To Be Weight

anchor-like.

I’ve been thinking lately about what it means to hold/be weight. And by weight I mean the conviction of feeling, the inability to neglect the heart, the construct of all that one’s aliveness has to bear.

By weight, I mean the way of living with no experience of triviality, submerged in the deep end while learning how to gather one’s breath under water.

ẹniafẹ isis

wrote a beautiful piece that got my mind in motion, in which she asked: What does it mean to be weight (like an anchor)?

An anchor spends its time submerged. It grows acquainted with depth, is not intimidated by the expanse of water/of being. An anchor roots, brings stillness, exercises resistance to the currents and winds in order to keep its vessel in place. An anchor always brings one back into themself, as a grounding.

I believe to be weight, anchor-like, is to bind one’s heart to feeling. To not abandon/forsake/fail to tend to the heaviness that is (me/us/ all things that live and breathe and be). I believe it is to be tethered to one’s emotional experiences, in tune with the hymnal of one’s own being.

I believe to be weight, anchor-like, is to not disregard the depth of one’s concern — be it beautiful matter or a visceral, soul-cutting ache. In many ways, it is to be vast and wide and unknown, like foreign language drifting across the ears of those not familiar with its native land.

I believe to be weight, anchor-like, is to know no difference between love and grief. To acknowledge grief as an extension of love and love as an extension of this very commodity: weight.

Without weight — be it the anchor-like heaviness, the burden of one’s suffering, or the liability to take notice to all things — the opportunity for such a force of love would be diluted to a state of indifference/apathy.

In returning to a former post of mine (because I am always going back, collecting deeper wisdom, gaining more comprehension of self), I realize that the weight of indifference is incomparable to the weight of love. One comes at more of a cost while the other is invaluable. One is lifeless while the other remains in motion — a heart-bend.

I am unable to deny my sight, therefore I cannot abate my feelings. I cannot abort my conviction to be a witness to the woes and the wonders of this world. I have come to accept that the heart-bend is necessity for my construction of meaning. Without the tiny flutters, without the creases in this blood-pumping organ of mine, life is a vain and hollow experience. It is within the act of bending, the stopping just short of breaking, that my soul swells with revelation time and time again.

It is the heart-bend, the anchor-like weight, that seeks for me to keep myself available to concern. To have constant regard of self — and of others.

If my heart was made for love, is there any other way?

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