I celebrate my fierce
More than once, I have been invited to consider that I speak only of love and beauty in my writings.
A few quotes frame my position. (There are many more, but these ones have been with me for a long time.)
This one from Kahlil Gibran
But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace
and love’s pleasure,
then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness
and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
into the seasonless world where you shall laugh,
but not with all of your laughter,
and weep,
but not all of your tears.
And this one from Hannah Arendt, philosopher and author who studied the banality of evil.
‘Evil thrives in apathy and cannot exist without it.’ Hannah Arendt
Silence makes us complicit.
What did you do? – our grandchildren ask us. I do not want to be the person who says I stayed silent. That I did not rail against the machine.
But more than quotes from others, my Pattern Integrity – the very essence of my being – is the justice warrior against the bullies of the world. The Spitfire.
I am that.
To not be this, to not write towards this, to ignore the dark, to not speak out…I would violate the essence of me – the very oxygen of my birth.
I am my anger. My ability to rage. My fierce. Most often, it is healthy and good. Sometimes, it rages without constraint and can harm. A lifetime of working on knowing that part of me, has helped.
But I will get it wrong. And I will hurt, without intention. For the Spitfire can be used for good and ill. I work ardently to use it for good.
I am also a poet, a lover. I cry so easily when animals are treated with cruelty. The innocent, the unable to speak or be represented. I am there to fight for them.
My well of compassion runs deep. I know the feeling of being thoroughly broken. Down. And down.
Where I do not trust the ground beneath my feet. That it will hold me up. I know this place.
I celebrate my fierce. My Spitfire. She is the counterfoil to the part of me that loves water, fluid, beauty and grace.
I am both.
Beauty only exists because of both. The light and the dark.
When I laugh, it is my everything laughing.
And when I weep, I am decimated.
This is to know Syntropy.
PS. Thank goodness for those people who are the counterfoil to my Spitfire. The world is balanced because of all of us.
Photo March 12 2025, Article written March 12th 2025
