Island Diaries Ep3: The secret pleasure of losing tongue abilities

If you are hearing mysterious voices, before claiming yourself crazy, remember Harry Potter. When he was being persuaded by an unknown entity to kill and destroy, he restrained himself from killing for long enough to find out that there was a snake living in the wall – slithering through pipes, basically talking to itself. So it turns out he wasn’t crazy, just able to understand parseltongue, the language of snakes, while nobody else around him was. 

I ain’t Harry but a while ago I started to set some boundaries between myself and entities that live in my subconsciousness, coming fully alive whenever I am asleep. They come in pictures, faces and places that are not part of my memories of this lifetime, and in feelings stronger than anything I experience in my waking life. 

A blurry constellation

After spending my life afraid of myself, I have decided that these guys live through me and are visiting me from time to time – just as butterflies, waves of anger, mercy, mosquitos, jealousy, pleasure, and total understanding do. But since I lacked logical understanding, my human self (you can also call it ego) was desperate for “cause and effect” types of explanations. Somewhere along the way I let go of that need and now there is a living part of me that knows everything (nothing). 

A big – HUGE – part of this lies in the fact that I have spent years of my life living in international communities. And one thing about that is – you just wanna understand and be understood, not necessarily smart. So linguistically, you become sort of stupid. Over the years, my Serbian got worse but my English didn’t get better. So, the mind gets confused, unable to name things and experiences immediately. The way it creates a constellation of thoughts changes completely. Verbs and nouns are just disappearing. So in my head there are only concepts, and I am unable to create any kind of distribution. But life, turns out, does not become misunderstood, my perception just transcends words. 

I am so smart

All of my life I have been a big fan of words, I studied them as well, and  even felt that words (in my native language) are the only thing I might know how to do. They also make me feel confident, powerful, witty, all that stuff. They make me understand and explain things in a certain way, and then also rob me of the essence of all that is, hidden behind the layers of intellectualization. Without language, we are also without attributes – and there is an enormous freedom inside of that state. 

If this whole passage seems familiar, it is because I expressed, and deeply felt the need to break free – DA SE RATOSILJAM!! kako dobra reč – from the limitations of language in the very first episode of Šumski dnevnici, a series written in 2020.

The Kingdom Of All

As I like to say, there is not a single original human experience. To illustrate that, I will quote two people here: Seneca the philosopher and Florence the singer:

1. Mind too sharp is the enemy of wisdom

2. Being clever never got me very far

Where there was once a diamond blade knife, there is a baseball bat made of clouds. This bat is not very smart, but it is taking me on a colossal journey through nothing! By shutting down the mind for a bit I excessed a deeper knowledge and discovered that we all know everything, and we always did. There is nothing you don’t know. From the nature of things, to where we stand with each other and ourselves in each moment, to the omnipresence of death. 

In this kind of acceptance lies enormous peace and enormous confidence. This voice inside makes no mistakes. The only thing between the voice and our inner ears is pain.

Through how many layers of pain are you willing to swim?

If you are promised a womb-like cave on the other end? Your whole body turns into a heart, and your whole heart is made of tiny ears. You disappear into the darkness, you give your intelligence away. Soft, little whispers become loud and clear. You can hear your belly and you can hear all the silent people around you.

Inside your little ears, little pearls are born. They miraculously shine in the dark! Now, you can hear what dogs are telling you. Cats, butterflies, mosquitoes. A single eye opens on one of your little pearls. Flowers in bloom – they talk to you, and you understand. Clouds, winds, nature as a whole – and they hear you too!

Welcome to the Kingdom Of All! You get to experience it all. Here is where the ends meet. All the sadness and all the joy in the world, rounded in a single pearl.

After a while, your heart-body is all of the sudden capable to make decisions. Where to dwell, in which lake to swim. The flowers come in to remind you that they do decide to come back every spring. There is a quite effort, a collaboration of the soil, water, sun, trees, Earth spinning and sometimes even people, that makes this happen. It contains power that is beyond my understanding, and this is how it should be.

Sometimes our hearts can’t take in such beauty without breaking a little. The good news is, it hurts so good.