STATIC MOTION AND THE BEAUTIFULLY MUNDANE

Static Motion and The Beautifully Mundane

By Isabelle Faenza

This is the story of finding the joy - finding the joy then figuring out how to allow it. It feels relieving - to be out from such a great weight. To be able to identify the correct pull again. Here not there, Left not Right.

I can feel the air expand in my chest, it has not been there for quite some time. It is terrifying! Yes. But it is so much better. Fear is not the driving factor in my life. It’s so funny when you realize it again - all these different parts

the commentary, not the source

I can feel it again! All of it ….

Part I: How We Got Here

As the light I explore gets lighter (self-love, yellow, aura, power, strength, explosion (rainbow of colors), goodness, empathy, knowing) the darkness gets darker, expands deeper (heaviness, reckoning of self-view, stripping down the noise, the fetal self begging for love and support, begging to be seen, begging to be felt, the muck, the seaweed, the sunken honey dripping inward.)

The darkness feels like a gift, like an opportunity to learn the parts of me that are begging to be seen. I feel a comfort in the heaviness - with the knowing that it is a part of me and I, it.

I find true rest, releasing myself to the heaviness.

The seaweed wrapped around my being, not suffocating, not trapping, teaching.

My sunken body, weighed down by molasses, the warmth of the drip, the relief of allowing the heaviness to just be, filling without fighting, I’m exhausted and thankful for the reprieve.

From the darkness, without exuding all my energy towards fighting it, I am able to rake through the message with my fingertips, stroke by stroke, separating the helpful from the unnecessary.

Carrying with me that that serves me and leaving behind to die that that does not align with my needs.

The darkness, the swamp, the heaviness, the muck, has been my greatest teacher thus far. It is the thing that says, “Look here, go here, you are needed.”

It pulls my attention in the way in which it is needed, not in the direction of what I want to feel.

For the sake of emotions, we can hold no preconceptions of what we want to feel, of what we should be feeling. We can only arrive with open arms to every council meeting and let the people speak. A leader with no insight to the needs of her community will never be able to provide a safe and flourishing environment.

Part II: And How We Got Here

This is a story of dedication to the ones that you love. Of design as a healing process and the meaning of the way the light reflects onto the altar. There is nothing more holy than the sun coming through the blinds into your eyes. Attention not paid where it is due, but where it is demanded - by our inability to process the emotions of tragedy. The red, hot fire of shame screaming much louder than the ever flowing stream of shared humanity and love. The redemption that accompanies returning to the source. I release my head above the water and welcome the cleansing of my sins.

We create not of choice but of necessity. We create when the feeling has no where else to go. When the weight shatters through and spills onto this world through.

Part III: And The Step After That

I am at the threshold - I can tell because I’m nervous, because I wish it was different, because I wish that I could scoop the sunshine out behind the clouds and place it as I please, that I could shift the way the water flows, that I could control the uncontrollable.

A need born from the beginnings of my flesh peeling from my soul and I hold the weight in my chest or in my throat and the man behind me begins to speak French and the sun lays across the water spilling into the pools of my eyes and it is as I wished, as I wanted, and I have to remind each muscle to release and I let the energy trickle down my spine and focus on how the pen marks the paper and I linger on the loops. I love the letter y and I love the letter g and everything they represent in this code I am writing and its history and the beauty of language born from a need to communicate and words as a testament of the human need for vulnerability born solely for connection, altered by the infliction of your voice or the movement of your muscles. Each stroke differing, the same word arriving as different colors to different flavors, that how you choose to articulate can only be controlled up to the point of reception upon which it is passed through the filter of my experiences and absorbed into my skin signaling a change of ownership and think of all the words we choose to never say and how they lived trapped within their birthplace with no freedom to breathe - festering within my bloodstream - it is no wonder I did not sleep when I did not speak, too many thoughts to tend to, to many wounds to close, and how beautiful to feel the lightening of a sound leaving my parted lips, I feel the most powerful as I watch the syllables swirl through the air like the last drag of a cigarette or the death of a wick or the end of a forest.

And to realize there is no direct relationship between the amount of words and their gravity - “meaning” being a relationship of the aforementioned considerations of conditioning, tone, and how you look me in the eyes. And I am free - autonomous - and I have chosen desire (for this life, for others, for myself), and more appropriately I have chosen to allow desire, or more appropriately I have chosen to not be ashamed of my desire as I accept that I have little say in the historical and chemical bonding of my emotions and I remind myself to breathe and I taste the smoke stuck between my teeth and remember that teeth are bones and I am thankful the bitterness has replaced the taste of you and if I just remind myself to look up I melt into the water and I stand still among the crowd and how beautiful is this life and the enormity of it and the opportunity of it and that I may sigh out the weight should I choose to and taste again the smoke mixed with the air in my saliva and love the dark in the way I do the light, and listen to dinner plans being made behind me and to write without comprehension or attachment - to do what I love without trying to control its outcome, no wonder the pages fill so quickly - I have missed you - But I keep forgetting, or I never will know, how to love correctly, how to not fear the loss, how to not suffocate the joy from my life

But I am learning, can’t you tell that I am learning because I am changing and it all feels quieter, closer, like you can whisper because I am already here, sitting in your lap not across the glass and you can be more gentle because I am looking right at you. You don’t need to get my attention, you already have it, and this is how I feel life is meeting me now in this softly lit garden filled with your laughter and half an orange because I have allowed such a space to exist outside the darkly lit alleyway and I just looked up and everything has changed.

And every time I look up everything has changed but I have come to rely on this as a fact and look forward to it, to welcome it (not dissimilar to hopefulness, to faith) and say thank you thank you thank you for letting me see it a different way or taste it in a different flavor or know it as another person and this time I looked up and I am crying but not in the way you think I just feel Loved, with a word purposefully capitalized - can’t you see how that changes the meaning? And I feel loving and I am overflowing with something that love doesn’t quite quantify but I saw a quote earlier that said not everything has to feel like something else and this falls within that category and I am going to stop writing now because I want to sit and watch the light play with the water and I have front row seats and a body full of desire.

Part IV: No, Isabelle, Where Did It All Really Begin?

For my mother,

To whom I attribute any and all of my need to write; To understand through articulation; For giving me the only avenue that allows me the ability to express. You have given me

life time and time again. I would not be on this earth if not for you, in more ways than one.

My mother gave up her body to grow me into this life.

She poured her soul into the bucket and molded her love into my shape -

there is none that can know love like a mother,

there is none that can know sacrifice like a (my) mother.

She tore her cloth and laid my body bare unto this earth.

The best of me is from my mother,

the worst of me is from my mother,

I am nothing if not my mother.

Part V: And, What Have We Learned?

The sharing of the human experience, I have come to realize, is the foundation of all the moments that make my skin tingle and my heart hurt and the air around me pick up as if acknowledging my role in the universe. The alignment of the important things. Which is why my coffee this morning made me want to cry and the fried eggs I made for breakfast had me laughing alone in the kitchen. This is why I have told myself twelve times before noon today, “I am allowed to change my mind,” and how sweet and how heartbreaking life is once you realize this. How freeing and terrifying. 

And then to think of sharing my writing. To think of taking my words and my thoughts and creating a version of it I deem worthy of asking an audience to read. I fear it would suck all the soul out of it. Am I scared of how people would perceive my writing or who I would become if I was writing for the sake of being perceived? Right now writing is a precious release. There is a purity in knowing that the words are mine and mine alone and while I want to share them in pursuit of creating for others what other’s words have created for me, I am terrified. While I feel called to offer a moment of recognition, a connection born from someone else’s understanding of your experience entirely secular from your experience at all, I hesitate to taint the purity. And I fully acknowledge that I am being selfish. What if every writer before me kept their words to themselves? How lonely this world would be. 

So, the thing is, I don’t want to be a writer, I am a writer. A fact made true simply by my existence. By my need to cleanse my soul each morning in this release. Can you understand the complexities that live within my own mind at any given moment? Why nothing is simple but that the most simple moments are the ones that make me cry. I think what I’m feeling is akin to thankful. Overflowing with appreciation, maybe. But I’ll save you the exploration, and I’ll share with you my writing.

Part VI: And That Other Thing We Learned

I see design everywhere, in words, in music, in the windows and the trees in your sweater, in the way the ice settles on the bottom of glass or the way your peas play off your carrots, I see it in your smile and the way you tell me about your day and in the buttons on your shirt and the sun bouncing off the glass and through the water and on my cheeks and in my skin and the shape of your sandwich after the second bite then the seventh. I hear design in the cracks of the concrete and the curve of grass, in each step taken to the right and the shape of your knee bent backwards upside down, the colors of your soul or your bedspread, or your skin when it’s sunburnt. I feel it in my bones and into my teeth and it drips from my fingertips against the paper, or keys, or glass, or lips, or hair, or waist, or cloth, or wine, or the French fries I ate last week for dinner that reminded me of what shapes you can make with lines or the varying shades of tan or how salty and sweet and light and dark and heavy and soft all go together like lemons and limes or the same flavor different brand. I feel design as the underlying current of life when we wake up each morning, we create this life and take it apart and put it back together and today I chose the black sweater and tonight i’ll choose the yellow silk top and it tells me how to string together my words and my hands and which layer to add and which way to look for the sky.

Part VII: So, Where Are We Now?

Artist artist artist - lean into this feeling this knowing - you are not too much - this is your skill, your meaning, your natural ability -

I feel really differently and I have this ability to touch It, the feelings, with my fingers or my toes and to the right or the left or through the screen or holding it in my hand like paper or silk, I can turn down the volume or jump into the skin beside me , this is really special , and I feel the most right when I am down this rabbit hole, exploring - to be an artist is a relinquishment , of fighting against my true nature , allowing myself to fall