The Miracle of This Life Allows Me to Feel It All. {poetry}
When we experience the act of surrender — bowing, melting, melding, surrendering up and into innate alignment — we make way for something.
Do you recall an experience of a truly buckling moment, into the sweet spot of feeling, being human, whilst suddenly touching your own divinity? Perhaps a slip into the outer of space and time, catching you unawares, into an all-encompassing awareness, an awesome depth of gratitude that brings you to your knees?
The following two poems, written a few years apart, were birthed from a similar place. An inner revelatory moment, where surrender may have been precluded.
Surrender was a word first expressed on repeat during a chapter of my life within a spiritual fold. Sharing with me, this vital — yet so often eluded — act of yielding. Relinquishing even the most savage human experiences of fear and despair, confusion, supposed loss or the perception of being lost, inside that unique inner compass we call Life.
The place that resides inside all of us unlocks such a natural return to humility.
Traversing the maze of physical suffering raises this for me on a daily basis. I have also felt fascinated by the many forms of faith, belief, spiritual tantra, the way different people meet Life. I have crossed paths with some who almost shame their humanity, their personality and of course the heavily discussed topic of ego.
I have found myself exploring a dance, in which we consider our humanness as the very gift we are given to express the beauty of our Source.
To truly ascend in consciousness, perhaps we need the reminder to make constant loving descent from the mind into the heart. The mind potentially serves as a guide to some extent, but the heart is our ultimate map.
I often reference my heart-eyes or heart-vision, and have continued to experience this in a very visceral sense.
Through recent explorations and immersions into this manner of meeting the world, through the lens of the heart-space, I have experienced the most beauty-full spectrums of life, in vivid and divine palettes, and ultimately, melted into states of the purest gratitude, even in moments of perceived pain.
It has been this receptivity that has connected me with my own divinity and the most humbling juxtaposition of human suffering and the soaring of the soul.
It occurred to me that the reader of The Alchemy would be unaware of the pain I was going through in my life, in my body, in my ever-so-human experience. At the time the final line of the poem passed my lips — one morning out in the master maestro of nature — it was, in part, duality itself that heightened the profundity and the opening into that tender, tender place.
My physical pains, discomfort and even weathered appearance stirred many a confrontation and a teaching internally, and it had been an arduous time of feeling at great odds with humanity, with interaction and company, and a grappling with my own human nature and self-judgment.
Yes, indeed, I knew the agony and the ecstasy, but all I felt in that moment was the ineffable gift, the miracle of this life that allows me to feel it all.
In sincerity, my heart felt broken, in the breaking down of my physical form in a realm of matter, yet here where my own spirit paused, melting in the gold of merely suggested sunrise where I marveled at the fragile beauty all around me, the swell of my heart caused the ground beneath me to open, revealing the most exquisite landing place of eternal groundlessness.
Swelling with a distinct fullness I sensed was also birthed through Adversity, a blessed companion of Awareness.
The progressive wide eyes I felt transpiring within me seemed to guide orchestrated life lessons, prompting me to learn the true meaning of surrender and trust, to know the fragility and anguish of what the human journey could entail, and to love it fiercely all the same, inside every revealing act of grace.
The ripples and splays of this experience led to deeper reflection on how I simply must love myself through this, treat my body like the dear friend that it truly was and is, trusting in its miracle and working through a lifetime of internal conditioning and this default view of myself as lacking, being separate, or unlovable.
To begin to connect to my deeper being and love Her in all her ways, shapes and forms was, at times, a taste of profound freedom. Dissolving the desire for constant approval, acceptance or validation from any other was another stepping stone that affirmed again and again the beauty of true sovereignty.
Coupled with a newfound and striking rawness of heart, beating brighter in the epic natural surrounds, I found myself naturally intent on daily practice: prayer, presence, and instinctive exclamations of gratitude for the endless gifts around me. The medicina of the earth, plants and animals, that relentlessly romanced.
I would joke to myself that even a short five-minute walk to the end of my street left me feeling like Snow White, surrounded by bird-life and bird-songs, butterflies and bunny rabbits. The more I dropped into my own alignment, the more I found the earth speaking to me in a way I hadn’t previously known. An ancient tongue of energy and response. Synchronicity and serendipity became daily treasures.
I had been pushed into a new level of solitude on the path, but my affinity and beloved connection with Mother Earth was always the most treasured comfort, and at every twist and turn, there She was — watching, waiting, ever loving, ever patient. The parrots and the trees were my friends, and the realm of the elements became my school.
The Unthinking of I was written a few weeks ago, being held in the healing hands of Bali, Indonesia. Here where the Balinese simply exist in deep reverence with spirit and country, emanating their ever-humbling daily devotions of prayer, vibrant symbolic offerings, never-ending blessings and Thank You’s to Mother Earth (Ibu Pertiwi) and Father Sky (Bape Akasa).
Their constant and loving communion is surely a living breath straight into the synergy of its vibration, lush landscape and vivid creatures. They are in a constant state of giving back to the land.
As I continue to walk this path, and gift of life, I feel an unshakable devotion to transmitting the responsibility we each carry and the probable urgency in these auspicious times: to honor the gift and to remain proactive and present in our daily thoughts and actions, where we place our focus, how we hold ourselves and others, how we can use our heart-vision to serve our own spiritual paths and, so importantly, in service to others.
This, in turn, nurtures the deepest, most necessary reciprocity: to our beauty-full Source.
We have this choice.
***
The Alchemy
The alchemy of soft sinking soles,
into hungry earth, beloved.
Impressions become
thumping heartbeats
catching the footsteps of my own, as it walks
outside of me,
deserts my chest
and wades into the rockpool.
This heart-opening
Ripens into middle ground, belly-up
to the sublime
As above, the mottled skies
So below,
the murky sea
This mirrored coupling
to reveal deep truths
Within their own reflections
To drink from just one cup
two souls entangle
What deeper truth
did this great love avow?
back to you…
Awareness; a dragonfly
and four magnificent birds,
Countless tiny sparrows —
and it is beyond me, not to marvel… to fall in love
with each (flirtation)
daintier than the next
So slight
Yet every sliver
a memory… of every Joy
Babushka dolls,
of Father Sky
Your wings, so pure —
they carry our dreams
Little, laid-up heart
in offering
to all Expansion
Ascending eyes up,
into His glory
Submerging ears spiral,
to Her vastness
Am I (I Am)
for one moment
to taste the fruit
with this full pallet
as the beat
outside my chest
it speaks
and She,
the starving spirit
invites the songbird inside, to sing —
I am so glad…
to be Alive.
***
The Unthinking of I
The sweetest of poisons
to rewire this mind,
In crumbling desecration,
It’s Your essence, I’m to find.
Less found
than Love, remembered,
And as the music swells,
This woven love arras
finds rest.
For You abide in many hearts,
And all fear, lost
within the wilderness of separation —
parts, like the tale of the sea,
of many hearts.
I am my own witness,
And these wilted arms that hold me…
not foreign enough.
Yet it is You, relentless
that shall pour forth
out of me,
Little pieces of my soul, once reconciled
Like the songs of our experience,
Endless jigsaws of integration
reconfigure in the quagmire
In which
I’m ever-willing
to crawl…
… on hands,
And knees —
For what shall I do without my dreams?
Mother’s fingers,
splayed from the core,
Secreted as our trees,
ever pointing to the All.
And the yolk
of Father Sun,
Bare-naked, swims to the ivory shore.
Oh, my own heart!
It leaps
with a life of its own,
Cast forth in unhindered passage
alight, taking flight,
In service
to Life
Such preparation of a soul,
to hold fast through the epochs —
Rise beyond limited belief…
… And I am deeply altered…
… All my armorings, shed,
and melded
to Amor.
Inquisitive One,
Tilt your head up
to the tonic of You
Beloved balsam
Father, Mother, Cosmic Birther
Awaken the matrices
in legions of light,
Portals of flight
Fertile land to fruit-full garden of life… force
Liquid light… course
To stir all dear ones’ destiny,
Animate and unearth longevity
The natural currents of a precious being,
Adept in the mystery
Disengaged from the reverie
[May there ever be]
A multifold
of much unrest
‘Til we are Home.
***
An ongoing journey with life and health has led Ange Sang back to her true creative therapy, through the written word and the lens of the camera. Ange is a devoted lover of all things nature, a tree-hugger, and has a heart that feels utterly compelled to shoot arrows of word and image, straight from her mystical experience of life to as many receivers as possible. On a unique path of physical illness, Ange began to share her written and visual arts as tools of thanks — a nod to an ever-rising theme of gratitude, in recognition of those around her. Her heart-vision continues to find its solace and drive in the grace of Mama Nature and the aim to recognize and articulate the grapple of the human condition.