My one thing

I woke up sad with a sort of hangover of sorts from feeling so much that I haven’t felt in ever so long. Just total emotional exhaustion while at the same time feeling like energy blockages and unprocessed pain that I have quietly but not so dignantly in my estimation carried for so long have been replaced by an unexpected inner clarity and return to a more natural way of being.

I have certain thoughts today. Singing is healing and singing Irish music feels more natural and grounding than singing most other kinds of music somehow. If I were to take vocal lessons the sort of song I would want to sing to practice is the Irish folk song. I thought about doing it with Latin music, too, and that is very possible, though it is maybe easier somehow, despite my love of languages, as a beginning singer, when some of the songs can be sung in English. Art in general is something connected to some of my earliest traumas and I always knew that if I were committed to some kind of art, which for me perhaps leans highly towards musical arts, and attained a sort of flow with it, I would have company for life and a sort of resilience to help me through life’s grief and pain.

I always sort of knew I needed this and I grieve that I was never really taught these things that, just in knowing them, would have brought me a sense of more ease and competency in all of life. The practice of music is one of those things, the most important one of all. For too long my soul was not ready for the teachers who could have shown me who I am but now I feel again the world is abundant with these kinds of teachers and though I feel I have lost so much time nonetheless I shoukd learn patience. If I had to do it over again I would have remembered the importance of developing competency and flow with an art much sooner and developed myself musically. I don’t want others to be left behind like I have left myself behind; if there are others out there like me who are not practicing what would connect them to their deeper life and soul, I hope that they are reached, and discover the blessings that await them.

John O’Donohue writes st the beginning of Anam Cara: “A world lives within you. No one else can bring you news of this inner world. Through the opening of the mouth, we bring out sounds from the mountain beneath the soul. These sounds are words.” I am grateful that I discovered the art of bringing forth the sounds from the mountain beneath the soul. It does not matter if there is anyone to appreciate the contours of their deeper significance for me, if there is anyone to read my words, so much as it matters that they are brought into the world from

the soul, and I find that each day I write I am a new person and words come together in altogether new symphonies. The words themselves may not look or be spiritual at all but nonetheless the art of bringing them forth is a spiritual practice and I don’t know if I would be alive without it.

I was also thinking yesterday and sort of fretting that, as someone with way too many interests in ways that often overwhelm me, how will I ever find one thing to write about and grow an audience, if I do indeed want to be heard, without being scattered and writing about this snd that in a way that touches no one? When John O’Donohue writes, though he writes of multifarious things, it is clear in taking in any of his words at random that he is always writing, in a way, about one thing. Can I ever find that ‘one thing’ — one tooic, one niche, one voice, which would make my journey of writing on Medium for example much more successful? I was feeling bad anout myself because I thought I would never be able to do this and yet finding ways to do this in some way is the easiest way to grow an audience.

I want to get over the blocks around having an audience, too: I can, on the one hand, be someone who, like Mr. Feynman, doesn’t care what other people think, and that is the way I write here. I write the wirds that feel like being written even though I know that I’m often not writing in a way that will necessarily attract a lot of readers, but bringing forth my words has been more importsnt to me than that. I have resistance to having an audience because I resist being pinned down but… again in the words of Dar Williams: it’s a strange and a sad thing but it’s time and I am changing.

I am not attached to audience, at least at the deeper level I am feeling myself now, though I will probably always have issues with wanting to please those who pay attention to me, and fears and self-doubts when people who have liked what I have shared or even strangers who never paid attention to me at all pass judgment on me or stop ‘following’ me because they disapproved of something I said. That is a fear that I have somehow already processed to such an extent that I feel more ready to take the kind of leadership that involves being seen; a lot of my more surface issues around that have been resolved in already experiencing and going through my worst fears around that. Who I was last time I wrote on Facebook, for example; I see some of my much older posts and I feel like I had issues with wanting to please or impress and I was influenced by all sorts of unhelpful ideas, not based in reality, about what others might be thinking of me ir wanting to hear or not wanting to hear and though I wrote for myself when you write publicly I guess younare always writing for an audience in a way and I was writing for the wrong audience, not one I had cultivated by being myself, but a sort of pre-determined set of ‘Facebook friends’, and writing for my ‘friends list’ as an audience was never going to be a way to find my voice but to squelch and stifle it. Oh, I guess it did help me find my voice — any writing anywhere helps — but it was way more complicated than it needed to be and could have been much more simple. It is hard to find yourself when you are worried about what all sorts of people you don’t even necessarily know might think of you, and yet these are the people you want to please somehow just the same, not because you have found each other and appreciated each other, necessarily, but in my case so often just because, when I went places and met people here or there, these were the ones who were willing to ‘add me to Facebook’. I want to write like no one is watching, write without concern for growing a following, but write with one voice, to serve even just one person who might benefit from what I uniquely have to offer, and in doing that, I am not caring what other people think. I am writing to be of aervice and if I am not of service to someone it is of no consequence  to me what they may think. I so often wrote maybe without realising it to prove myself in some way. That is not all I was doing, and I feel there was value in what I wrote beyond that, but that certainly got in the way and made it impossible to find a unique writing voice…

After I was feeling such fear that it was hopeless for me as far as finding that one thing that I might gather my writing around (like all my pieces might somehow gravitate around one major theme that expresses uniquely who I am) and thought I would never figure it out because Inwas hopelessly interested in too many things, I may have had a breakthrough. It was hard though: I feel like an expert on nothing and what could I possibly write about continuously without burning out or getting bored or reaching the limits of my knowledge? I may be really interested in helping people learn languages but can I see myself writing on that every week for a couple of years in a way that consistently expressed in a way that was of some kind of value to others? Eek, I don’t know! But I know that right now, even writing about that, one of the things I am most passionate about, would not inspire me or be something I was enthusiastic about because I would feel chained to the topic and it would not be something that would nourish me, if I felt confined to just writing about that as a way to grow a business or income stream, and if writing is an income stream, I want it to nourish me. Of course it’s not about the income but about growing and learning about myself and choosing to believe I have something to offer and learning what it means to take leadership as me and providing value to people.

Anyway, I think I started to solve the dilemma, I just have to clarify it: I write about helping people nourish and cultivate their natural genius, learn how to learn in more effective and enjoyable ways, and become themselves. Oh, I am absolutely drained and exhausted today and also now becoming exhausted with this writing and I feel ready to end this entry, so I don’t have as clear language for it as I had yesterday, but I think that is the topic that is uniquely me that I could write consistently on in all sorts of ways while including all of myself in the process. When I ‘brand’ myself that way, my love of languages and helping people learn them more effectively falls right into it. My love of journaling falls right into it because that is one of my favourite ways to cultivate my own depths.

I am also recently becoming more and more aware that I wsnt to help the world learn about trauma and help the world heal from it, and my own history is that trauma has been perhaps the biggest block to cultivating my own natural genius; which isn’t a bad thing in the sense that, I have something to write about that. I have a lot to say about trauma and I know how it gets in the way of us experiencing our Light.

Ah, maybe that is another thing: I don’t think what I mean by genius, which is something we all have, the Zen-like capacity to be exactly who we are, is all that different from what Quakers mean when they speak of the Light. Our Light is our genius, our genius is our Light, and trauma has for me clouded and impeded both my genius and my Light.