I am all of me and all of you

"I am interested in what is real, and honest, and all the ways we can lean in a little closer to ourselves. The way that the truth weaves softer textures into each inhale and exhale, expanding and stretching and calling us into our fullest expression.

I can feel the way so many of us have been searching for translations in a grief-illiterate culture, the ways we hide who we really are and what we really feel. The way we walk around each day without ever really seeing each other; the juxtaposition of being in a room full of people yet completely alone. A deep ache for belonging and release and connection that does not ask us to numb what is alive for us at any given moment.

Let me sit in circle for lifetimes with the ones who hold me as I wring grief from my skin, extract apologies from my spine, and scream so loud and with such ferocity that you can see the teeth marks on the anger that once lived inside my belly. The ones who witness without fixing. The ones who can see all of me and not look away.

I am all of me and all of you.

I am victim and perpetrator.

I am oppressed and oppressor.

I am maiden, mother and crone.

I am the good girl and the diabolical whore.

I am student and teacher.

I am a needy child and an evil dictator.

I am sweet nurturer and raging bitch.

I am woman, animal, and earth.

I want to never stop feeling the discomfort of sitting with pain, yours and mine, and being witnessed by the eyes and hearts of community. To be naked and raw under the glare of the gods, and claw my way back into the womb of the sacred.

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I want to have the courage to speak the words that tighten my chest, and permission to be with complete silence.

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I want to dance and be danced wildly in the cathedral of my body, meeting skin and muscle and unhinged primal movements with the saltwater of sweat and tears.

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I want to speak my truth to you in elegant prose and in tearful incoherent sentences until we are both so uncomfortable that we crack wide open.

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I want to love fully and wildly with reckless abandon and be ravished by love with no expectation. To love and lose and love again and be made better for it, more tender. To let my heart, broken or whole, cover ever-widening terrains.

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At the end of it all, when you finally slip out of your soft animal body, what will your legacy be?

Did you live and love well, and fully?

Did you allow yourself to see and be seen?

Did you learn how to listen?

Did you remember who you are?

Did you catch every last drop of awe and ecstasy on your tongue and let it drip down your chin? "

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Gina Puorro