TIGHTROPE WALKER
tightrope walker
27 poems of grace and hunger
This is a description and the afterword for my new poetry collection, available now! click above :)
DESCRIPTION
During challenging times that included wild fires and a pandemic, the author was stranded in a strange land.
In profound isolation, but sheltered in the arms of the natural world, a sanctuary she knew as a little girl, she traveled through uncharted territories of “grace and hunger”, within and without.
She was following a thin, but luminous thread of beauty, at times haltingly walking on it, as a merciful tightrope over the abyss of uncertainty and fear.
This collection of poems was born from this paradoxically fertile, but shaky ground — terra non firma — that allowed a deep dive into healing of personal and collective trauma.
The symbolic initiation of these words, an amalgam of awe, pain and bewilderment, coalescing into the small artifact of a book, against all odds, is a veritable soul retrieval, as much as a soul offering.
AFTERWORD
I’ve had a love and hate relationship with words.
Eager to learn the mysterious alphabet in my vintage Spanish syllabary, I started teaching myself to read and write early on. But it was a disrupted endeavor, as in those tender years I was facing a great deal of trauma, that included going back and forth between 2 continents, 2 countries, 2 cultures, 2 languages...
So in spite of my love of words, something kept me from sharing anything in written form for decades, even though I was expressing myself in the sister visual arts.
But my writing, tended to vanish, or be destroyed.
This book attempted to be born during the pandemic. Here I share a glimpse at the process I went through, as I feel within it may lay a certain element of healing available for someone. Maybe you.
I remember cutting up my Dear Diary into tiny pieces as a little girl, before throwing them in the trash. And of course, there’s that event of my accumulated journals “falling” in mass through a trash chute (see “Vertigo” poem). Later on, my words would be invited to dance within the flames of a funerary pyre, from time to time, or would otherwise have freak accidents.
One of those happened during the pandemic, when a book was finally taking full form. Then, I lost about a year’s worth of work and poetry translations (the most difficult writing task, I believe!) to an inexplicable tech hiccup. This, with TWO protective back up clouds in place.
It was then that I realized something deeper (was at work), linked to early trauma, both personal and political, which had secretly undermined my inherent sense of safety to such a degree, I had been unwittingly muzzling myself.
It wasn’t even about what I was to say, or how. It had become an invisible malaise that spread it’s white void onto the empty page, onto the empty canvas, and eventually turned into a deafening silence that eerily pervaded my life for a while. It wasn’t the contemplative silence of “dissolving into soul”. Of communing with the divine. It was the tacit, lifeless hollowness of dried bones.
This, for a person normally haunted day and night by overly giving muses.
It took me decades to admit the level of sustained trauma I had incurred as a child. It wasn’t acknowledged and so I didn’t speak much about it, as it’s often the case, out of confusion, fear, gaslighting, or to protect others. Also, out of what I see now as a kind of survivor’s guilt, (“it wasn’t that bad, I’m alive ...right?”). So I somewhat gracefully danced, and limped, on the tightrope of what could be labeled as C-PTSD nowadays. Adding to a sensitive nature, my body called for attention by channeling all that stress towards pains, and incurable, chronic, or mysterious illnesses, that provided my challenging training ground as a healer.
After long travels, pertinent to such healing and my spiritual growth, I was brought back to the US by the sale of some artworks (now Public Art at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, CA), and the pandemic caught me in nomad mode, stranded in a strange land.
Hard times for many, indeed, survival was difficult, truth be told, and I had to move several times, in the midsts of the severe collective alienation and distress.
The pressure of these conditions may have proved instrumental for a layer of healing; retrieving missing memories from the dusty corners of my psyche. To finally have that grim puzzle of bones coalesce into a more recognizable creature (Last Night poem), that explained in a hushed whisper, a few perplexing things. But I had to digest these findings of personal trauma in the context of their uncanny, scary replay, at several levels at once…
Holding tightly to a thin thread of grace, of beauty, has always saved me. So in my sheer loneliness and shattering, I communed with nature, and specially trees, my refuge since childhood, my portals to divine love (Refuge poem). And writing, at a time when very little art was pouring through me, as I was bouncing about with a tiny purple suitcase, hauling my own bewilderment.
So the loss of part of my writing was obviously entwined with these experiences.
Later, when I gathered the courage to pick up the remains of said book, to make a smaller, introductory version, this started triggering unfathomable anguish, and no amount of explanations around the lines of a severe inner critic or such things made sense anymore. So it was memory again, that brought elucidation. It wasn’t a suppressed one, it was the sudden rise of a key remembrance of collective, political trauma, where in a very shocking, violent, archetypal way, my people were “taught” what would happen to us if we spoke up.
I was around 11 years old, and back in Chile for good, with Pinochet’s Dictatorship in full gory swing. I was walking from school to my grandparents, with whom I lived, when I found myself caught in the middle of an inescapable frenzy of panicked people, sirens, racing police cars, etc. I later found out just a few minutes before, a couple of people had been kidnapped right there, while picking up their children at a small school. In a case that became famous, 2 journalists and a professor were taken, then “disappeared”, their bodies found later on, with their throats slit, as a message to any dissidents...
Sorry for the graphic image, but when the horror of the memory hit me, it came with a deeper understanding, where I contemplated the symbolic aspect of the throat, as expression, as voice. The Throat Chakra, our ability to speak our truth.
At the time, not withstanding outrage, there was no plausible explanation, no way of making things right, or soothing the collective terror in a system that was to continue for years. And so we each processed this, and other such events internally, the best we could. For many of us the healing is still in progress; we are still working on our own bone puzzles to have them coalesce, in order to paradoxically, let the dead be dead… And I have to let you know this is not just a fanciful metaphor.
I do not believe my case to be special. I think the pandemic brought an opportunity for purging and healing of collective dissociation, and personal trauma. Primal soul loss, loss of inner and outer ground, loss of voice. Trauma that can ripple on a large scale, and is also inflicted upon the very Earth.
This book, and the queued ones perhaps following, is simply a grain of sand. My soul is as expansive as my body can be painful, so I won’t be a poster child or focus on this as a single subject. I am stitching a broken circle with red thread, hopefully giving myself some symbolic closure, by naming and honoring little parts of my process. By this, I am humbly offering homage and impossible amends to the silenced ones, to the many that go through such experiences, in one way or another, to this day, around the world.