Letters to the big room : Ann

Wednesday, 2 October 2019


Dear Owen, Christine and Hayley 
 
What brings me to the big room? Everything….
 
But specifically? Hope, fear, smallness, shame and mystery. Voices that I want to hear. And service. Always service. 
 
I write this in the early morning after a dream where I am covered in caterpillars that already look like butterflies. I go outside and carefully place these creatures onto tall plants that I know will nourish them.
 
As the stories we live by crumble, I feel the tension between the letting go, the holding on, the wish for change and despair of what that could mean. 

One night last week, I lay awake listening to a man at the marina where I live screaming, shouting, having ‘a breakdown’.  How many screaming souls out there that night? Silent screams. Every night? In literal or metaphorical prisons. 
 
How many souls need to scream? My heart softens. But it wasn’t always that way. 
 
It isn’t always that way. Hello inner tyrant. 
 
Over the years, I’ve been invited to a few big rooms, sometimes gently, other times with shattering force. the big room was saying ‘come in’, but I didn’t understand its call. The details both matter and don’t matter. 
 
Mostly, I’ve retreated back into small rooms that felt comfortable, but never really were. My limbs don’t fit, I have to contort… there’s no air or space to breathe in such a tight space. I had to die over and over. 
 
I have a deep ache that lives inside me in different places at different times. It’s much, much older than I am, and I (I think), sense it in other people too. To feel a part of something, but not just anything.
 
the big room holds space for the hardness and softness and everything in between. The compassionate and the tyrant. 
 
I forget to remember. I need reminding: die, live, In, out. 
 
I need reminding that there is more to discover: selves, ways to see, voices. In the unseen and unheard, there is magic.
 
I know that now.
 
With love and gratitude for welcoming all of me in, 
Ann