Here is where I died.
I didn’t plan to die.
The death was slow,
A long torturous journey.
All that did not belong,
Came to cause pain,
So that it might return to the nothing,
From whence it came.
Slowly I turned to ash,
Parts of me lingering,
Clinging to life,
Fear asking to be looked at,
A clear out of all life’s strife.
I sat in the ashes,
Inspected them closely,
Clung to a few,
But none shall remain.
For here is the place,
I am born again.
Source: Santuario, Ana Maria (2022). A Journey of Subtraction. Faith in Change Publishing, London.
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About the poem…
“By way of God’s hand, I was burned to death, until the self the world made me no longer existed, not even in memory, and I sat as ash… fragments that no longer stuck together… just dust floating its own way to an early grave…
There is a way this body and mind work to allow my past to fall away, as moments unwanted, traumas, losses, and other painful experiences come to pass back through the way they came; in other words, what came into my ‘self’, learned to digest itself and work its way back out again. As programmed as any other, I deprogrammed my being, decoded the programmes making me, me, and found freedom beyond that journey. To be free of conditioning is the destination, but one must let go of everything to become so.
It is a challenge to explain invisible concepts, but with this poem, a little of the process I have survived comes to life, comes to be felt, expanded beyond my own awareness and comprehension, comes to find a place in the worlds of others, comes to be known and witnessed. I lived an ascension of sorts, a glimpse of the ultimate powers that be, those which came to lay me bare and reduce my pain to ash, all by ensuring that I felt every inch of it as it left me. Seven Years of Suffering, that’s the book that’s next, but apparently I have around three more months to suffer through before I can begin writing that chapter of life, and reconceptualising that which came through these poems into a short history of my small, yet full, inwards world and the lived transformation that ensued itself, without anything like my permission.
‘Be careful what you ask for, you may just get it’… a friend commented to me long ago… I asked for the truth of myself, and boy oh boy, did I get that in high definition! These are words to warn the braver souls out there… because when you ask for truth, or the end of your suffering, you must ask yourself whether you are really ready to allow the universe to provide the answers and for it to decide the direction you must go, because provide it does. You see, the delivery of your journey is never up to you, and once that first step is taken, once you invite this stuff in… there is no going backwards towards ignorance, towards the bliss of The Illusion of Known… when you step into the world of The Unknown and accept that there is only The Unknown, you cannot undo what is done… not ever.
And so, do burn if you will it to be so, and come here to find solace in the comprehension that even your burning is temporary, just have FAITH until it passes… and then take a big breath, because, more than likely, another bonfire is awaiting you around the corner.”
– Ana Maria Santuario – 2022.
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