I don’t want to fit in your world.  

I want to play in mine.

I don’t want to paint myself into corners of your limitations.

I want to dance in the expanse of my freedom and joy.

It is not that your world is bad, it serves its purpose beautifully. It just no longer fits me. I have lived decades in the formulaic constraints and limiting agreements of what it means to survive in this world.

I am done with living in survival and struggle when my birthright is freedom, joy, and love so deep and honest it would crush most human hearts. It’s dumb that we, as humans, are so convinced that this is the only way to exist when all the change we seek and claim that we want is staring back at us, just inviting us to finally say yes to what has always been our birthright. Humans are too damn asleep, and too damn comfortable with their cages to kick out the walls of their paper-thin cells and step into freedom. That is not a criticism, it is an observation of myself as I look back on my own limitation lined past and now observe the world around me.

I’ve been done for a while and I have been clawing my way through the thorns, brambles, swamps of my own limitations and beliefs with only the light of my inner knowing guiding me down a path only known by my soul. I’ve witnessed thousands of faces of my fears, my beliefs, my patterns, and my darkness, and I have learned that all of it is illusion, a self-imposed prison to which I hold the key to my own release.

I no longer flinch at fear, I no longer attempt to soothe the ache, and instead, I invite what is present in closer. It belongs here too. That is being the Merlin, this is self-love, love 2.0. To allow everything to exist without having to, “fix, save or solve,” to sit in the raw and uncomfortable, “And.” The, “And” is feeling everything simultaneously without running from discomfort or going into overwhelm, it is me accepting things as they are. This acceptance reveals windows and doors that were previously hidden from my sight. It unlocks courage to move into spaces I previously perceived as unsafe. It allows me to hold myself in and befriend aloneness that has previously threatened to crush me in despair.

My lightness calls me to a place where I am met in love, seen, heard, witnessed, not because I have begged for it or become worthy, but because I have opened to what has always been within. The courage hasn’t been to open myself to another, it is to relax my own gripped hands, open my palms and receive myself. The world may never meet me, love outside of me may never come, but I finally said yes to myself, and the chokehold I have felt for eons, begging for a piece of true and authentic love, has finally released. I’ve embodied what I have always sought.

My lightness calls me to a place where creativity isn’t a task I do, or a validation of my right to exist, but an expression of my soul singing its unique frequency. It can’t not express, the beautiful, the ugly, the soft, the hard, the sharp, the refined, is all here, and welcomed. It is me.

My lightness calls me to a place where ease and simplicity greet my arrival, and dance with me through my days. I don’t need to collect, hoard or build riches. I just live in the flow of the ordinary, and the mundane and smile at the knowing that depth, beauty and magic are hiding in these plain moments of existence.

Your world, with its lies and limitations, fits me like pants three sizes too small. I will not convince you to step out of a place that still suits you, that still has a purpose in your journey and growth. I do not judge this old world; it has its own beauty. But I need to move on, to step forward onto a bridge that is still being built by my own hands.

My world is building. It is me finally painting on my own blank canvas. Sending out invites to a world who still wants to stay in the familiar, the safe. Many days I paint alone, with only my own flame to illuminate the canvas just enough to add the next brushstroke. Will this portrait be a masterpiece? Will anyone witness its unfolding? I used to care, to want, to desire, but that forced me to fold into places that have never fit me.

Now, I stand as my own sovereign creator, in my own field, in my own presence. Meeting myself in those places I had always wanted another to fill.

In this still point, I feel my own wholeness. I feel the moment of now. I do not fret about the past, and I do not script a future. I paint my own canvas, I feel my own freedom and sovereignty and know, I just, “Am”.