River Self

This morning I woke with an ache in my chest,

a widening in my heart,

and a hush in my bones.

What a strange paradox we carry…

to ache with the sorrow of humanity

and yet expand with love so vast it feels uncontainable.

We arrive in blueprint innocence,

transparent… porous… alive to the world…

ever conscious,

ever blissful,

ever wise.

And then life begins to etch itself upon us…

first in the womb, as our cells form, as the body remembers...

then in birth, in those earliest moments before memory…

imprints so fine, so transparent…

we mistake them for simply us…

like a veil resting over the river of our being.

And as we grow, the heavier marks arrive...

the twists, the breaks, the coverings,

and somewhere along the way we forget!

We forget that beneath the armour and the strategies,

there is something that never broke…

that deep river self…

ever flowing,

ever conscious,

ever blissful,

ever wise.

I see the ones who hold this remembering…

those who midwife us back into wholeness.

They stand tall in their tenderness,

their hearts stretched wide enough to catch...

the tears, the laughter, the unspeakable grief.

They widen the space,

so that what has been compressed

might finally breathe again.

And I see the courage of those who step forward,

to be held… to be seen… to unlearn.

It is no small thing to choose this path,

to open the closed fist of survival,

and trust life to flow through once more.

This… this is what gives me hope…

not that suffering disappears,

but that we discover it was never the whole of us.

We are more vast than what happened,

we are more ancient than what we endured.

We are the river of life itself…

Shimmering uniquely,

ever conscious,

ever blissful,

ever wise.

© Fayenen, Sept 2025. All rights reserved.