Laugh and Be Loved

There is a fullness that does not ask permission.

It comes in waves — nausea, then breaking, then ground. My heart runs while I lie still, the way it runs when the body is in motion, except the body is not moving at all. I slow my breath on purpose, the way you slow a horse. Something in me is trying to be born, and I do not yet have the word for it.

I am good with words. This is not that. This is sensation wearing the shape of a woman, too large for the room she is standing in.

A few days ago I was on the Atlantic, in Ericeira. The water pulls differently here than it does at home, on the Mediterranean — the hills rise and fall under a different weight, and my body remembers the difference before my mind does.

The houses are whitewashed. The doors are trimmed in yellow, and they beckon toward something smooth I cannot yet name. People wanted to care for me, and I let them. There was ease in the day, and lightness, and underneath both of those, something stern — standing at attention, the way those yellow doors stand at attention against all that white.

I could not drink the wine. My body said no before I asked it anything. This is new. This is programming asking me to be specific. To be clear.

There are three places calling me right now, and all of them are true.

A mystery school, where I would sit inside cosmology and spirit and lead others there too. A shrub. A hot sauce. A honey. Something you can taste, something that feeds. And the oldest room of all — one on one, deep practice, my full attention resting on one person at a time.

All three feel like joy. None of them is the ache.

The ache is older than any of them.

Who do you think you are.

I have heard that question since I was a girl. Not always in those words — sometimes it came as a slight so small no one else would have caught it, sometimes as silence where welcome should have been, sometimes as a door that didn't open all the way. Enough times that the question stopped needing to be asked out loud. My body learned to ask it for them.

Who do you think you are — to be this much. To take up this room. To want to be received all at once instead of handed out in careful, curated portions. A boutique of empowerment. A sample size of your own authority, because the full bottle was too much to offer a girl like you.

That is the fear underneath the fullness. Not fear of the three paths. Fear of being a lot, and being offered so little in return.

So here — while the wine sits untouched and my heart still runs in a body lying still —

here is who I am.

I come from water that remembers everything. Haitian water, Bajan water, Geechee water rising and falling with the tide the way I am rising and falling now. I come from Cherokee ground and Choctaw ground, ground that was walked off of and still held the walking. I have sat inside the Vedas long enough to know that creation is not one story but many, told in many tongues, all of them true at once. I have trained the body long enough — hand to wrist, force redirected rather than fought — to know that the way through a thing that comes at you hard is never to block it. It is to turn, and let it pass through you, and remain standing.

This is not a mixture. This is not borrowing. This is what happens when five rivers actually meet in one body and stop pretending to be separate.

The old physicists knew this too — that pressure seeks release the way water seeks its level, that nothing pushes without needing somewhere to go. Birth is not a metaphor for this. Birth is the literal law. What is full must open. What opens is not broken. It is simply, finally, telling the truth about its own size.

Einstein knew it differently, and the same. Gravity is not only the force that holds things down — it is the curve that bends space until something breaks open, until a star collapses into the very density that lets it become something else. There is a constant in his equations that exists only to hold the tension between collapse and expansion — the universe pulling itself inward and pushing itself outward in the same breath. That is this. That is what I am lying inside.

Everything I know has descended into one point — one moment, one shore, one body — and at the same time, nothing is familiar. This is what a singularity feels like from the inside. Not destruction. Density. The place where the old laws stop applying and new ones have not been written yet.

On this Virgo new moon, my naked body under a dark sky releases all control and lets what is coming arrive.

No loss of sense. No loss of power. No loss of capacity. No loss of understanding the new structure — only the old requirement, finally gone: the requirement to explain yourself while you are living it.

So let the center of me tear open, if that is what it takes.

Let it be violent, if violent is the only word large enough. Let it be visceral. I am not managing this anymore. I am not making it smaller so it fits inside a room built for someone who agreed to stay small.

And on the other side of all that breaking —

not a bigger platform. Not a clearer offer. Not even peace, exactly.

Just this: