Nick Heyward – “Kite” – Honey Deep Honey Wide

Something about these recent darkening days has brought the song “Kite” by Nick Heyward back for review in my consciousness. With both Mars in retrograde in my first house of the self, and Mercury in retrograde in my seventh house of relationships, it makes a lot of sense. This was a song that I felt deep resonance with when I was a teenager in crisis.

As a child, I had a rich inner world of Beauty and wonder. It was a world that I felt unable to share with anyone. I never met anyone in my youth who seemed to see or feel what I felt. I felt like an alien in my own childhood. Having a natural gift for solitude, I was able to handle long periods of alone time without suffering. It did get lonely at times, but since I was a child, I could not remember a time when life had been different. I didn’t have a different reality to compare it with. From time to time, I felt a deep ache in which I wished it was possible for others to know how it felt inside of me.

This world of Beauty that I had access to was something I protected from the ugly realities of life such as my ongoing power struggle with my father or my inability to make friends due to a lack of social skills. When life got ugly, I would wail and push this world of Beauty deep down inside. I could not bear to let the ugliness of this world touch the purity I knew as Truth. My fragile sense of self was not able to protect this inner knowing from the harsh reality of the outside world.

When I heard this song as a teenager, I instinctively knew this is the challenge I faced – how to protect my world of beauty from the ugly realities that I saw in the outside world and in my close relationships? The repeated lyrical refrain in “Kite” is “Don’t let them shoot your kite down.” The singer is pleading to both his mother and father to not allow others to knock his kite out of the sky. There is a feeling of futility in this plea. The singer is under fire, and no one is coming to his rescue. As a teenager, this was my most intimate painful reality.

My parents have always loved me and placed my well-being before theirs throughout my life. However, from where they stood, they had no way of accessing the existential crisis that was my experience for most of my young life. I did not know how to bridge my rich inner world with the outside world in order to share it and to be known by others. I did not know how to protect myself from the powerful unconscious fears of my parents or the desire of others to control me.

I felt extremely alone and vulnerable throughout my childhood and teenage years. It seemed there was no way for me to feel safe being myself. I grew into a young adult with suicidal ideation. I felt impotent rage at a life in which I was not free to know or express my Self. It did not feel safe to be my Self.

Fast forward a couple decades or so over the powerful journey that was my coming of age, I give great praise to the Spirit of Beauty & Courage that has sustained me through dangerous rites of passage in which my heart, mind, and body were at stake. I am deeply grateful that I survived those challenging self-destructive years. Now when I hear this song, I listen with a feeling of profound awe.

I feel wonder that I get to discover more about who I am every day. I feel gratitude that I’m no longer a child dependent on her parents to protect and support her way of being in the world. I feel infinitely blessed to know and love my parents as the beautifully flawed heroes they truly are and to feel them love me for who I am without conditions. I feel a powerful fierceness inside me which watches over and protects me every step of the way. The kite of my heart is of my own making, and I fly it high in the skies of my own rich inner world. No one has the power to shoot my kite down, because I no longer give that power away. I have reclaimed my vision of Beauty as inviolate. It pulses in my heart and across eternity, and I am free.

So may it be for you, my friend.