Touching Shame
/Taking next steps out with the book I’ve been working on for about three years now. Getting closer to stepping out, discovering layers of shame that leave me frozen, in freeze. All I know how to do is to bring it to my somatic practice where I spend time “discharging” and to my art. Moving between concrete stories being there and other times it’s all purely sensation or just too large, too many layers of trauma—mine, ours, ancient and new, made in love and hate, sorrow at the gate.
Writing about shame hasn’t been easy so I used a way of pendulating between walking on a path holding sensations of pain, taking notes and then writing. Integrating my own way of InBodyNature practice with a ritual I found of CAConrad’s (blessings to you CA). It was good to get out of the same literal path and creative habits, surrendering to being lost in it all for longer than comfortable.
(when reading the following poem: consider the pronouns of we/ours/us as describing the multiplicity that lives within any I. Perhaps you’ll hear one of you there as well.)
At this Intersection
When the light goes on again is our body still here, is yours?
Slower over all passions
Feet still heart
Hips still hot
Keep touching it
Rolling it in your hands
Are your senses wet
Slower, slower still
The way is clear
And yet we will not leave us there
It’s embarrassing
To be seen as something less than
Shame on us
Less than human
Making it’s own violence and hatred here
Eating away at a better human inside
The taste rotten
Shame staying
Don’t touch it
Shame on and on
Not better humans
Shame on us on you
Shame on shame pendulating between no longer us
Tick tock tick tock
Staying not us
not even better
human shame in you
touching shame in us
Shame made visible
Painful, it’s uncomfortable, it’s embarrassing to be seen as something
To be seen as something
Banished to our body
Dragging in snow changing the way we walk
Pendulating tick tock tick toch
Trying to get to third fourth leg that makes life more stable
How to sense for what lives between
two legs, two eyes, two breast, between anus and vagina
Places once there now, gone
How does one know the unseen parts?
We want to drown in liquor, in fantasies and hallucinations
Of you touching us
Feeling the touch of you in our selves makes violence and hatred inside
Now outside yet the place still here in our body
Where others are we are lost with no hope
This rush to want ground in deep mound
Beware of the life eaters!
We don’t want to disturb our hills
Do not disturb the hills
Parts unseen touching that which is bigger than something else
We haven’t touched before
What right do we have to climb these places that do not belong to us?
Where we have comfort of wealth, failure, sickness to hold onto
We want to stay
Being nothing
Yet we don’t like this not being good enough
Ahgg
We are afraid
Not understanding presumed protection from fire to save our houses
Trees of no value
Wreckage of life eaters thrown about
There are obvious two paths where others have walked
We will not go there
The middle seemingly too dangerous
Uncertain which way to move forward
Between
Our legs
We stood and waited
Such a long distance
Do they have a right?
And yet they can still enter
We thought we got rid of all of them, the doors
And yet knocking on the door continues
Our bones and mind don’t move as quickly as all this rushing about
How will we ever be able to read you or us?
Thank you
to the non binary snow beings for inspiration