Imagine the moment of your birth
Wet with womb, blood and tears
Raised to meet kisses, tenderness
Loved, you turned your face
Met the sun, cried.
You were pure love, in those blessed hours.
You forgot love, though. Grew to wear something else in its place.
The mask was woven - feathers and hides
Needles of bone, bleached and grooved
With the sinewy thread they gave you.
Sometimes you stitched on sequins, sometimes sprinkles of glitter
That shed every time they looked at you, disapproving.
Compliance is a fickle princess - its hard to execute the curtsy exactly
So you keep adding on embellishments - a bauble here, a patch there.
In the mirror you think you recognise yourself.
And then one evening, you go out walking by the lake, and see a powerful owl swoop low. The way the sun hits the water, the burst flight of startled ducks, the bats feasting on the mosquitos. Why, how impossible it seems that you did not see this all along.
You claw at your face, knowing suddenly
A voice cries: Unstitch, darling - take off your mask!
Tattered feathers flutter away in the warm breeze.
You are becoming - the bat, the owl, the mosquito
The sunlight on the lake.
You remember what it was like to be love.
This poem is for dearest @trucklife-family, who works so hard for truth in these troubled times. I was inspired by her post this week on masks - whilst we literally wear them, there is also something metaphoric about them.
She wrote:
We face a time where we must make a decision, to step away from a system that has controlled us and make our own way, returning to our sovereign self. Or continue to live within a world that will manipulate us for their own gain. It really is up to each one of us,to make a stand.To take back responsibility for our lives.
To rip off our masks, so that we can stand in our power and take our place in creating a better world. Where once we silence ourselves by putting on a mask now we are being silenced by those who are enforcing these physical masks.
I thought about how we wear the masks of social conditioning, never really being our true selves for fear of rejection, isolation, punishment even. From birth we are manipulated into society's idea of what we should be, who we should be. When I examine the masks I wear myself, I choose to ask myself - am I acting and being from love? It is a hard task, removing all those feathersand baubles, glue and strapping.