I Realize the Gift of My Gloriously Sensitive Heart.
Somebody described me as ungrateful recently.
The interesting gift within this incident was the illumination it brought. Not because it was true — on the contrary, the knowing that this particular word and all its loaded sentiment was, in fact, the utmost antithesis of who and what I truly am and the theme of this life I express.
Having ridden the waves of process, and the parting of ways with of a trusted confidante — the turmoil of wanting to make things right or desiring amicable closure, to feel SEEN and heard in truth, suddenly this apparent insult landed with me as a blessing.
In that moment, in which blinding clarity confirmed that this was not all about me or my stuff, but perhaps another’s sore spots, I was able to see the boundary line.
They say, as tiny children we begin intrinsically tied and laced to our mothers. As if the umbilical cord remains — and we remain tethered — even throughout those first wobbly steps and the earliest years of us making little imprints onto the planet. A tender time, when the information and beliefs we are ever-absorbing into our baby-hearts, runs deep, being crystallized into fresh little psyches.
These immeasurably formative years, up until at least age two or three, we still tug at our Mama’s skirts. Then gently, softly, we begin to wander — in wider and wider circumference outward from her.
And yet we often rinse and repeat, ceremoniously in between, scuttling back to nuzzle into her lap, hiding behind her familiar legs, or in the safety of her bosom.
Some of us experience a multitude of variance in circumstance, when our mothers are unable to gift us with full presence, be it through their own life pains, distractions, traumas or illness.
And some of us never learn that one, insurmountably engrained and deeply somatic lesson, in which we ingest and comprehend where our mothers end and we begin.
We do not know our own boundaries of being.
In my own life, I didn’t realize the gift of my gloriously sensitive heart. I was a little one who would sing, draw animals instead of people, write I Love You across every surface to share this enigmatically beautiful feeling, and play inside endless worlds of make-believe, of the most wondrous, technicolor imagination that sprung from a deep, deep well.
Perhaps I was simply seeing what already is, in raw beauty.
As my connections and relationships formed over the years of growth, my reactions to losses or rejections would express as slight overwhelm, imbalanced in their relative scale. My growing mind would hold on to the spinning record of self-inquiry and doubt and the inability to let go.
I would take others’ views, feelings and projections as gospel, tragically burying those of my own.
I wondered why the simple word Stay seemed to pain me… and the heartbreak of its dualistic counterpart, when everything and everyone seemed to leave.
I began falling into the existence of a drifter, who could very easily adapt to and fit in with any social group or crowd. Carrying the sense of roaming this globe and its endless streets, fundamentally alone. In a constant state of observation of the world and its many colorful yet odd inhabitants, I never fully related.
The trials of incarnation would see me unsuccessfully searching for this in other substances, souls and roles.
Yet on the delicious occasion where hidden jewels of soul-tribe would sporadically be revealed, my goodness, was I grateful!
A natural lover of humans, despite this alien heart I’ve walked the earth forever feeling those around me so deeply. And when their most vulnerable, often fleeting, moments of humanity flicker through, their flames hit my heart like fiery arrows, so tender and felt in warm and loving humility.
I am blessed to generally see the goodness in people, beyond the masks and torments of trauma so rife. Even when we grate and hurt and jolt up against one another in this lifetime, our layers and veils tend to falter and fall, if only for a second, and the blood in our veins we all share as finite.
At times, I too have had to make the more confronting cutting of ties, when the frequencies between us are just too vast and the respect of where each one of us resides on the path takes all precedence above closure and futile justification. Sometimes we have to walk in silence, to serve each other’s souls instead of our hot human heads.
And at times we run from what another reveals to us, because it’s of the deepest realm of truth, mirroring back to us what we might sooner prefer to evade. On other occasions, we run from what is light years apart and empty in resonance, so our soul boundaries are affirmed.
If I am attacked, ostracized or slandered, and that tiny, loving girl yearns to feel held and bolstered, I remember the ground upon which I am standing, the sky and the stars above, and the truth of the heart at my center.
If our deepest gratitude is not felt or accepted or known by others — regardless of our joy in freely sharing so — perhaps it is in the art of their giving that they need find the answers. For we are here to give and love with honor, void of expectation, condition or ego.
I don’t forget, through the madness, to stand in loving compassion and forgiveness — when the heart feels it — ultimately in affinity with the others I walk beside. Because we are all just our madrés’ melding, melting pot of imprinted feelings and thumping heartbeats — trying, longing, to find our way.
We can remember, when another fails to see our insides, or is blinded by their own enduring triggers and traumas, that we are the governors and governesses of our tenderness and beauty-full acquiescence: to keep singing, loving and playing, in sovereignty.
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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.