The Severance of Presence
A Friction Metabolizing Event
Something has been happening to me.
I am moving through my day—writing notes in my office, playing with my son, sitting in my hot tub under the stars—living the beautiful mundane magic of my life. And then I feel it: the friction. The threads of it start to weave around my ankles and intertwine with my hair. They crawl down my throat and slide into my stomach. Heaviness invades me, a pulsed kind of urgency becomes my new rhythm. I try to grab onto the lifeboat of my life, and I realize I am so deep into an alien current, I can no longer see the shore of normalcy.
This is how they all begin.
I recognize them now, but not in time to orient myself. The disorientation is a part of it. If I knew what was coming, I couldn’t be reborn.
This is what I call a friction metabolizing event.
Where I become the event horizon for any and all friction that orbits its way into my forge. Some come from the momentum of my own thoughts as I stand at a threshold of change. Some come fully formed from the collective ache. Some are a weave of pain—both mine and the many who hurt like me.
They have been happening to me for the past three months.
I am not the same.
During the last one, which appeared on a Thursday afternoon in my office between clients (yeah, not great), I felt possessed to record it. Not as performance. As witness. Because I got tired of waiting for one.
What follows is the raw, unedited transcript of that moment.
It has no context. It didn’t come with one.
The audio link is here for those who want to feel it as breath.
This piece isn’t for everyone.
I am terrified to share it.
It moves through sobs, coughs, silences, and tones that may feel strange or even jarring. It’s not meant to teach you anything. But it might awaken something in you that remembers.
If you choose to enter this cairn, do so with breath.
Do so in stillness, if you can.
Let the words move through your system as sound, not just meaning.
And know that you are not required to understand them.
Only to feel what is yours to feel.
If this isn’t for you—walk through. I’ll see you on the other side, where I shape it back into framework.
[The Severance of Presence.m4a]
(Optional note: This is raw and unedited. Please listen with headphones and spaciousness if you choose to enter.)
The Severance of Presence
Raw Transcript
(Coughing. Spitting.)
Ooooooooooooooo vvvvvvvvvv
We have been bound—
The ropes that have strangled our throats and our wrists
and our hearts and our minds
and our wombs and our throats,
our throats—
(Sob)
The tether that has been cut
between our womb and our roots and our throat
Thinking that they are separate
Thinking that every time we speak
we are not speaking from creation—
but we are
we are
we are
(Sobbing)
The generations that have been
bound
bound
bound
Fractured—
No, not fractured—
Sliced.
Severed.
Severed.
Severed.
Oh, the severing.
(Whispers)
The severing. The severing.
Ooooooooo vvvvvvv
(Coughing. Spitting.)
It was never a forgetting.
(Sigh)
That word is too anesthetized.
Too lulled.
It was always—
a severing.
(Silence)
Tonal language
(Light language. Pulse.)
(Deep breath)
If it was never a forgetting,
then it was never a return.
We were not meant to be remembered—
We were severed.
We are meant to be rewoven.
Thread by thread.
Every ounce of blood split,
reweaved into a tendril of belonging.
Every child,
every innocence,
everything that was sacred,
ripped from our wounds
or violated into desecration—
will be rewoven.
DO YOU HEAR ME.
(Voice cracking)
It will be rewoven.
Not to be forgotten,
but to make up the very marrow
of the thread itself.
It will be rewoven.
We will be restitched.
Recreated.
(Coughing. Spitting. Hiss. Hacking.)
(Deep breath x3)
(Long pause)
It’s calm now.
The cavern grows inside of me.
(Silence)
And still I feel the pulse forward.
The voice—
and then what?
and then what?
and now what
and nowhat
and nowhatandnowwhatandnowhat
and nooooowww whaaa
and nooooowwww whaaaa
and nnaaaa waaa nnaaaa waaa naawaaaaa
(Sharp inhale. Sobs.)
(Cracking with sobs)
And now nothing—
because nothing is demanded of you.
And now nothing.
(Sobs.)
I see it now.
We were severed from presence.
We were severed
from our very own
presence.
Oh, yes.
(A deep drop in voice. Calm breath.)
Yes.
It returns.
(Sigh.)
We were never meant to seek God—
only to be present long enough
inside of ourselves
to stand next to the frequency
again.
And so it goes.
☽ Postscript
The pattern underneath this transmission is one I’ve been carrying for a long time.
It’s one many of us carry—though it moves differently in each body.
If this piece stirred something in you—
even if it didn’t make sense,
even if it only left a hum,
even if it rattled a place that had gone still—
know this:
you are not broken.
You are in the process of re-membering.
In the next cairn, I’ll share what emerged in the aftermath of this piece—
a structural reflection of how systems split to survive
and what it takes to hold both poles of a truth without collapse.
This one was an act of visceral vulnerability.
As always, I welcome your friction. But, on this one in particular, I ask for your kindness.
Coming next is the transmission honed—The Severance Pattern: The blueprint of rupture and the architecture of return
I appreciate your honest sharing. I’m still learning how to be with these frictions that arise. It’s not an easy process.
🖤🫶
"Severance, the birds of leaving call to us / Yet here we stand endowed with the fear of flight / Over land the winds of change consume the land / While we remain in the shadow of summers now past / When all the leaves have fallen and turned to dust / Will we remain entrenched within our ways? / Indifference, the plague that moves throughout this land / Omen signs in the shapes of things to come" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfE365EFivE