Inspiration: Addition of Light Divided
Addition of Light Divided
Lyrics by Tori Amos
She said, "I am hurt"
Love is lost and frozen
Pray that I don't stay
Feeling broken
Feeling broken
I woke up in an aqua
Tourmaline dream
I woke up in an aqua
Tourmaline dream
Let the light break through
You don't need to stay broken
Break this chain of pain
You don't want to stay broken
You don't want to stay broken
Just wake up in an aqua
Tourmaline dream
Just wake up in an aqua
Tourmaline dream
Rum punch in my hand
We melt with Kali's dance
Hearing voices
We could join forces
And we did and we did
Yes, we did and we did
And we did
And we did and we did
And we did and we did
Yes, we did
And we did join forces
Addition of light divided
Addition of light divided
Addition of light divided
Divided
Divided
That chain broken
That chain broken
That chain broken
When I read this back, I recognize the climate of myself. Not a mood, not a moment, but a season that learned how to live inside my skin. Hurt did not arrive loudly. It seeped. It crystallized. Love did not vanish. It stalled. It became something I carried like winter in my ribs. So when I write “I am hurt,” I am not confessing. I am locating myself on the map of my own body.
The aqua tourmaline dream is not escape for me. It is orientation. I have spent most of my life waking into feeling instead of away from it. Color has always been my language when words hesitate. Aqua is breath. It is water pressing against air. Tourmaline is charge. It remembers pressure and answers with light. When I wake into that space, I am choosing sensation over numbness. I am choosing to stay conscious even when consciousness aches. My work has never wanted comfort. It wants contact.
Light, in my world, does not behave politely. It does not ask permission. It enters through fractures. It touches the places that tried to seal themselves off. When I say you do not need to stay broken, I am speaking to myself at the edge of a long habit. Brokenness once felt like shelter. It felt safer than hope. But I learned that cracks still conduct warmth. They still pulse. They still answer when something living presses back.
Community enters my work the way weather enters a room. Suddenly. Bodily. With noise and movement. Rum punch in a hand is not decoration. It is grounding. Kali’s dance is not metaphor. It is necessity. She breaks what has grown rigid. She teaches that survival is not preservation. It is motion. When I repeat “and we did,” I am counting my way out of isolation. I am reminding myself that I reached, that others reached back, that we did not remain sealed in our private storms.
“Addition of light divided” is the line that carries my whole philosophy. Pain, when hoarded, calcifies. Pain, when shared, transforms. I do not believe in shrinking suffering. I believe in distributing it until it becomes intelligible. Brokenness is not something to hide. It is a medium. When light splits, it multiplies its presence. Each person holds a shard, and together the room grows visible.
By the end of the piece, nothing is cured. That matters to me. The chain breaks because it is worked on, again and again, with breath and rhythm and waking. Inspiration is not rescue. It is permission. Permission to remain unfinished. Permission to thaw slowly. Permission to keep entering my own life rather than watching it from behind glass.
This is what my voice is doing. It stands in the weather of hurt and refuses disappearance. It says I am still here. I am still responsive. I am still capable of dreaming myself forward, even when the dream is built from fracture and light.
