Loose Flesh, A Woman’s Love

Holding the flesh of my thigh, known to the patriarchal world as cellulite

Get a tummy tuck, get fat reducer, diet.

A woman, learned to hate that flesh

The chunky, gooey, top of the stomach, called muffin tops.

That curvy Renaissance woman, naked across the couch

Only a woman can love the white, silk, soft flesh.

No muscles, or workout, or gyms or hundred mile races

Just her gelatin flesh, her body, the matter of body, the woman

The earth. Woman is the body

Women stopped loving themselves, too soft and cushy to fall into

Like pillows or clouds, but the strength in that hanging flesh

Is my grandmother’s iron hand and tough survival.

Loving the woman who eats Crisco and dives into the ocean off of cliffs

The light of the moon shines on her full buttocks.

Women who inject silicone to get that buttocks curve like a hill

Flat tummies, six pack, ripples across the gut, a man’s body

Only a woman can love a woman in the way a woman loves

I am only first beginning to love as a woman can love myself

I was beaten to be stiff, silent and pretty, a hard pretty, that had no lose ends or fuzzy

Ends curled, only neat and clean

A woman as a wolf, peeing, her legs open and sniffing the leaves, in the dirt

That is how a woman loves herself.

Marta Luzim’s Writing the Wave: Mama Stop!

I wanted to tell you Mama, as you died, as you sat drugged on anti-psychotic medication, barely breathing, feeding tube up your nose and down your throat, because you refused to eat. I wanted to tell you Mama, as you threw me down the stairs, pulled my hair, slapped me across the face, tried to drown me in a tub of sudsy water when I was six. Mama I wanted to tell you as you held a knife to my throat, stood on the ledge of our window in your bra and underpants, rain pouring down and you wanted to jump and kill yourself. Mama I wanted to tell you, no, scream at you, no, grab you by the hair, squeeze your breasts and grasp your cold hands and say “STOP. STOP YOU CRAZY BITCH. I NEED TO BELONG TO YOU!”

Marta Luzim’s Writing the Wave: Mama, Your Body is Mine

Green, red, sky clouds of swimming blue

Lavender, squirrels, shapes of bushes wave

Huge oaks, roots groping into the earth

Majestic house of soul, large windows, waving blossoms of light

Coolness in the air with warmth that flutters through the breeze

This is life mama, this is life mama.

Mama. You taught me to say, Fuck, cunt, bite, pull, eat shit, vomit, dump explode. Mama this life, all of this

Warm, exited touches of heat, voices calling whispers

Deep longing

Comfort, nourishment, stomach filled with medicine of community

Wild Gods and Goddesses

Gift of unbridled passion

Do you hear me mama?

Touch and ignite the cosmic orgasm

Releasing all hurt, pain, holes of despair, pockets of longing

The love that never ends.

Mama, my body is my teacher. The body you said stunk when I played outside. My body that you reached to when you were in pain. Ran your black rain into my skin and cells. It felt like love to me.

My body awakens me in my sleep.

It needs food, soul food, earth food, stomach food

She whispers go here, go there, go everywhere inside of me

Tiny fingers and angel wings flap and massage me

Say, listen, listen, listen

Healing chants and visions, herbs, nature’s harmony.

My body is my legacy Mama.

Every woman, grandma, daughter and child who has walked the earth

She is the diva woman, dancing, swirling to the orgasmic plunge of the universe

She seeps into every pore, cell, vein of blood

Circular in the moment explodes into the womb, down the uterus, out the vagina

To find my voice…scream out…MAMA!

The moment, the seconds, the generations, the eons of life

Awakened in the Garden, the Tree of Life, Eve bit and it all began

You thought you were sin, wrong, unworthy.

But no more. My body is my teacher. She digs to live in my soul

Belonging to the body is the legacy; the women

Wild and dangerous, soft and compassionate, full of life,

Deeply surrender to the raging energy of love.

Not of violence, Mama

The eyes of the Shekinah: Astarte, Isis, Esther, Sarah, Leah, Rebecca, Mary

Creating the universe where fear and separation is at rest

I see you mama

Arms silent on your heart.

Breath no more

Soul floats away.

Can you hear me mama?

I am left here to continue on…

The past is the past and it still echoes in my present, dances in my dreams

And holds a candle to my present where I see a light in the distance to an

Unknown future.

But your face, mama, is there. Through the veils of time.

And a longing that remains…always.

Marta Luzim’s Writing the Wave: Mama’s Breasts

I was six when I saw mama naked form the waist up. Mama’s breasts were large, round and fleshy. I stared at them with wonder. I asked, “Mommy, when will I have those?” I pointed to her breasts.

“Later. Much later.” She said.

They became a mantra of sight. The image of her breasts. Mama, your breasts lift out of your cocktail dress. Hang over your skimpy nightgown, stick out in your turtleneck like fat bullets. You wanted the world to see your breasts. But your breast teachings were, “Never let anyone touch your body. Men are like dogs, they go from fire hydrant to fire hydrant.”

I hungered for the nurturance of your breasts, but they were made of mud and steel. You taught me to squelch my orgasms, to hate the smell of my body. So I fucked every bad boy to bond with the hatred you leaked all over onto me.

Mama. Considerable superficial charm and average intelligence

Absence of delusions or other signs of irrational thinking

Unreliable, disregards obligations, no sense of responsibility

Untruthful and insincere

Lack of remorse, no sense of shame

Poor judgment, does not learn from mistakes

Self-centeredness, incapacity for real love and attachment

No true insight, inability to see oneself as others do

Ingratitude, egocentric

Vulgarity, rudeness, quick mood shifts

Impersonal sex life

Failure to have a life plan

Personality disorder – traits are inflexible and maladaptive and cause either

Significant impairment in social and occupational functioning and subjective distress

Intensity

Intensity

Sexual intensity

Sexual release

Sexual intensity and insanity

Intensity of the insanity feels like the intensity

Of the sexuality.

How is this?

I seek…creatively?

How is this?

I don’t understand

Brain scrambling

Attachment disorder

Body feverish

Soul sadness

Life with mama


Appetites of a Borderline

Borderline Personality is characterized by a pervasive pattern of unstable relationships, self-image, emotions and impulse control. Borderlines are emotional hemophiliacs.

The conditions can manifest themselves through, among other things, “angry outbursts” and/or “chronic feelings of emptiness.”

The terror
The voice
The purpose
The permission
The process

Raw, no skin, emotional hemophiliac
Insanity
Suspicion
Secrets
Signs of trickery
Jealous
Blame others
Take offense
Augmentative
And tense
Responses shallow
Cold
Humorless
Instability in relationships
Mood and self image
Attitudes, feelings
Change inexplicably
Over short periods of time
Unpredictable, irritable
Argumentative
Moods shift abruptly
Impulsive
No sense of self
Remain uncertain with life
Intense one-on-one relationships
Which usually are stormy, transient
And brief,
Evaluates others with no real concern
For them
Chronic depression and emptiness
Manipulative attempts at suicide
Psychotic under emotional stress
Hysterical personality
Overly dramatic-always drawing
Attention to themselves
Emotionally expressive to unusual degree
Angry overreactions to minor annoyances
Quick to boredom with normal routines
Interpersonal problems are frequent
Manipulative
Seductive
Dependent
Constant demands on others
Vain, shallow, ungenuine and inconsiderate
Moral insanity
Lunacy
Sociopath

Enlightenment

“I’d would rather walk with God in the dark than go alone in the light.” – Mary Gardiner Brainard

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  – Hebrews 11:1

“Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.” – Paul Tillich

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” – Voltaire

“Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture…Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.”  – Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

Enlightenment

SOME LINES: “Our mother cautions us, every time you turn around certain you have lost something/afraid you have left it behind/you have, you have…”

I peer over my shoulder. I see webs of my shadow life. The past holds the secrets of what I grieve now. It is a dark, murky road. A starving muddy betrayal when life whispers visions of fullness, that turns on you and offers your head on a platter.

Enlightenment.

This time travel trip to an outpost of humanity, where few seem to reach. This perfect Eden, this place where dreams come true– Jiminy Cricket singing when you wish upon a star. And poof your dreams come true.

Enlightenment.

Up against your own self loathing and protruding belly fattening you up for the kill. Feed off this lightness of being. It is so yummy and lustful and ecstatic, this promise for the land of Milk and Honey.

I look in the mirror. I wonder, how did I get here? How did this body take me down into the gutter of despair? I meditated, spruced it with oils, fed it organics, ran like a warrior through the streets, to get a tight butt and a flat stomach. And then, hidden between the tiniest of cracks in my cells, left over trauma and unexpressed rage sunk down deep. I thought I had the answers, and now I don’t even know which is north or south inside of my broken compass system.

Mindfulness, accept, presence, be here now. Enlightenment.

So I sit. My mind races, judgment, judgment, fear, fear, rejection, rejection. I want youth and beauty. I want a long, hard, sweaty orgasm. I want to eat milky ways, oreo cookies and gooey cheese burritos. I want to dance along the Seine, I want to eat pasta in Tuscany, I want to watch the sun roll over the Colorado Rockies. Instead I rock in my arms, sobbing, praying, wondering when my enlightenment packed its bags and said, “I’m going elsewhere, you don’t deserve to be happy.’

Enlightenment – Dark Night of the Soul.

Enlightenment says. “I won’t stay by your side while you go through the dark tunnel. I’m going where the sun is sunnier, where the smiles are brighter and you can’t have me unless you think positive all the time…and you can love everyone. Or I’m out of here.”

I let you go, enlightenment, to find another host that can find love in a war zone. I can’t. My heart breaks and crumples on top of the dead bodies, powerless, unable to resurrect my soul, let alone anyone else’s.

Enlightenment took my head and twisted it around, said you can make this happen, you can make this transform, you can create reality. And then the body caved in, my mind went insane watching the death, suicide of walking souls, and then it said, you did this. YOU…IT IS YOUR FAULT THAT YOU ARE HUMAN.

I dreamt, maybe this will go away, this hurt, pain and body annihilation. I can make this disappear, I can anti-age, I can be physically immortal. I can walk on water and the suffering in my belly will disappear.

Enlightenment tapped its ruler against the chalkboard and said, “Every horrible disease has a silver lining.”

So I dove into the glitter and glitz to find this silver lining and demons ate me alive. Gang wars, rape, and abductions of innocent children. Terrorists beating women into submission. Women who sit in corporate easy chairs, smoking cigars and thinking that they broke the glass ceiling, when all they have is the scars of broken glass that cut their veins.

Enlightenment.

I see the bright lights and neon signs that flash Peace Now, All you need is love, Make Love Not War. I hear them calling to me. But inside, enlightenment has shriveled up into an old lady waiting for the Gates of Heaven to drop down on her head and smash all her dreams. The song still sings in my head. One day your prince will come. I am woman, hear me roar. Then the song dies and beats of wind, thunder, a smack across the head, and wake up you idiot, this is all a dream anyway. You never really existed in the first place.

Enlightenment.

The story ends. And begins. Does anyone want to be saved? Hallelujah. Can I be saved? Hallelujah. Enlightenment even kills the young babes.

Enlightenment.

Your waves of destruction are so huge and big and impossible to swim. I’m first learning to surf, doggy paddle, and maybe, just maybe I won’t drown. I want a new body. I want my body to work. I don’t know how.

Enlightenment, why did you leave me?

I hold a candle, waiting for your return. I am waiting. Waiting and waiting. Come on, enlightenment, I’m hanging on the cross here. I’m fading, going. Blood eyes, fangs waiting for the kill. Enlightenment, what big teeth you have. Suck me dry. Life support. BEEEP!

“Come into my heart now/ I write/ whoever you are out there…” “Substances mixed with water/ fumes, no name for them/ smelling worse than a sewer…” “How many are moving/ not in belief/ only in homelessness/ not in communion/ only in blood and woundedness.”

Enlightenment is human.

A woman hungry on the side of the road. A child reaching for a hand. A smile that comes from heartbreak. A long road to heaven. Enlightenment, I see and feel you in the dark.

 

The Death of Goddesses
by Erica Jong

It used to be hard for women, snowed in their white lives, white lies, to write books with that fine frenzy which commends genius to posterity, yet estranges it from its closest friends.

Women were friends to all, & being too friendly they could not command the unfriendly prerogatives of genius, though some were geniuses still, destroying only themselves with the torment of the unfriendly ghost trapped in a friendly form.

Oh the women who died dissembling friendship for the world! Oh the women who turned the dagger inward when it wished to go out, who impaled themselves on Womanhood itself!

No vampire could be as greedy for blood, no father or husband as bullying. A woman punishing herself with her own pain is a fierce opponent indeed.

It is self against self, dagger to dagger, blood of her blood, blood of her daughter, blood of her mother, her menses, her moon, all pooled together, one crimson sea.

It is the awful auto da fé, the sublime seppuku, Sante Sebastiana as archer & victim too.
The arrow flies from her bow. She runs, fleet as Diana, & stops it with her breast.

Enough! cried the Women-Who-Cared. Henceforth we will turn our anger where it belongs. We will banish the whitest lies. We will speak the black truth as it is. Our father– we spit back their sperm. Our husbands– we spit back their names. Our brothers– we suck back our love.

The self-righteous inherit the earth, & anger speaks louder than love. Love is a softness the weak cannot afford, & sex a Darwinian bribe.

But who wants the earth as a gift when it is empty as space, when women grow hard as bronze madonnas & Diana loves only her stag?

When Persephone stays in hell the entire year, then how can spring begin?

© Erica Mann Jong

Hot Tears – by Marta Luzim, MS

“Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become a woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child’s blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality….I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.”

― Anaïs Nin

Hot Tears

by Marta Luzim, MS

After my mother’s death and sister’s suicide, I went to a therapist who specialized in grief. As my grief tumbled out of my belly, I began to beat pillows and yelp. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed counselor sat still and quietly said, “If you put a pillow over your mouth, you won’t disturb the other people in the building.”

REALLY?

Well, let me scream so loud in your face that your eyelashes burn and your freakin tongue falls out of your mouth…ARE YOU KIDDING ME? When did our grief become quiet and polite? How do we love each other, really love each other, and escape from this matrix, this hypnotic state, this brainwashing of nothingness, meaningless, coldness, and numbness. I want to touch, feel, attach. I want to know, live, breathe. I suffer, I cry and I break. And I rebuild, rebirth and keep walking with a limp. I am human…human, goddamit!! With a Spirit and Soul. My soul teaches me to be human, shows me the way, that I am human. They lead me with a iron hand and a soft heart pointing. I have to walk through the fire of my own body and feel all that is there to feel. Like the ancients who howled, and beat their chests when their loved ones died. If I allow myself to love the imperfections that reek from my body and mind, then I can call out my own name with joy. This spirit wants me to know how small and fragile I am, the soul, how resilient and strong I am.

Life is a rhyme that is unrhymeable. It makes no sense, and only feeding the soul with voices of passion that cry, laugh and grieve can I truly live. I can go and on and on, yelping like a lunatic, because I have no answers. All I can do is strip until there is only skin, bones and sweat standing in front of me.

What matters now is that I take my insides and turn them out. That I stop playing the game, the mass deception, that women are not women, but have become men. In their empty stares, and stark starched smiles, and positive attitudes that wipe out all the mourns and groans that breathes life into the lungs and heart. Women fought to be equal to men, and they won that war only to lose their compassion and soul. What matters is that I find the deep woman, the fiery woman, heated, juicy woman who steps out of her camouflage, strips the vines that choke her scream, and allows her throat to shake with grief; She is the belly of the womb. She is the one who sucks, eats and births. What matters is that I am here. Right here sitting on this chair, writing, saying whatever I want to say. That I find my voice and let others find their own. That I let my tits hang, and my vagina dry up, and moisten it with my soul. That I use lubricators and pump up the volume so I can hear the growl of hunger through my ovaries. That my feet feel the soles of the grass and step away from being the maiden and run towards being the crone. Sitting alone, waiting for other crones to show up because they’re sick and tired of what the world has to offer them: empty promises and fake gods. That they want to create new worlds they can build together. Not made of botox, belly tucks, hair extensions and eyelifts. Not worlds of millionaires, running the country dry. Not worlds of being good daughters or wives, or whatever the roles dictate. But a world that cares for the soul, the heart, the desire, the love, the despair, my reason for being.

Only in that journey will I find my moon soul.

The woman who hides, afraid of her own scream, represses evolution of the feminine. The ache of her longing needs to be seen, cradled like a babe, nourished with the sun’s heat that sweats the skin and opens her heart to rage, that stops her from pretending.

I thought myself strong, independent, the skies the limit. And now the Goddess, God or whatever creates this whole crazy-making universe decided to throw me down to my knees. Praying, yelping, howling for faith to restore me. Now I whimper and whine and kick and hurt, vomit and stink and lean on everyone that will offer me a soft shoulder to hold, not pull away from the stench of my fear and anxiety.

To be lost, vulnerable and let everyone see my guts hanging out, my head over a toilet bowl, holding myself in a womb-like embrace, is an embarrassment. The clothes I wear to hide are pride, ego and toughness — and I think this is good? We are told that to be lost and afraid is wrong. I need to put on my war paint and fight the demons, and to evolve toward the light.

At the end of the road, there is this light…the light of just being.

Play acting? No, it is not worth it. Let’s find kindred spirits who are strong, loud and disgusting, gross and yelps with grief. They pound on the drum, calling for all to wail as crazy, nuts and obnoxious as they can be. Let’s make the world uncomfortable with screams, like the baby who won’t stop crying and crying, and no matter what you do, they won’t stop until they are ready. That is the woman’s cry, that is the woman’s strength. To keep going, keep yelling, strip off the suit of man and wear the soft, pliable skin of woman, the one who saves souls, who eats grass, trees, and plants the seeds of moonbeams in the water.

This is what is worth living for. I don’t want to wear fake clothes, I don’t want to pay taxes that man-made systems have built, which takes that money and uses it for their own greed, not to feed the poor, sick or aged. They think themselves immortal, powerful, beyond death and judgment. Who are THEY kidding? Who am I kidding to try to fit into this mind-fuck jibberish of power and control? Why live up to false gods that speed us toward illness and death of the heart? What is the middle, the balance, the tenderness?

I am learning through my grief body, through the suffering that squeezes every ounce of love from my skin. I want that love, that deep orgasmic, drooling, mystical love. I grieve lost ecstasy. The euphoria children are born with. Then the rules, the have to’s, the should’s, the do it right, be appropriate, don’t be too much, too sensitive, too loud, and parents smack the children dry, closing down the roots of life that spawns from their gentials. Then the soul is raped and scourched.

I grieve my lost self. My mother’s lost self. My sister’s lost self. My grandmother’s lost self. The lost feminine whose voice is raw from decay. Let’s dance around the fire, frenzied and alive, and SCREAM out. I CAN GRIEVE LIKE AN ANIMAL! I am the innocence, the rapture, the continuation.

Marta Luzim’s Writing the Wave – How Will I Keep Living?

Down on my knees, clutching my hands to my heart, I pray to the stars, the desolate flames of the night that run into rivers of stars. I pray. How do I live? I pray. What do I claim as my own vision? What vision will claim me?

My vision, it hides in my groin, it takes my breath away. It tightens my thighs so I can’t feel the passion of my own dreams. What lingers in my cells that asks for forgiveness? What do I forgive? The vision of love lost, love borrowed, love blue. The night of lovers who tear each other apart like fragile lace that turns to ice and stone.

Love. Lined with thorns. Love seducing the young souls. Love, a web of lies and a womb to lay my head on. Do I forgive this love that preys on my heart like a coyote cry. Love, you arouse my wet senses and then leave me as dry as an autumn leaf. You make so many promises of eternal life and passion. Love, the vision, hangs on a cross. Love, it flies on wings. Love, who are you and what will you bring to my door or light through my window.

I cling to my belly where an insatiable need to pour out and drink in love wanders, lost and desolate from a humanity that has forgotten that love is bittersweet, and deeper than any word or phrase or sentence or image can hold onto. Look at the moon, Love, look at the moon…where do you hide? Black is so seductive and love dark lives…that is the vision left from the residue of grieving, ecstatic love, lover after lover after lover.

How do you keep living?

How Dare I Love Myself

“The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.”
Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.”
— Joseph Campbell

“The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience.”
— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God…
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
— T.S. Eliot, excerpted from the poem East Coker

“Melancholy gives the soul an opportunity to express a side of its nature that is as valid as any other but is hidden out of our distaste for its darkness and bitterness.”
— Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

“There are two very different paths of thought in spiritual awakening. There are those who believe that love is joy, God is love. That nirvana is just around the corner. And there are those who believe suffering is a path to self-awareness, wisdom and spiritual truth. For me, love and suffering are not beliefs…they are an experience. I have known both, all consuming, and as bedmates. The universality of these two emotions draws me into a deep, hot, fiery, disturbing passion to know life and know myself. My life is never lukewarm. It is hot and cold in motion. And most of the action goes on inside of me.”
– Marta Luzim

I wrote the poem How Dare I Love Myself more than ten years ago. I have posted it maybe two or three times. I am posting it again. Feedback on this poem: too intense, silence, stunned like a deer in headlights. It is hard to look pain in the face. Stand up to it woman to woman. Most don’t want to recognize pain, let alone admit to suffering. Suffering is a dirty word in our society. We are supposed say things in a positive way, find the good in everything; everything is a gift. Well, not all gifts are pretty. Not to say, if one chooses the mission, that one won’t gain wisdom from pain. But that does not mean suffering is gone. It just means you find a way to bring peace to suffering. Suffering forces us to choose life or death. Makes us look at life from all angles, a never-ending search. Makes us find value, precious moments when happiness seeps through the darkness. Revelation, according to David Whyte, is when we wake up and realize that we are mortal. That we die. “Revelation is not simply an act of receiving information. Real revelation has consequences. Revelation might orphan you from everything and everyone you know.” That we have to say goodbye to those we love. This awareness is not for the weak-hearted.
To stand in life without the frills of a heaven or hell, that there is life without knowing where the journey ends or begins is the most creative and courageous adventure we can join in on. But most of us want answers, solutions and not to feel our way through, experience our way into ourselves. Mostly, we don’t want to feel sorrow, sadness, hurt or anger. Joy is preferable. Frozen in joy, happy all the time. So when loss comes, they hide their pain. Think it’s wrong and move on. Then there some people who are afraid to feel joy. They feel safe in sadness, at home in sorrow, avoid the risk of love because there might be loss. Being human, we can never escape from any of these emotions…joy or sorrow. But we try anyway.
My suffering makes me question what forgiveness and self-love mean to me. It is a continuous process for me. A vigilante, a warrior, a wounded child searching for my own compassion and self-acceptance.
Life has challenged me every step of the way. I am sure that most of you who are on this journey of the human heart and soul have reached moments where you said, “AHHHHHHHHH I got it now,” and then BAM life offers you another hit on the head, another mountain to climb. That is why it is best to be prepared in life, present in the moment, ready to use your resources and continue to live the inexplicable and uncharted process of life.
Over the last seven years, I’ve had to recover from the tragedy of my sister’s suicide and the onset of a chronic condition called gastroparesis. This condition was a macrocosm of the microseism of my total life experience. I had to truly save my own life. It unraveled every trauma, past and present, and threw it in my face. It blew my house of cards down. It made me start at the beginning. My life raced before my eyes. Every wound that I thought was healed was ripped open and given a new layer and meaning. I was brought to my knees, humbled, and confronted with the deepest mystery of healing and loving myself. I found how human I am and how strong my spirit is. I found how fragile, sensitive, and emotional I am, which taught me a deeper meaning of self acceptance. I re-visited a deeper rage, sorrow and love. I had to reclaim my relationship with God. Rebuild trust and redesign my life. I had to stop hiding behind being a therapist and a healer and start to show and speak my own vulnerabilities; which has been through my art, writing, and intimate relationships. Being an emotional person, a human being first led by a spiritual fortitude that has always been a mystery to me, I had to face the rawest, primal and most painful places inside of me and then surrender and say goodbye to false ideas of who and what I am.
I am a human being. How wonderful to find that out. What a relief to know that. I didn’t have to walk on water anymore. I didn’t have to be or do anything anymore. Everything now was authentically a choice.
What do you avoid about being human? How do you hide your humanness? What does the human spirit mean to you? Tell me about what you suffer. What does your suffering want from you?

How Dare I Love Myself
— Marta Luzim

I am not enlightened, although I know I am immortal.
I lived many times, in many destinies, down many streams of light
I do not know how an enlightened being feels
I can only fantasize vicariously about eternal joy and freedom
and at moments, sweetly brief, like the smell of pure mountain air
I know the miracle of the Creator’s intention
Loving everyone all the time is a mystery to me
But I have developed a wisdom that comes with triumphs and defeats
directed by a path of invisible footsteps summoned by my need to heal my pain
I live my life being and doing, being and doing
then resting my weary bones
wiping away the dew of morning tears on my heart
in a silence that brings more tears
I am suspicious of these cries that spring from the well of love and grief
that speak to me in my dreams and in my longing for the Miraculous
I do not know if I can forgive completely
but I know I can stop blaming anyone for who I am and what I become
My forgiveness dwells in the blood that drips from my wrists
in every slash of self-hatred I’ve inflicted upon myself
Yes, I can forgive this because I understand my blood
I can caress its pain and embrace its ignorance
a mother to myself
Yearning for the day my blood will flow into Oneness
instead of  merely trickle in my brain, separate from human touch
I crawl closer to knowing this as I gaze into every person’s eye and see myself
So I climb the deep ravine of my soul to forgive the only person that I have not believed was worthy of my forgiveness
That is me, totally me, and the me in everyone
I trust with a blind faith that one day this will wash away the illusion that binds me to my hardened fidelity
Songs, blessings, burn in my veins chanting hymns of love
Great ecstasy waits for all of us
I have no claim to this Love although it claims me without mercy
Everyday I pry my heart open
forcefully twisting it around and around like an old rusty jar with its top stuck
left forgotten in the back of a refrigerator.
A little more, a little more each day I scrape away the dead juices cementing it closed
Patiently I wait, praying, oh, praying on my knees with hands clutched tightly
Over and over asking for my sight to clear itself so splendor can tingle in me
Until then I continue on like a waterfall merging into the river
the river into the sea
I live a little. I die a little and then live again
Hungering for the union of the cool ravishing tongue of the ocean waves
Eroding my past and my gut wrenching agony with each lick of its invigorating foam
Surfing, balancing, connecting to its billowy ride along the earth
This insistence, this demand I set as my mission is the only way I can love myself
Nothing more and nothing less
All my talents, my visions, my desire rests in the arms of this request
This heavy fisted appeal pounds down on my guilt, shame and arrogance
That says to me “I carry on, I carry on through it all.”
And this is my love song to myself
A vigilante on horseback yelping like a wild animal into the dust
I carry on, I carry on, I carry on
Guns ablaze, ready to shoot anyone who dares to stop me
A love that never gives up on me even in my darkest times
Even when I look in the mirror and see a she-devil staring back at me
I guess I am worthy to love if I carry on and on and on and on and on…
I know I am immortal and I carry on unenlightened and questing for more

Marta Luzim’s Writing the Wave: Home

A sadness for home that never ends. Is it true you can never go home again?? Coming back to New York brings up my childhood. The times I jumped over cracks in the pavement, singing, “jump over the crack so I won’t break my mother’s back.” Nonsensical rhymes that seem to warm my heart. The attached brick buildings, ornate in the decor, carved by our European ancestors who came to America to find the golden life. The smells of garlic, frankfurters on a grill, roasted coffee and aromas from every ethnic food stray along the winds of New York. Busy streets, busy people, Bloomingdales, Cartier, Lower East Side bargains, 5th Avenue and the astute doormen. Over the bridge Brooklyn where I was born. My father’s deli, my mother’s beauty parlor and mah jong games, my grandmother’s potato blintzes and chicken fricassee. This was home to my childhood. Italian, Irish, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Polish, Russian Jews, all the immigrants that came through Ellis island, millions of homeless souls, with only their hearts, souls and memories of the old country where most lost their families and friends.

Can you ever go home again? You can never leave it. It is always in your blood, in your DNA, in your cells. I can feel the smell of summer in Brooklyn, the sweetness of salt from the ocean, the shouts of tag football, the skip ropes, bike wheels scooting down the streets. Everything was alive and life was endless.

What happens when you can never go home again? Ghosts of the past follow you…haunt you with shifting memories, sensations of what felt like home. Where is home?

My childhood home in Brooklyn, NY