The Last
Your heart tiptoed down the hall
out the door
across the street
as far as the other side of town
until the rubber band snapped
and took the rest of you
leaving a chasm in mine.
I filled it with words
first as entreaties
cried out ever so calmly
then etched onto endless pages
until the torrent ebbed
and shifted form.
One day
I realized I had written a poem
that wasn’t about us.
So this is my final for you.
One word
broken in two.
Good
bye.
Periodic Table of Emotions
There’s a science to this chemistry of avoiding combining catalytic connections between the heart and the head. Like all good experiments, something has to blow up, spill over, or make me choke to figure out what doesn’t work. Unfortunately, while actual scientists record the results to know what to avoid, as an artist, I tend to use a less clinical approach; the process has always been what interests me most. Even with the dances I choreograph, once they are done, it’s being in rehearsal I remember, not the finished work.
So in the lab of my life, I need to go back and redo again, and again, not remembering that it isn’t the amount of each element, but the fact that they don’t work together at all. Reminding me once again that this combination still produces a destabilizing outcome.
Longing and anticipation, anxiety and memory, anger and regret, self-medication and sorrow, these opposing components do not play nicely together in any setting, controlled or otherwise.
With compounding and identifying which interactions work well together, the balancing act is more nuanced, but I have found that these groupings are always from the same side of the spectrum. Calm and compassion, forgiveness and gratitude, awareness and curiosity, these always interplay quite nicely. Mixed with the right physical response, they can produce an alchemical conversion into a state of being that is calm, settled, almost at peace. With more subtle adjustments: a little more breathing, a little less fear, the sweet spot of spiritual sanity is attained. Not in the past or future but finally, gloriously, successfully in the present.
Exhale.
Now, where did I leave that glass of wine?
– Janaea Rose Lyn
5
4
I love this rhythm. Generally subdivided as 123, 12, or 12, 123, it’s my favorite to choreograph and drum. Dum dum dum, Tek tek. Dum dum, Tek tek tek. Or to jumpstart the clutch of my heart when it’s faltering. Boom boom boom, Bap bap. Boom boom, Bap bap bap.
Five is the number of wounded themes I have identified, where the best and worst of my impulses reside. It is the count of the primary pillars that inform my life. And let’s not forget the senses. Each has a primary pattern that is daily re-interpreted with subdivisions, changing accents, and syncopation, as I phrase the structured improvisation that is my life:
Belonging attention care, Trust guidance
Love service, Art beauty abundance
Sight sound smell, Taste touch
The first are my recent areas of intense scrutiny. What I didn’t get, what I long for, what I gave to a fault, what informed my behaviors, and where I attached the conviction that no longer serves me. Protective armor has its place, for a time. Defenseless, I have no choice but to give these to myself. The necessary cliché of healing my inner child so the adult me is integrated, interacting with intention and no longer in reaction. The work at hand.
Following are what nourish me, and each other. Soul food.
The last are trickier. Blinders finally off, the view is expansive, but the glare of seeing what is actually in front of me often requires a hat, something I never wore before. The volume of the voices in my head is louder, too. I lost my olfactory sense for a time, which has always been dominant for me, so it was disorienting to say the least. The day of the shock, it came back full force. It turns out I also needed some pharmaceutical assistance, so it’s now safely restored to the pantheon of pleasures. The final two can leave me aching, so I try not to focus on them as much since you’ve gone. I can enjoy eating and drinking again, but that’s not the flavor I miss. When we do see each other, I look forward to our parting hug, brief kiss of care, and the sensation of your scent landing lightly on my skin.
– Janaea Rose Lyn
Room to Move
Gravity, physics, and physical abilities notwithstanding, the primary partner in my dancing life was space. Moving in and through it, changing levels and planes, staying in place or inverting perspective, all of this expanded my expressiveness. Space is tangible. It has weight and viscosity. It’s more obvious when it duets with water or temperature and can be felt as humidity or an icy chill, but it shimmers all the time. Pay attention, and you’ll see.
Now I am navigating a whole other relationship to spaciousness, interiority. My head and heart growing to make room for a different kind of locomotion. I have always worked on my inner self, but as with training my outer self, neither produced outcomes as quickly as hoped. With time, the results were evident in both areas. I have many decades of practice under my belt.
Unencumbered by the grueling demands of the life I once lived, I find I am working harder than I ever have. My daily spiritual practice takes as long as a New York City technique class once did. Once completed, I am not sweating on the outside but equally as exhilarated within. Filled with insights, understanding, and shifting perceptions, I may look the same to others, but invisibly, I am more gracious and accepting. I am less encumbered by my psychology, and am learning how to get, and stay, out of my old ways. I no longer get as easily ensnared in the drama of others.
I have blood memory and bone density, even if my flesh is a little more wrinkled. I often get compliments on my long, salt and pepper mermaid hair. You have to earn that, and I can live underwater now. I can breathe in both worlds. The vastness of emptiness is not terrifying anymore because I have found that when I fall, I can also grow wings. I have met divine mentors and apprenticed myself. I was always a serious student, though to my chagrin, not always a quick learner.
Like the air that surrounded me onstage, unseen by the audience but charged nonetheless, I am a lone but no longer alone.
I’m in good company.
– Janaea Rose Lyn
See Through
Where stone and pillar held firm and formidable, diagonal canyons of air and light form transient shadow and shape.
Strange how echoes become visible when belonging to either side.
Confessions and fervent prayers drift past in full view, no longer needing to seep through cracks to escape.
Bored eyerolls and questionable gestures intended for childhood crushes across a pew look lost, eternally seeking a response no longer forthcoming.
The curious daughter of the tree out back
climbed as the perfect perch
to hold hands, steal a kiss,
has entered as a congregant of trunk and branch.
Deeply exquisite is this state of exposure.
Nothing ruined, only revealed.
Centuries of lives that cobbled these stones with their stories, only to find their place with one. At their head.
Sun replacing stained glass becomes the window witness.
– Janaea Rose Lyn
Photo: All Hallows House, Alison Butler (2023)