Poem for the Week
Permission, September 14th
This month we are thinking about the concept of permission at Letters to a Leaving Mormon. For me, permission was an idea that held me in a box of my own making. Permission was a marker of almost everything I did. Did someone permit to wear what I wanted to wear? Did a leader permit me to kiss a boy? Did God permit me to have certain thoughts that were not in alignment with what I learned at church?
When the answer to my inquiries were no, as in, no it wasn’t okay to wear what I wanted, wasn’t okay to kiss the boy, wasn’t okay to have dissenting thoughts, then I was left with a decision to make. Would I ignore the fact that I wasn’t given permission to do certain things and risk not being a good person, or even worse, not make it into the heaven with my family, or would I submit to whatever was asked and feel resentful, confused and angry because I ignored my intuition?
When I say chaos, this is what I mean. My life, especially toward the end of my time in the church felt like absolute chaos because it was run by a system, leaders and rules that did not align with my heart and spirit, yet I was still conditioned to ask for permission to listen to myself and let that heart and spirit lead me, and always, the answer was that I was wrong to do so.
Over the past few years, I’ve worked on turning permission inward. I’ve tried to give my intuition, my experience, my knowledge, the opportunity to speak first before I make a decision based on what I think will make someone else happy.
I don’t know a punchier way of saying that the habit and demand that I ask permission to be and know myself for the first three and a half decades of my life robbed me of truly knowing and trusting myself. I wanted so much to be good that I put my intuition on the altar and prayed that it would be sacrificed for something better.
Being required to ask for permission, and learning to wield your permission over others is an invisible chain that keeps us from ourselves.
Practice this month a few small acts in which you give yourself permission to do or be something (even so small). Do not outsource your intuition. Wrap it tightly in a hug and let it know you are listening.
Clearing
Do not try to
serve the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is yours alone to sing
falls into your open cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know how
to give yourself
to the world
so worthy of rescue.
-Martha Postlethwaite
