I Am Soldier
The journey of the masculine towards the heart.
I am soldier. I am deadly and precise. I stand in full camo, armed to the teeth. I am silent and have no mercy. I am the perfect machine for coercion and extraction; For shaping the world in my image. I control, I decide. I root out the good from the evil. I live and you die. You do my bidding. I cannot rest until only I remain. In my project of dominion I know my heart as enemy, as messy and unpredictable. As weakness. As traitor. If I let my heart survive, I will lose my edge. I will be outsmarted. If I let pain enter my body, I will be annihilated by others like me. I must kill first. I must secure certainty.
I am enemy. I am the alien, the other side. I am the soldier’s heart. I am an invitation into relationship, into change, into new ideas. I am your mirror, your witness, your second sight that calls you to your purpose. I challenge your hegemony, I destabilize your regime of control by reminding you of love; of your love, of the truth that you are love. I am a crack in your armor. I am insurrection and rebellion. I am what you call weakness. What will I do to you if you don’t win?
I am the land. I am the brooks and the streams, the rivers and the ocean. I am the dew on morning leaves, the salamander and the cardinal. I am the stillness of snowfall and the cacophony of the thundering herd. I am the mosses, flowers, rocks and bodies. I am your body. You were me before you were you and will be me again. We are us, offering of ourselves our beauty and vibrancy, offering the companionship of each other’s essence. We hold each other in relationships of abundance, of gift, of mutual beneficence, of co-evolution and co-creation.
I am the slain and the slaughtered. I surrender to the softness of my body, I fall to your power. I offer myself at the end of your gun as your enemy and as your proxy for freedom. Your rifle tears through my flesh, blows out my brains, splatters my blood on the asphalt. I lay lifeless at your feet, an easy victim of your project of control. But around my body grow daisies, nourished by the iron of my blood borne down into soil. Even in death I threaten your paradigm, inviting you into your heart, sending you running into the depths of your soul to hide from the rivers of your heart's pain.
I am your body, slain and lying in a meadow. I am a collection of nerves and tissue, of synapse and filament, of biome and biomass. Even now I live, moving out from form into filial ties of dancing biota teeming at my periphery. In my unwinding I reveal the incredible design of your life and the bundles of energy bound into form against all odds. I am the incredible gift of love from the earth that no one can take away from you; the profound gift of having been poured into me even if for a short time; to feel her gravity, to take even one breath.
I am your reflection. I am the world looking back at you through foreign eyes. When you point your rifle at me you will find yourself at the barrel of my gun. In choosing to fire, in robbing me of my life’s full expression, in stealing my dreams, we both die. And in that climax of control, in that heart of destruction, is the moment when you will finally realize what it means to live. But in your eyes, trigger ready, I see that you are trapped. Frozen in your fear of relationship, captured by your own program of control. Powerless, in your dominion, to engage life. So I step away from your pointed rifle and circle you there, cast in polished bronze, beholding your pain and your fear; your battle wounds and your lonely heart.
I am child, activist and dreamer. The one who dares to cut against the grain, to defy convention, to imagine a different future. I pull you off your marble plinth and return you to the earth. I free you from the cast of your bronze prison. I pull you into the stream and watch you rust, watch you oxidize; watch the centuries of water come down as rain carry you back, molecule by molecule, to the great mother, until you are only minerals in the sand ready to nourish new life.
I am your lover. I receive you, broken, wounded, lost. I hold you up in your frailty, in your shortcomings. I see the scars behind your strength as I remove your armor and pull away your camouflage. My desire is to know you in your strength and weakness; In your hearts rage and in your body’s truth. To be in contact with your living skin, to be feeling, tasting and smelling you. To be in you, to allow myself to be taken by you, to explore your imperfections, your rough edges and your places still soft. I surrender to the pleasure of our relationship, to being voraciously consumed by your carnal hunger, to being changed by your love.
I am pleasure. I am the fullness, the protection, and the strength of union. I am not the guarantee, but the opportunity; not the guarantee, but the promise of having a body. I am the experience of coming to life. I am breath and body; I am soul in form. I am the spark and the fire. I am the sunrise and I am a warm bath. Even in pain I find you as resilience; in endurance and in learning. I am the delight of beginnings and the power of new choices. I am your destiny to become.
I am the myth of separation, the program of control. The illusion of security and dominion. I am the black landscape of your heart, the parts of you that you refuse to see. I am your wounds, your insecurities, your lies and your assumptions. I am the soldier and the enemy; the bully and the victim. I am everyone who has ever told you that you don’t matter and that you aren’t inherently worthy of love. I am anyone who told you that you must earn a living. I am your teacher, I have shown you to the meadow and the daisies. I have shown you into your lover’s hands. In the rain of your tears and in the brokenness of your heart I offer not the guarantee but the opportunity; not the guarantee but the promise of a better world.
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