monique rust

turns out, usually: one in and of the same thing

=don’t get to spitting your dualistic, overly simplistic, coping-mechanistic ways of perceiving at me=
turns out, in my case:
i spent 35 (ok, maybe 36, 37, or even 38) years unknowingly clinging to the false prophet of an interesting affliction, a delusion of some version of something like “self-sufficiency.”
a belief that i did not need/get-to-ask-for HELP,
a notion, i know, that is at least as silly as it sounds.
but, still, i was so tightly wound in the wounds that it took (as it typically does) great suffering and tragic loss to see my own self, as she was.
“strengths” turn out to be the very weakest links with the most tenacious and broadest chances of transformative self-dis/re-covery.
here,
the pandora’s box of the wisdom of paradox opened on up to me,
as i laid myself, fully prostrate at the belly of the beast of source-energy and asked for the first thing i ever did:
clarity.
the wilderness was a welcome sight, an invitation i accepted and entered without hesitation…and i been trekking my way through ever since.

through (being the only true way “out”<—whatever that means) the journey, thus far, i have voluntarily and at times much less-so-“will”-ingly spun-out and surrendered to what i call “universal trust-fall”…you know, that exercise you go through at summer camp, where you fling away from gravity with only the promised support of that and those around you to catch your fall,
to save you from otherwise certain travesty.

i have slept on sides of slippery roads with only a switch-blade and a growing faith in loving my fate to protect me.
i have crossed the country, many times over, on planes, trains and automobiles.
i have air-b-n-d’d and hoteled and lived out of my car…i have found myself safe and sounder than ever ‘midst environs otherwise tisk-tisked,
living on and off of the powers of instinct and the lessons i have learned and the willingness to let go of the lousiest ones that had long siren-sung and swung from a set of rusty shackles, holding me tight to a place i never belonged.

and, though threatened and hunted and haunted as it was, that little light that forever lingers inside found its fertile soil…in the balance of the rising tide and nowhere to hide.
“horizon” became a simple awareness, not a desperation destination.
and its sight gets lost. a storm comes and blinds its vision.
and you sputter and spiral and lose your way…even travel in the wrong direction for a few days.
still, the dawn returns, once again (as and ever more) illuminating the Way.

i have gone from paralyzing, obsessively, feverishly fearing and running from the very thing that could set me free
[the reaching out for hands to hold, for the embrace to warm when my body gets too cold and for resources for which i (and all of us) have always held every right and even duty to ask] to a life more fully and wholly lived, vulnerable as can be.

openly and obviously and stunningly intertwined is your destiny with mine (and vice-versa, of course; i always known that).

here and there, though, the not-so crystal stair will stab you in your foot to force the cycle you must fulfill,
figuratively and quite literally,
if it requires sitting the fuck down and being STILL to work the rest of the way out.

so, just:
thank you.
overwhelming gratitude to every one of you who have been on this journey with me (in whatever form, seen and unseen),
to those few who maintain the path, even now…even as the final curtains begin to draw on a stage long-ago set,
to a table with the struggles and the delights of no regret.

July 22, 2020 by monique rust

monique rust

live online listening room

the blessing & the curse

…first of all (and finally)