Perhaps the hardest thing, most beautiful to be, is in our skin with reality
Kia ora,
My website is a creative space to explore what arises and to trust that the process of creativity has my back. It is a celebration of the growth and understanding that can come from our lived experience, moving us beyond the distress that invisibility and trauma burns into our neuro pathways.
I love that it is possible to transform these pathways. Allowing us to explore what lies beyond dehumanisation and the revolving door of bystanders. The later causing, without a doubt, the most harm. For every time the bystander chooses to dismiss us, they do so within a pantomime for which the sole purpose is to protect themselves from thinking thoughts.
The childlike trust we once had and gave to anyone without question, and the landing disillusionment of our being, leaves us able to now recognise that the greatest harm is done by those who choose to do nothing. It cuts the deepest because the power that they hold has the potential to be an incredible catalysts of healing and social change, so the comparison alone is baffling and crazy making. The choice to deny the undeniable serves to solidify our invisibility and is the common leverage for scapegoating us. This experience has, for some time, left me with no words. At fifty three years of age, with large pieces of my puzzle landing, those words come more easily now.
Since I was a child I have used creativity to find those unattainable words, perhaps in part because I do not now have the luxury of living in an illusion that protects me from reality and prevents me from thinking. I am grateful for the capacity to think more and more thoughts. I am thankful for the increasing distance that critical thinking gives me from the constructs that try to dilute this opportunity to live. Starting with movement away from false sectarian definitions of who I am, and the absurdity that it is sacrilegious to have the intrinsic curiosity to find out. Long may the distance travelled from the militant brainwashing of fundamentalism be exponential.
It is isolating on a level that my central nervous system seems unable to master within its current evolution. So perhaps out of desperation, I find myself in a practice of radical acceptance, that starts with,
Remembering where I was a year ago
Recognising where I am now
Imagining where I will be this time next year
We do this in the knowledge that there is no magical escape from mental distress and that respite and softness actually come with moving gently towards, not away from our pain. The daily work to stay safe and sane is, like an iceberg, extraordinary in its height, and depth below the surface. But it is not a badge of honour. What other choice do we have? The alternative is without hope, at its best it is the dullness of living-dead, and at its worst a premature death.
Perhaps I have invisibility to thank for my need to actively use creativity to make sense of experiences, to lean into, and then move out of, distress. I try to do this with the depth that creativity gives and the capacity that humour provides. This website is a vehicle for that process, a 1971 Transam if you like.
In closing, I’d like to share the lyrics of a songs I am currently recording and invite you to take a look around my website if it is of any use to you.
Aroha nui,
Sam RB
That’s Living
It feels like becoming human
Growing pains of the heart and mind
Spreading awkward wings
Flying short burst with heavy landings.
Endless apologies
To those that cared
To not reject
The duckling trapped
All those years
Mind bending torturous
Less than elegant
Survival of our persistently
Naive and unconsciousness dissociated being
Conditioned invisibility.
It’s not living
It’s not living.
My heart stopped
Each time you bullied me out of my skin
I fell slowly backwards into my bones
With nowhere to run
Trapped
I started
To stop moving.
It’s not living
It’s not living.
Numb agitation
We yearn to articulate
And then
After some time
Of pain and our heart breaking
It falls open and terrified.
Like a miracle
We never anticipate
Happening
It is safe enough to have the thought
And the beginning has begun
The air opens
And we can feel.
Arriving and landing
Inconveniently for some
Arriving and landing
In search of our skin
Earnestly beating
Rising and falling
Beyond their pretence
We did not land here
to live underground.
And that’s living
Thats living.
Sam RB ‘24
