These words, written by Fiona, come from a process using the gap between the in-breath and the out-breath as a focus.
Genetic Vale of Tears
Breathe in …Breathe out …
Slowly, as usual, trying to control the breath.
Anger rises ... Let me out of here ! The vice around my ribs closes in and clamps shut. Suffocating …
Breathe in ... Breathe out ...
Broken, battered, bruised … Can never be good enough …
Go into the space between the breath.
Fear rises in the body … look for a symbol ... Nothing – just blackness.
Sit with the blackness …
Move through the pain of the cramp – a memory of birth?
My birth? Mother’s? Grandmother’s?
The voice screams inside my head –
WHOSE SHIT IS THIS?
The blackness moves, shimmers and then I see my answer.
Millions of tiny droplets cover the blackness.
Millions and millions of tears … glistening like beads.
And in that instance I know – I know I can never cry the tears that vale my innocence ... Not in this lifetime or any other.
They are the genetic tears that I carry in the space between the cells and until the tears dissolve I can’t get into the cells.
The tears of all the women in my genetic line. Their anger, resentment, fears, joys, ecstasies, grief. Their whole lives glistening in the genetic vale, that hides me form my no-thing-ness.
I look into one. It grows like a huge glass tear shaped orb. 3 dimensional.
In one droplet, in one tear is the story of all the women who came before me. The microcosm of the macrocosm.
All potential, all faded hope. Life and death are not separate.
There is movement and in its fluidity, many lives move before my "eyes" ... I don’t know who. I don’t seek to know.
One tear drop, an expression of all tears. Tears too deep to cry.
All I can do is acknowledge the exquisite beauty in that single tear.
As I do so … The vale drops. Drops and disappears …
Breathe in … Breathe out …