The Burden of Knowledge

Watched “Heroines: A Photographic Obsession by Lincoln Clarkes”, a documentary by a Vancouver fashion photographer who saw in the run-down, doped-up, abandoned and ravaged women of the downtown eastside, another beautiful side of the human woman. He befriended them, interviewed them, and photographed them in their own environment. What came through was his love and attention to them, the care he took and the respect and trust that became mutual, which I imagine is a rare thing with women who have been so damaged. The photographs he captured of them were heartbreaking in their honesty and haunting beauty, but what really penetrated to my core was the longing. To me, these are portraits of longing, that which we all share, no matter who we are, as human spirits. It is the part of us that never dies, and in showing us the decay and degeneration and dying of these women, he showed us also, life.
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The books I’ve been reading these last few days—Eat, Pray, Love; The Life You Were Born To Live; The Zen of Creativity—as well as on the Human Design System, have come together to tell me, amongst other things, that it would do me a world of good to somehow find it in myself to form a daily discipline of yoga and meditation (tai chi and qigong are also suggested sometimes). Surprising myself, I’m actually finding yoga and meditation, whenever I’ve practiced them lately, to be a balm to my being, lovely and satisfying experiences. This is something I’ve always denied as being possible for me in this lifetime. Yet, here I am, well over the hill, and finding the grace I thought was genetically lacking in myself, to dance my way into the valley.
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Head and right upper back congestion, again… M. gave me a massage, then I had a salt bath. In the bath I ‘heard’ that it is because there was something I hadn’t let go… Then in my bedtime meditation just now I ‘heard’ what it was: knowledge. I thought, wow, knowledge is heavy! I had no idea… being so used to gathering it and hoarding it and dragging it around with me all of my life. This stuff I’ve been soaking up lately, these clues and signs and confirmations and affirmations and wisdom and insight, are great, and gratefully received. But I wasn’t supposed to try and hang on to it. It is literally like pulling a heavy load across my right shoulder and straining forward, overextending the trapezius and the occiputal nerves until they are screaming in protest. All because I’ve forgotten to let what I learned go.

As soon as I realized this, and breathed it out, a lightness lifted up in me, and I felt my belly expand. I smiled, involuntarily. Truth sunk in, settling into the bottom.

“I take a breath in. I let it out. I take knowledge in. I let it go.” This is today’s mantra.

I know too that if, after I’ve let it go, it comes back, then it is meant to, and it’s not because I tried to hang on to it.

I suppose, even gifts given to us have a life of their own, and ours are merely hands they pass through in blessing. Some stay with us longer, but sooner or later, they all move on, along with life.