where it is real is where it really hurts
on making the art that matters to us
“Where it is real is where it really hurts.”
The line’s on loop in my head lately. It’s from a song called “T-Shirt,” by the band Two Dollar Guitar. One of those songs that tethers me to myself, like the ropes they use to hold a hot-air balloon to earth, one of those songs that can keep me from floating away.
Do you have them too? Songs that dig so deep into the soil of you that if you follow their tendrils they are a root system that seems to wrap around everything: childhood memories, philosophies of life, wordless longings, a tangled shape within the inner shape of your being that you can almost physically touch?
I was at a gathering last weekend, talking about the topic of “unconditional love,” and all the ways we wrestle with its potential and its pain, and this song lyric came back again, wanting to be reckoned with.
“Unconditional” sometimes feels like the wrong word for the kind of love I want to know in this life, I was realizing.
I think what we long for most is love that’s both specific and spacious. Love that says: I really see you, just as you are. But also, nothing about what I see is too scary to be outside the bounds of your wholeness, and my willingness to be with it.
Specific, as in, I actually want to understand. Specific, as in, Where it is real is where it really hurts.
I discovered Two Dollar Guitar in college, when I had a radio show on the student-run station at Swarthmore. I only really ever listened to this one album, but I listened to it over and over again — the songs accompanied me through multiple apartments and houses, on countless road trips, through parenthood — there’s something about this song T-Shirt, in particular.
First of all, the title itself tugs me, a little personal talisman.
Senior year of high school, I’d written this short story which was also called “T-Shirts.” Or more like — the story had written its way through me. It woke me from a dream: a ring of rocks, a cardboard box in flames, a fan club president setting fire to a box of T-shirts with the lead singer’s face on them.
Those of you who’ve taken Entering the Cave have probably heard me talk about it, this story. It’s the Origin Story of my own cave-ridden hero’s journey (we all have them, I think, if we go looking): the first time my channel was that open; the first time a piece of art propelled its way through me like something that needed to be physically born, some process I didn’t feel fully in control of.
Surrendering to that process — letting the story happen through me — opened places in me that I hadn’t known I had access to. Suddenly I wasn’t making art, not in the sense of planning, and trying — art was making me. Fuck it was thrilling, and scary, to collaborate so completely with unconscious parts of me.
As a kid, I’d loved swimming underwater — diving again and again to the bottom of the pool — and writing this story had something of that quality to it. A diving down, again and again, a realizing that I was capable of it, of going deeper than I knew, and liking it.
So, in this story T-Shirts, the setting fire happens because the protagonist, a fan club president named Genna, has been in love with the lead singer of this band for years without telling him, and finally realizes (in a bout of flaming rage) she needs to let go of the fantasy if she ever wants to live in reality.
I won’t tell you the ending, but I will say, it all works out for her.
The story came fast and desperate, over the course of a few days and late nights, and felt beautiful and painful and important, like it was revealing patterns to me that I needed to see in myself. (I was 18 years old and I’d been in obsessive unrequited love with a boy named Steve for a year and a half and needed to either tell him or let it go, but I hadn’t actually realized that until the story made me see it. Art has a way of revealing our shadows to us.)
“Where it is real is where it really hurts.”
“T-Shirts” felt so good, so necessary, pouring through me, because it was really fucking real. And it really hurt. But then it also balmed the hurt, because suddenly I could see what had been hurting. And I could show it to friends, and they could see it too.
This is so much of what art does: externalizes the inner depths, so they can be known.
And this is so much of what healing is: letting the places within us that are afraid they’re alone, afraid they don’t make sense, come into the light, and be witnessed by someone who will say, that does make sense. And you’re not alone.
When I teach Entering the Cave, this is much of the practice: simply witnessing one another in our truth and vulnerability, and saying, you make sense, and nothing you’re experiencing is wrong.
So, senior year of high school, this story’s throttling emergence unleashed a waterfall of yearning in me. A desperate longing to write like that all the time: to know how to be that wild, that unbidden, that fucking free. That fucking honest. To understand how to collaborate with my unconscious, to dream things into existence without all the voices of the inner critic clamping things down before I could get something real out of me.
But of course, I got scared. As one does on the path of trying to be an artist, or any path of trying to get free.
“Where it is real is where it really hurts.”
Back to the song.
I don’t know if I can adequately describe what it does to me, the song T-Shirt, only that it’s maybe very close to what I sometimes mean when I say the word love. But let me try.
It starts quiet. (Like love?) Just a guitar, repetitive plucking. Already something insistent though; even in the restraint, there’s immediately something a little antsy. (Like love?) Then a voice, low, sad, and lyrics that pierce through all my armor and it’s the 90s again, I’m a teenager, no now I’m a child, I’m sad and scared, I’m wild and alive, I’m in the woods, I’m under the night sky, I don’t know what year it is or how old I am, I’m timeless, and there’s a tug in my chest that’s part fear and part desire, something feels electric and so precious that it hurts to know it won’t last forever — that’s all I know.
So open up the night with a big flashlight.
Out into the trees. Down on your knees.
Tonight. Tonight.
See the stars above fill the world.
Little spots of dust. Little, little girl.
Out in a field, down in the dirt.
Where it is real is where it really hurts.
In one image memory that this song tendrils around, I’m maybe 9 or 10, and on this school camping trip and walking alone into a meadow. I must not have been far from the group but I felt a complete and total solitude, as if I’d entered a parallel dimension. The sun was warm and the meadow hummed with insects and smelled of hot grasses and clover and I walked and walked and some energy in my body said I could walk forever and never stop and never go back home and some deep intense awareness in me said I want this to last forever and I already know it won’t.
I want this to last forever and I already know it won’t.
That was the flavor most love took on in me for most of my life. Love was aching poignant longing, was trying to hold a thing that can’t be held. Love was nostalgia and grasping and clinging and trying so hard to keep things the same, which is inherently impossible, and its impossibility is a particular flavor of yearning that was the constant condiment in every moment I savored. A bittersweetness, the squeeze of lemon that brightens the soup, the sorrow that gives heft to the joy.
In another image memory this song evokes, I’m 15, and lying in the grassy meadow above Reed’s beach in Maine with my cousin from California and my best friend from Illinois and some cute boys we’ve just met in town and it’s past our curfew and we’re looking up at the stars and at Venus, brighter than all the rest, and the waves are washing against the shore and goosebumps are rising on my skin and I want to live here in this moment forever and it’s a taste of full aliveness, soul in a body, body under a night sky, a feeling of being exactly where I most want to be and exactly myself, a touchstone I’ll chase, a confusion that will for decades make me wonder whether my real life is one that already happened a long time ago.
The more I meditate and become able to live in the present moment, the more I’ve been finding a capacity to experience love and life without so much ache; the bittersweetness has shifted slightly, or maybe it’s just that I’m not fighting it anymore. I’ve accepted its flavor completely so that now it just tastes like aliveness. I’m trying to trust the luminous impermanent arising of life’s unfolding more than ever, to rest in something timeless that’s not trying so hard to hold onto anything, just to be honest and present with what really is. It’s lovely and unfamiliar, this way of being, and yet I still also love, tenderly, the old loves, the old aches, the old songs, even as I’m in a process of opening to a different sort of expansion that’s not trying to hold on so tight to anything that changes.
Meanwhile, though, back in “T-Shirt” by Two Dollar Guitar: all this time the music’s quickening, like a heartbeat, and the guitar’s opening into strums, and then more voices come in, backup vocals, and then it really starts to rock and build and feels like driving with the windows down in summer in Oregon with huge blackberries ripe on every roadside, pushing the accelerator, feels like fireflies in your best friend’s backyard and a screen door banging, feels like that moment as a kid on the swing set when the top of the arc would leap and you’d be weightless for an instant and then the song hits you with this:
And the sky opens up
and pours down his love
and fills your lonely heart
with his aching words
and so you found God
in the year of your birth
and all you got
was this stupid T-shirt:
LOVE.
And then Tim Foljahn proceeds to sing/moan the word LOVE over and over again while the backup vocals build until he’s outright screaming.
LOOOOOOVVVVVVE!!!!!!!!
Which is sometimes what it feels like.
When we’re really in it.
Love, I mean.
It sometimes feels like screaming.
Like what else is there to do with the rippling ever-changing beauty and the pain and the anguish and the way everything ends and must, in order for life to continue its cycles of growth, but to move too, to flail, to sing and scream and dance and cry and fall down on our knees sometimes and cry out,
LOOOOOOVVVVVVE!!!!!!!!
Partly, the song lyric stuck in my head comes from these conversations I’ve been having lately.
I keep talking with people who are in something of a Void space. A liminal in-between. Or right at the cusp of taking on some new endeavor, making some next leap.
I was talking with someone the other day about how it’s easy to talk about things to one another — to report on what we already know — but where the real juice comes is in the moments when we’re willing to walk right up to the dark edge of what we’re really trying to figure out because we really do not know yet because it’s precisely where we’re really growing and meet ourselves, and one another, there.
That — that edge of the not-yet-known — is where the real wild aliveness is.
As I prepare to teach a series about The Void next week, I’ve been reading mythology and philosophy, and doing deep meditation practices, and getting increasingly jazzed about the prospect of hanging out with a crew of artists and creatives talking about all of it.
But I’ve also been deep in my own Void, at times. Like, really not knowing. There is so much I really do not know right now, about love, about life, about art, about the state of the world, about where any of it is headed.
What I do know, most of the time? Is that it’s okay not to know. There’s aliveness here, and there’s collaboration with a mystery that we get to dance with.
Martha Beck talks about the moments in life when essentially what we do is walk ourselves off a cliff, knowing that not all our parts will survive the crash. We’ll break things we thought we couldn’t live without.
But the parts of us that do survive? Will be timeless. And fearless. And might even know how to fly.
LOOOOOOVVVVVVE!!!!!!!!
I offer these practices — entering caves, searching darkness — because they’re what I need, and how I’m living into a life that feels like mine.
Amidst grief, confusion, uncertainty, and wanting to scream my face off pretty often these days, I keep also opening up to moments of such intense joy, and to a profound and intense gratitude for life itself, and for love, in all its many forms.
Where it is real is where it really hurts.
And? Where it is real is where it really heals.
I keep discovering — miracle of miracles — that love — real love — can balm the pain.
Specific, and spacious.
Real love can keep allowing us to change, and real love can survive our life/death/life cycles, our Void times, our mistakes, our confusion, and our flailing.
Life can keep surprising us with the ways a path will suddenly open up to a new vista, and from here, we’ll see something we couldn’t see before.
When we can hold what hurts in an unconditional love, and trust that growth and rebirth is always what life is seeking, we can keep breaking our hearts open to hold more and more of the world.
Multiple times a day I reckon with what a delight it is, to be living a life that’s real enough to really, really hurt.
(Go listen to T-Shirt by Two Dollar Guitar, already.)
And if you want to join us for Entering the Cave, please do. I’d love to get really real together.
www.sarahkowalski.com/the-cave
