On Pain.

I am not proud of my pain. Because first of all, it isn't mine, and I want no part of it. Pain is not a 'life experience'. It is something you always try to squirm away from, somehow, the way you know how to.

This is a writers' site, and is thus a place to produce books - not bound pages like you find in libraries, not stories trying to be told, but the living exodus of words from the vast city of your heart. The every word of a writer is a rebel Egyptian slave.

What is the Ark of the Israelites? The tablets of Moses are the most perfect book in existence, because its people have ran from the Pharoah for thousands of years, after that single situation. The Pharoah is dead, Egypt is a place Jews can never stand in confrontation again. But the Ark remains as the exquisite pain, the thousand year flinch.

After a couple of days, almost all I have seen here are modern slave words, books of proud pain.

If you choose love as the ground you will stand on, or pain, or thought, fishing, accountancy, anything, you first let it build until you are nothing but the love, the pain. Then, it becomes a part of you, something you take for granted as if it were your eyes, your heartbeat. At this pont, it becomes nothing, invisible, and you can finally see past it to all the other things in immediate, prime contact with you. Before you get to this point, you are living in nothing but pure terror, without being able to accept it. I can say this because I, as well as everyone else, have been there, when I was in my teens. You say, WHAT SHOULD I DO?????

Words: You run from the Pharoah. To where? Israel does not yet exist, except within you. Is the written page your Israel? Are drugs? Is pain? It's more of a challenge to have the non-existent as your friend. Start there, in the zero of Israel.

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A concrete example of this, I would put forward the song 'Ancestors' by Björk. On first listen it would seem to be written in the language of pain, but it is a joyful song of the acceptance of one's body, which is in fact her lifelong theme. It's also the reason she can do really strange things and still come out smelling like roses. And by following this formula, you can too!