Everybody's Story

Vulnerability

I know I’m being truly vulnerable

When my heart begins to cry

And my voice begins to cry

a river of swollen words

And my breath is fragile as a leaf in autumn

floating on a layer of wind

and not falling

but traveling through the ethers

and touching the spirits

with the cry of vulnerability

that says

my heart is open

and I am willing

to risk hurt

in the name of honoring

the creative force that moves me

to be vulnerable

in order to love

The Storms Arrive

The storms arrive

with lightning infused emotions,

the electric taste of charged air

and the rumble of thunder

The hard knots tighten in my stomach,

a physical manifestation

of the tangled cords

the tangled lives

emotional and energetic

intersecting on my body

My heart is a cloaked fist

a choked raw twist

of flesh and blood

When my heart and gut hurt like this

things are not as they should be

Honesty

I'm learning new things 

about my heart

and what it needs

in order to stay open

I need to speak fully

all the weight of emotion

I hold in my heart

I need to speak it

honestly

even if it hurts to say it

it hurts worse to hide it

to cloak it in a closed fist

My heart opens

when I'm honest

about what I'm feeling

Difficult Possibility

I don’t know how to make everybody happy

Perhaps it’s not my responsibility

Perhaps it’s an impossibility

But I feel responsible

for the people I love

I feel accountable

for my capacity to love.

Love and hate

break down easily for me

I love love

I hate knowing people are hurting

I have infinite love

to give

and I want to give it

For all of its abundance and creative power,

why is love so difficult?

I’m trying to be a good person in the world

keeping my heart open and living in love

but I guess my way of being

is harder to understand than I realized

and somehow causes the very hurting

that I’ve always believed love healed

Because I don’t know what else to do

I’m going to keep loving

with an open heart

because I cannot stop believing
in the difficult possibilities
of love
to enact healing and end hurting,
to enable honesty and engage hearts

I write this

in the name of

vulnerable resistance

--Diana Tigerlily