Like a little archeologist I stumbled upon a message from the past. It was not hidden in a bottle or within the depths of the Earth, but in one of my hard drives. This is something I wrote about 4 years ago, but somehow felt fresh and meaningful today so I thought it would be cool to share it with you.
Here it is, I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed rediscovering it!
I’m asking you to be useless. And necessary. I’m asking you to be inevitable.
I’m asking you to be out loud.
I’m not inviting you to work on your voice – it’s already there - or on yourself - that’s irrelevant.
I’m not inviting you to craft a sound so unique and beautiful nobody will forget. Or a life so successful and inspiring we can all learn from.
Be beautiful, sure. But be ugly, too. Be ordinary, be spectacular, be human. Please.
I’m asking you to be generous with your voice. I’m asking you to resist the temptation to turn it into a self-serving tool.
Speak out loud from love and abundance. Speak out loud past the brim of your own self, overflow beyond limitations and become much bigger than the boundaries of any possible fixed description of who you are.
I’m asking you to truly be an artist, in the broadest possible sense. Close your eyes and jump with the courage to be alive, in the face of our human fear to not be ready for what we may discover. Follow the path marked by your desires without asking them any questions or expecting anything in return. Listen carefully to the nudges of your soul without filling in the blanks.
Take your life out of your head and unleash it, resisting the need to do so in a “safe place”, a fenced area. Unleash your life and trust it, wherever it may lead you. Live unconditionally, with heartfelt abandon in the mud and in the sand, in the field and in the streams, in the peaks and in the valleys. Remember that whoever says that higher is always better, has never truly seen the unspeakable beauty of standing at the bottom of a valley.
I’m asking you to be a poet, an explorer. A being who’s willingly, unabashedly, unconditionally and wholeheartedly joining the Great Conversation of life which carried on through the ages and no, it has nothing to do with you.
At the same time everything is there ready to hear your voice, your contribution.
I’m asking you to join this collective act of co-creation where we create, change and transform each other by deeply listening and generously speaking – which is a speaking that comes from the deepest, truest part of us and is free from the insecurities of our personal thinking.
I am asking you to be courageous and let go of ‘you’. I am not inviting you to serve others, I’m asking you to let both ‘you’ and ‘others’ dissolve into a wider ‘We’ that knows no ‘them’.
I am asking you to celebrate what you don’t know, and see that there’s no bigger gift than standing on the edge of a poem you’ve never read before, a kiss not yet experienced, a day not yet created.
Because life is in what we do not know. Life is in the ever changing circumstances we find ourselves in. Life is in the mystery. Part of us, hoping to find relief, longs for a final answer and some control over the events. But the greatest gift is in the impossibility of “solving” life, in the fact that if we would become masters over it, life would dissolve before our eyes. Like Psyche losing Eros for the need to know his face. Do you dare to love in the dark?
I am asking you to recognize that the not said, the not accomplished, the not possible are not failure but the only foundations to invite and experience what we could not otherwise meet.
I am asking you to give, not as an investment to then take. But as a way of writing poems with flesh and blood. With kindness and an impersonal faith in who you truly are.
Ann Hamilton said “we live in a time when it is especially challenging to articulate the importance of experiences that don’t produce anything obvious, aren’t easily quantifiable, resist measurement, aren’t easily named, are categorically in-between”. I ask you to be courageous enough to take on that challenge. To BE the answer to that challenge. I am asking you to step out from the need to measure, assess and quantify and step into a wider, undefinable world. Free and Alive.
Why? Because we can only know love in the act of loving and not in trying to conform it to specific standards. We can only know creativity in the act of creating, not in the judgement of what has been made; we can only know life in the act of living, not in measuring success and moods.
Are you willing to be shaped and sharpened by the unknown? Are you willing to recognize the incomplete as the perfect response to a question too big and beautiful to be vilified by a complete answer? Are you willing to step over the edges of your world to become pure light, as well as the darkness it defies and it is wrapped by at the same time?
Love and wonder,
Nico