Emotional Exposure
Yet my soul is silenced through conditioning
my mind is busy with a myriad of thoughts,
my heart and body feels alone,
my spirit is suffocated within the prison I have built.
my spirit is suffocated within the prison I have built.
Extract from Chapter 2
That might be fine, I may have felt her surge within me, that powerful wild woman who sees and knows so much. I may have had a moment of pure urge where my body flushed with excitement, I may have experienced desire rising like lava within a volcano. But I'm conditioned, I have values, I have learnt to hold myself without acting out all urges in life instead holding myself within the box of politically correct ways of living. I have learnt to leave the chocolates out of my way, I have learnt to put down my spoon when there is a delicious desert in front of me, I have been able to hold myself steady and composed when a man has caught my feminine attention, I've held back from satisfaction in sexual encounters, I've withheld my inner feelings and urges and desires before. I have forced myself to continue mundane tasks and do jobs I don't want to put food on the table and to meet living requirements. I have held myself in a graceful and controlled way for long enough to know that the feeling will subside and I can go on with my life as is planned, perhaps even pre-planned?
Is it appropriate here to consider that? No not now! I'm having a dilemma, and in true form I need to keep focused to my excuses. However, I guess this justifies why I walk the path I walk. If my life is pre-planned and I have no real say in it, but to behave and bare what occurs, then I'm like many others, and then its easy to feel the nauseous feeling of helplessness, at least I'm not alone. Which brings up another thing, why is I can feel so alone when there are so many people around me? Why is it that I feel so apart from everyone else? Is it just me? Do you ever have that helpless feeling, that lonely feeling that seems as though you could spit into your own coffee and no one cares enough even to notice? Well that may sound extreme, yet, I wonder - do I matter in this big world, full of different colours and shapes of people all milling around at an ant party, busy running in circles carrying heavy loads and following each others path in some chaotic order.
A horn blares, a tunnel of wind sucks at me whipping my hair into my face, through the curls I see the side of a bus trundle past. The colourful larger than life image of a pouting woman observes me from the back of the bus, selling her sexuality within the value of her merchandise. She's frozen in time, stuck in a state of tender splendour willing me to buy her goods.
Now where was I?
Where am I going?
What am I doing here?
I look around searching for signs, signals, familiar territory, something that can assist me to orientate myself. As I take a deep breath I look up and see that a storm is brewing. Big heavy clouds that look like they have been dragged through oil have already congregated together, they seem as though they are mounted on their own steeds, an entire army of them coming to rain upon me.
I see a flash of the naked dancing woman within my mind again, there is sunlight prancing and frolicking upon her glistening bare skin. She's calling, her voice drips with honey gold passion, her radiance bewitches me momentarily. She, the one within me surges again, a desire that is as strong as gravity its unseen pull, enticing me within the seas of possibility sending messages upon the waves of excitement. But NO!
I can continue to walk within the designed acceptance levels of my own dry but safe rules, some borrowed perhaps from others and some lived through because of fear of what other people think. But, you know, I'm ok with that I don't need to get all heated up and ravenous about a feeling surging through me, I can manage myself. I have been in training for years about this! I have helped train others too! You know, when they step out of line with an emotional desire and they need a gentle reminder to settle down into the hum drum of life, like the constant sound of an air conditioning system, filling the spaces of the quiet creative realm. Society needs us to all keep ourselves in check, I mean wouldn't it be absolutely ridiculous if we all raced down the path of internal desires and followed our manic feelings. It would be an unsafe place to live.
Even as I'm think this through I feel a little more in control. Perhaps slightly annoyed, ok frustrated, but I can get through this!
Who am I kidding? Probably not you right! Well not myself in truth either, the ribbon that flutters in the wind is what is happening inside of me, the ripple of potential joy, a spark that desires to flicker into a flame. Yet my mind continues to extinguish it. Keeping it from having oxygen. For the fear that my emotions may overtake me, the mind is at war with internal feelings, the controlling mind is continuously declaring war on the parts of myself who are attempting freedom of expression and the like. This is a civilized society we live within, there is truely spaces to express and more often than not its NOT NOW!
These clothes that I wear, the ones that I have on, have become the old trustees, to remove them would be unbearable to my known way of being, to explose myself would mean to see myself and to be seen. To be seen by others, like the first encounter with a new lover, the tentative moments of exposure and vulnerability when his eyes settle upon my body, and my brain goes into a million questions of whether I'm good enough, slim enough, round enough in the right places, that moment where I put myself on a stage of 100 nah sayers all judging me from the couch potato chair, adding their opinion, picking at the little parts of me that I normally hide with clothes.
As I look into the inner crowd I see familiar faces, with expressions of disgust and or judgement, their faces illuminated by where my attention is placed. All the little judgers with top hats of influence or with necklaces laced with other memories of mistakes or clusters of errors I have made seeing through lushly painted critical eyes seeking out everything that is wrong.