La Discipline C'est L'amour

La Discipline C’est L’amour- (Discipline is Love).

Tatted on the forearm of my love side on the 4th of July.

To remind me...

A visual representation of my personal rebellion.

“Breathe in Discipline, Breathe out love”.

Every anxiety attack and unhelpful wave of thought silenced and brought to a calm, with just one decisive, controlled breath.

From the brink of my belly, I begin to poke. Intuition tells me it is okay to contract air through my nose to my lungs.

Meditation is the lens bringing 2020 into focus:

My eyes were closed, yet the controlled strokes and meditative sounds of micro punctures on my skin brought my mind a solemn vision—tuned to the tones of brilliant patterns popping off and celebration in the waning hours that crept away from this so-called “Independence Day”.

*Inhale*

My brain smiles because, in the steady rhythm and flow of my breath, I notice how worthwhile I am in my body, how in control I am of this body, and how alive I am in this body.

A black woman in America, I had nothing to celebrate but the brilliance of freedom that resides within my mind and the freedom to do at this moment what I want with my space and my time.

2020, in focus—has been more of a hot mess haze. Yet, still blessed & guided, I can see myself and others through a clear lens. There’s no unseeing it.

It's just like 2020 won’t rest before taking my breath away.

Once again, the micro punctures slip me back into a meditation over my pretty thoughts:

Patience is love

Love is discipline

Discipline is self-love

The blessed also endure

Endurance builds strength

Strength is beautiful

Not all beautiful things are resilient

All resilient things are beautiful

You, my love, are resilient

You, my love, are built to last

You are no validation of the world

….

*Exhale*

Corona came and stranded me in an endless dissonance, constantly, parked in the place between paranoid and highly annoyed.

Not sure if it's allergies, Rona, or just me, but it is hard for me to BREATHE.

2020, you chaotic, malevolent beauty— you continue to take my breath away.

La Discipline C’est L’amour

(Discipline Is Love), is the reality I choose to endure.

As if it weren't enough for the majority of the nation; deemed unessential & unemployed because we found focus— found ourselves. We found control in ourselves and the collective soul.

We stopped to BREATHE. Finally in CONTROL

To be human is to collide with the realities of love, or lack thereof.

We are descendants of love or lack thereof.

Each experience shapes us to convey a fortune of love or lack thereof.

To give or withhold,

to receive or to block our love.

What was your first encounter with love, or lack thereof?

Ever since George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, and the persisting cycle of black bodies destroyed, stripped of humanity with knees on their necks, I feel black bodies dying on the concrete are becoming more normalized.

I and so many others are over here traumatized. I have to shift my focus, especially every time a visual goes viral of the last breath.

Ingrained into your earthly experience, probably since you were a child, was a description of this life's greatest wonder.

A description of Love (or lack thereof) in this world tends to either:

* glamorize and strip love of all its complexities

OR

* Strip love so fiercely from its form you begin to glamorize dysfunction and lay it in love's place.

Kind of like, haze in the place of focus, anxiety in the place of breath, savagery in the place of discipline, or clout in the place of activism.

I imagine all those whose stories were not told, and I feel them and I experience their breathless bodies screaming.

I too dressed love in a compact I mirrored my relationships (platonic or not) out of.

The truth is, love is a sweet spot. Not simply a bud, and never fully a blossom, something like bloom.

Restriction from its full exertion keeps it in perfect form and its perseverance past budding makes its beauty striking enough to stop & adorn.

Love is a sweet spot

A dual mindedness of respect for boundaries and total embrace. Love is disciplined.

The deprivation of discipline in relationship, with others or self, twists lines and boundaries into a reckless entangled ball of being.

Where no one energy begins or ends, but simply mixes and intertwines. Where neither of us is clear enough to find or be found. We have abandoned ourselves.

We are undisciplined.

WE CAN'T BREATHE!

Until we shift back into our bodies, from that decisive and firm focus on that initial, last breath.

I vow until my last breath I will rebel, beginning, and ending with my focus on peace and to just breathe.

I know it is not just me who has been mistaken. It seems many things pass off as love.

Lust

Passion

Likeness

Familiarity

Indulgence

Pain

Anger

Violence

Volatility

Lack of Boundaries

Trauma Bonding

I could go on.

Control in our current world feels sometimes intangible, but love was never meant to be a tool imposed on others for control.

You especially cannot control the situations that spiral out of misguided love.

But you do have control and discipline over self. In the words of Mark Wagner, “On a good day.”

The discipline of self. What a beautiful bipolar bounty awaits in that exploration.

But, bountiful indeed.

Discipline of self, to embody all the safe spaces of another's comfort.

Discipline of self, to be bold when fearful.

Discipline of self, to choose prosperity over pleasure. Early mornings over late nights. Goals over distractions.

Love is an action, and with manifesting any action; it assumes focus, allowed by discipline. Allowed by love.

If you feel the need to control others to have “peace”, you will always be chaotic.

Peace is my rebellion in chaos.

Not all rebellion is hype and loud.

Some of the fiercest storms have come from calm—Ask anyone who has been disciplined by a black mom.

So I revisit the decisive tick tack and meditative beat of the micro punctures, painted on the love side bottom of my sleeve.

La Discipline C’est L’amour

Discipline is peace

Discipline is Love

Tatted on the forearm of my love side on the 4th of July.

I reign free. I reign in discipline. I reign in love.