Soul Knitting (15 Feb 2002)

I have been a closet poet for quite a number of years and only a handful of friends have been privy to my poems.

There was a time when words strung themselves effortlessly in my head. Ditty capturing micro moments, when a smell, a leave, a scene that flashed by my bus window imprint themselves as words, they self-organise into poems, which I unravel on to the page one word at a time.

The older I got, the better I got at my day job, the less important I made writing. I convinced myself, writing didn’t matter, it was a youthful hobby. Whatever confidence I had about writing, I chipped away myself. I stopped writing and the deeper the gnawing grew.

S0…I have been hiding, under excuses of not being good enough, not being polished, not having a voice or anything worthy to say.
In fact when I started this blog, I didn’t really want people to read it.
The moment I registered my name in full as the blog url (seized by an almost mad moment of courage) I remember the mad panic setting in. I was naked and exposed. If I wrote from the heart, then there is no hiding.

To ‘save myself’ I found more excuses to not blog.
2 weeks ago, I told a whole other group of friends to hold me accountable to blog every other day. And most of them were so surprised I had a blog.
They asked me to send the link to them.
And I kept quiet, and changed the subject.

The next day I decided to stop the silly racket in my head. I took on sending out the link and for the first time consciously created for myself that it didn’t really matter what anyone thought. It didn’t matter what I thought. All that mattered was writing. And quietly, uneventfully since that moment I chose to just be with my own words, to not judge them.

In way, this re-new commitment to just be with words, stringing them together just for the pleasure of it, reminded me of this poem I wrote over 6 years ago.

Soul Knitting
Eva Ng
15.02.02

We are,
the knitters of our soul.

Taking bare strands of life
weaving patterns with the needles of our
hands, eyes, nose.
Shaping the looping vision with our ears, heart and mouth,
entwining the fibres of everyday,
with cheerful dexterity the one day,
and morbid dread another,
winding highs into lows, lows into highs.

We patterned this youthful section with an unskilled
vigour, knitting frenzied patches of wild woolly colours.

Dropped stitches, joyful gaps filled with exhilarating delight.
Crimson glories of foetal blood flagged life beginning.

Sorrow and tears, together stitched an abyss of grey, charcoal and muted darks,
deep pains inking the patch in shadow.

Tidy rows, the disciplined threads of adult life,
captured by neat lines in formal shades.

Years, days, hours,
click, tick, click tick the needle goes.
This great mat of colours, textures and fibres
Bold and unapologetic.
Stitch switches, switch stitches,
ultimate chaos, a true tapestry.

Masterful Living

I love this little poem which I scribbled in my daily planner from somewhere.
I aspire to live in this magical equilibrium.


I draw no distinction
between my work and my play, my mind and my body,
my education and my recreation

I simply pursue my vision of excellence
through whatever I am doing,
and leave others to determine
whether I am working or playing.

To myself, I am always doing both.

Heart to home

This morning I received an email from my youngest sister YY, recounting her move back home temporarily before she leaves for Europe to take up her scholarship for a Masters in Education. She shared a humorous exchange between her and my brother C who is the youngest in the family.

Later this morning, C emailed me to call him to sort out some paper work. And he shared that he has created ‘house rules’ for YY – which I found totally hilarious as their eldest sister.

Small anecdotes, moments of comic domesticity, so common to people living under the one roof.

Today, they came to me as extraordinary gems, an opening for me to be part of their life that is made difficult with me being in HK and them in Sydney.

In reading her short email, hearing his humorous complaint, the world shrank and I was transported home.

Inner and outer space

A friend called to invite me to take a seminar for 10 weeks. It’s called the Mastery Seminar by Landmark Education. The premise of the seminar is not to learn anything new (for graduates), it’s about getting out of the way the barriers to extraordinary performance in all areas of your life..

I particularly love this description of the seminar - Mastery in living requires having nothing between you and people, nothing between you and life, and nothing between you and yourself.

As someone with an exceptional commitment to and appreciation of excellence, mastery is a virtue I find highly inspiring and deeply appealing. My head wants me to sign up immediately, but the wisdom of my heart says not now.

Over the weekend, I am able to understand my inner compass’ guidance.

I am walking into many changes right now with the two businesses I am creating with wonderful, soulful partners and transition out of my comfort zone of being a career salaried worker. For my world to be filled with the new that is coming in, I am guided to undertake an ‘emptying’ of all sorts– physical things, emotions, thoughts, that has anchored me in my world now but I will no longer be needing in my tomorrows.

So much clutter and memories for the emptying. I see so many things I hold on to because I have never trusted myself to be without them.

More so than a physical emptiness, I anticipate such pleasure to refilling my clean and spacious inner sanctum.

Becoming more of myself

Perhaps it’s the media I elect to tune into, the books I am drawn to reading, or the podcasts I am listening to, the theme of ‘healing’ is recurrent – healing on the physical, emotional, soul and even planetary level. For a brief moment, I felt irritated by the word. I found it annoying because to require healing meant that something is broken, impaired, in dysfunction. I don’t feel, broken, impaired or defunct. Why is everything telling me I am. Why does everyone need to be healed!?!

In the same swiftness the irritation was felt, it fizzled out. Perhaps I should be grateful, I don’t feel broken. In my good fortune, how self-fish of me to beleaguer what others need.

Once my mind was able to give up my position on healing, I had what one would call a ‘critical moment’, a penetrating insightful moment on my life.

In 32 years, I have never truly embraced being a woman. I envied the speed and obvious strength of boys growing up. I preferred the company of young men over young women in my teens, I gravitated towards their crass humour, the simplicity and brunt of their friendship. In university, I love the way we shared adventures, laughter and focused clarity of goals. A little emotion is already a lot of depth in these relationships.

Women friends on the other hand cried, needed stories, needed shoulders, needed confirmations of their evolving self, were soft, were clingy, were powdered divas whose emotions rode high and low like tides to phrases of the moon. I loved them, but I found it a challenge to truly embrace their waning and waxing reproaches and love affair with the world. Most times I am in awe of them, their beauty routines, their vanities, their sweetness. And I found myself a part of yet apart from true belonging in this feminine world.

I relished in not being a girly, romantic girl. I was a strong girl, a smart girl, an efficient woman, a thinker, a do-er.

Today I realized I never truly allowed myself to unfold fully as a woman, never ventured to a space of womanhood unbeknownst to the confines of past prejudices and preferences.

32 years late and tomorrow is a new day. The amazing gift of life is that each moment holds the seed to be different from the moment before.

I saw today the synchronistic unfolding of life in my future as an entrepreneur in creating businesses that are all about serving the evolving, unfolding women in my community, city and ultimately the world. And while I embark on my new adventures, I will be starting a family, stepping into the new role being a mother. In doing so, I can see myself ‘healing’ through living, those unexpressed parts of my soul as a woman.

As I learn to embrace the varying faces of woman, I will essentially re-incarnate daily to becoming more of myself.

Here’s a poem that celebrates just this revelation. And it is of course divinely guided that I came across its magical eloquence today.

Love After Love
By Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Communion

As I heard this poem being read as a prayer by Caroline Myss on her podcast Sacred Contracts, it took me back to a time when I felt totally complete, with no wanting, sitting on the shores of Hvar staring out at the infinite horizon.

This also brought brings back all those other moments when I am next to the immensity of the ocean and I always become deeply filled with a sense of peace, bliss and connection to the world. In those moments I feel the ocean once again accept me and a profound sense of returning would fill me to the core. I could never explain why this is so, only to know it is. Maybe the vastness of all those water somehow fills and reflects a vast void within which longs to hold such magnificent.

Here’s the beautiful poem that transported me to such a moment.

When I Was In The Forest
by Meister Eckhart:

When I was the stream,
when I was the forest,
when I was still the field,
when I was every hoof, foot, fin and wing,
when I was the sky itself,

no one ever asked me did I have a purpose,
no one ever wondered was there anything I might need,
for there was nothing I could not love.

It was when I left all we once were
that the agony began,
the fear and questions came,
And I wept, I wept, and tears I had never known before.

So I returned to the river, I returned to the mountains.
I asked for their hand in marriage again,
I begged --- I begged to wed every object and creature,

and when they accepted,
God was ever present in my arms.
And God did not say, Where have you been?
For then I knew my soul ---- every soul --- had always held him.