an old gypsy soul with a deep affection for the moon, magic and mystery, and an unshakable conviction that everything is conspiring in her favor. She possesses an affinity for finding connection in the mirrors-for-eyes of all humans, creatures and Mother Nature. A West Coast native, she draws as much inspiration from long drives down Pacific Coast Highway with too loud music and wind blowing kisses through her hair as she does from sitting in stillness, breathing deeply and writing soliloquys of desire behind the black curtains of her eyes. She counts her empathic sensitivity and proclivity for wearing her heart on her sleeve among her greatest strengths along her journey to dance through the depths of her simultaneous light and darkness. She invites you to howl with her at into the ether and follow her day-to-day musings on Instagram.
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