To become visible

What is it to be seen? What would you give to know that the raw beam pulsing inside of you were visible to another human? Would you strive and hunger and seek and run toward that visibility? If you knew that to be seen—to be fully seen—would require you to also open the cavernous darkness you know lives beside the light, would that change your answer? Would you turn inward, wrap your shawl closer, tuck in, protect yourself from the gaze? I know both impulses. They live in equal measure inside of me.

The first photo my partner took of me was on our second date. He sent the print to me with a card and a message about a seed of love forming inside of him as he captured the moment. In the photo, a woman stands with her bare feet planted firmly on a huge boulder. Her body arcs forward, like a bow. Her arms are thrown back and you can see the muscles of her shoulders, the bare arms, the wide-spread fingers. Her face is tilted toward the sky and light and spray of the waterfall she stands beside. Her hair falls away from her back. She is wide open, surrendered, full, grounded, flying. The water crashes toward her. She is unafraid. She is beautiful and abundant and free.

The woman is me. She’s the “me” I’ve longed to know for so many years. She’s the woman I dream of when I imagine who I want to be when I grow up. I’d glimpsed her in moments but never paid her much attention. Her beauty and fearlessness felt like frivolity to the persona I’d developed, to the hard-working-trying-to-keep-it-all-together-struggling-pushing-single-mom image I had of myself. God-damn. It felt good to be seen in the light of his lens. I began to stop asking myself if I could be her and focused instead on living as that woman, the one who bares herself to the world, who risks herself in it, who listens hard and does her best to speak the truth as it emerges. It’s this shift in me, nurtured in part by his steady and creative presence that has me here, writing to you today. We venture together into the world on feet that fly, ride, ski, swim, dance. We seek and catch light together. We ease our way through sunrises and sunsets, pausing often to notice and appreciate the color, texture, quality of any given moment. He wakes and whispers his love to me, then lies in bed while I venture out to let my pen scratch across the page of my journal every morning. He speaks to her, the creative one, the fearless one, the head thrown back one. He often asks what stands in the way of letting her come forward more. And, he looks into and embraces the dark as well, even when it hurts.

And perhaps it's not so much the dark, as the painful. As our relationship has grown over the past few years, I’ve recognized that inside of a relationship is a taut balance of being seen. Inside the safety of this relationship, I face the patterns I’ve unconsciously developed: the ways of being I’ve developed that either hurt me or hurt those I love the most. The gift he gives is the unconditional love I receive for the ways I move while in these patterns—and the motivation to break free of them. I want to loosen the grip of my own stories, beliefs, and behaviors that have kept me where I am. I know some of the ways out. I know that when I write every morning, and when I exercise, I feel good. I make the wise, heartful, grounded decisions that feel most true and least harmful. And when I can’t find the strength to move in the ways that feed me, I do my best to let that grief move through me, trusting that the infinite cycle will sling me back home…eventually.

Which leads to where I found myself today. The past several weeks have been heavy. I’ve battled a sinus infection that keeps my energy low and I’ve dipped in the swirl of emotions that envelop me as approached the first anniversary of my brother’s death: an inexplicable, overwhelming stuckness that’s only relieved when the tears flow freely. After days of fighting it, I finally acquiesced. I tried to walk in the winter sun; I tried to work; I tried to do my taxes; I tried to meditate. Finally, I found myself sobbing in bed, then calling my partner. “I don’t know what to do. I just don’t know how to be right now.” Just those words, heard, seen, felt by the man who loves me on the other end of the line, and then, the gentle question: “Can you remember where you feel good?” called me to come back here, back to the page, back to the words, back to myself.

His gentle questions, and even more, the reminder that I’m loved even when I can’t find the line of myself, reminded me again of the words that have haunted me for the past six months, lurking in my memory. “To be human is to become visible…” This afternoon, I finally found it:

To be human

is to become visible

while carrying

what is hidden

as a gift to others.

With the late winter sun streaming through my window, I went searching my bookcases for the book that holds the rest of this poem. I saw and smiled at the thin spines, lined up together, so many words that have brought me comfort and hope. With more energy than I’d felt in weeks, I moved to my bedroom, and there, hidden at the bottom of the stacks of books by my bed I found The House of Belonging signed to me by David Whyte in 2016. The poem is: What to remember when waking. I read aloud the words and found again my footing. The release was powerful, and I again found the sure-footed woman in the waterfall.

Now, looking through

the slanting light

of the morning

window toward

the mountain

presence

of everything

that can be,

what urgency

calls you to your

one love? What shape

waits in the seed

of you to grow

and spread

its branches

against a future sky?

The shape of the seed that formed in my lover’s eye when he saw me—just as I wanted to be seen—is still emerging. Meanwhile, my own individual form is constantly emerging. I expose the raw, powerful sharpness of my gaze, then slip back into the shadows. The gratitude I hold right now is for the space I have to explore and examine this movement. My wish is to continue into that fierce light, more and more, without losing the safety of my own feet so solid and grounded on the earth. What future sky is waiting to hold our branches?