It's hard to shut your mind off when it's the only thing you have to comfort you.
The trouble with the mind is it moves quickly, and has thousands of thoughts to consider and provide. A lot of little things can lead back to what you want to avoid, a lot of closed doors can be open by round-about routes.
I'm left with my thoughts, and can do no more than think.
Now is the winter of our discontent.
I'd quote the rest but we rearranged my room and who knows where my Shakespeare collection ended up.
I'm feeling it again, a constant drum against my temples, a throbbing in meter down my spine; I'm growing tired of this place, these halls, these barriers between where I am and where I want to be.
Peace.
Peace alludes me again, peace stands at separated distances and waves primly in the breeze, powder snow wafting fast, drafting my vision and leaving me blinking, yearning, searching, and constantly--ever constantly--falling short.
There is a strength, a will of heart, I have to invoke. A courage and power to keep on keeping on, to trudge another moment in this swamp of sadness, to make it to the end. There is a faith I must exercise that an end will ever come, that an end will be something worth trudging for. That an end will be better than where I was, where I inevitably couldn't stay.
Because people wake up and dreams shatter.
And anything that was once held as reality eventually must become illusion; all that has passed is not fact any longer. The condition of time and life is that it changes. Truth changes, people change, rules change, responses change. I can't look back because back is not real any longer, back is a memory and only exists in the spaces of mind. Back has become a faded reality, a dimming truth. I cannot argue that it was there, it happened, but to revisit and search for all I found before is a futile mistake. The past has passed.
It takes near constant pinches to wake up, an underlying chanting of affirmation that now must be faced. Now has become what it is, I have traveled my roads and there is no altering the station in which I stand and the ground I occupy, whether it's desirable or not.
My trouble, my fault, is that it's not desirable. I find no comfort here. I yearn for pastures or past years, of mountains beyond my own. I'm craving Virginia, the ocean, a Washington forest, anything to smudge away or mar all I'm left to stare at now.
This isn't what I wanted, this isn't what I'd hoped. And in my despair my mind flies back to moments of surety and contentment, happiness and ease.
But those moments are passed, those moments are not real. I drown my heartache in happiness that is false now, happiness that is reserved and saved and soon will dry up. I keep dishing out peace from a limited supply, and the levee's running dry.
And under frantic tears and the whirring of gears in my tumulting mind, I know my answer lies in heaven. I know my peace can be provided. I just have to ask.
I ask and He says wait. I ask and He says patience. There is no guideline, no support, no idea of what I'm waiting for, what I keep waiting for. This blindness is harsher than sorrow. This blindness births discontent.
I feel so good then immediately so terrible. I feel faith and fortitude then weakness and worry. I stumble and my mind wonders and I remind myself my charge to wait; I walk forward and wait. But I constantly must remind myself there is purpose, somewhere beyond the sight line of my mortality, there's reason without my comprehension. It requires ever fiber of my soul to consciously continue, to chant consoling catch-phrases, to provide my own peace.
I know He knows, I know He has grand things coming. It's getting to them and waiting for them in this dark lonely state that I can't seem to handle. It's knowing good is coming but not seeing it that terrifies me. It's being left with the workings of mind to tide me over in the time between now and when that something arrives, it's my mind's enjoyment of memories that destroy me. It's my inability to cease seeing the truth of yesterday and the forlorn fiction of it all today that breaks me down. It's hard to shut your mind off when it's the only thing you have to comfort you.
Showing posts with label Virginia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Virginia. Show all posts
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Friday, January 11, 2013
Tracks in the Snow
Everyone knows it's going to hurt, but at least we'll get hurt trying.
I've always loved the snow, the way my perception becomes as though I'm locked in a log cabin, away from the world, snow cementing and nestling me into a safe-haven of contrasting warmth and frost. There is something enlivening to my soul when the earth becomes synonymous with the heavens, when I find myself in the middle of a cylinder of white, from my feet to as far back as I can lean my head. When the horizon vanishes, when it's white into infinity, I find myself at home.
I want to curl up on a windowsill and scribble in petite cursive all the workings of my mind, all the actions of my capacities, with my knees scrunched to my chest and the knowledge that I have nothing to do--no responsibility, no obligation, no plans--aside from absorbing the snow piling up against the window, taking breaths of the winter seeping through the double-pane glass.
It's a Virginia moment, one I haven't had for a long while. It's the desire for solitude, desire for cleanliness, desire for change and difference and peace; a certain sort of peace, an altered sort of peace from that which shrouds me constantly of late. Not the peace that life is working, life is right, and I am where I'm meant to be, the peace that makes words come, the peace that opens all the crevices of my soul up to the winds of words that dwell on snow drifts and swirl past in a haze. The kind of peace that brings longevity to my seldom failing heart and like a bellows feeds and fodders my spirit into a realm of knowledge, understanding, and creativity.
Perhaps the snow didn't bring it on, but is rather accenting the notion I've been skating with all week: that initial peace of correctness and joy. It presses in around me like a signifying beacon that here is where I should be, here is correct, here is beautiful like the snow.
I once imagined walking in a snow-crusted world, my hands in my coat pockets, unfeeling of the cold. My boots leaving soft prints in the unbroken ground as I traveled with head high, truly seeing the world, taking in the contrast of bark against scarves of snow draped round the trees, spying in the distance the faded existence of the forest, snowfall lending a whitewash across my senses, leaving the wilderness a duller version of itself, the colors faded and masked in a sepia grey scale, with an eternal light bouncing off of the winter it was shrouded by.
It's in these daydreams I picture the Indians. I draw back to childhood fascination of the natives to this land, and the early settlers that greeted and uprooted them. I read one book twice, Indian Captive, about a young blonde-haired girl taken captive by the natives and adopted into their culture. I imagine being her, or a beautiful red-skinned Pocahontas, taking to the woods by snowfall, at peace and at one with the land. My hand falls to the trunk of a tree and a remembrance of life rushes through my nerves to my core, and I'm half tempted to sit in the snow bank, to stay here and abide and breath this life and love. To stay until the snow fades away, a thought that never dawns in this daydream or the next, that the snow shall pass. A desire to partake of this world so often stranger to me.
There is love in my person, there is passion and acceptance to the extent that I could fling myself from this window to thwump with a puff of powder into the white beyond. I want to run away, I want to find Virginia, but not for a lack of satisfaction with where I stand, as it has been so often before. I want to take flight for the romance of discovering the white and feeling the possibilities that await awakened by the falling cold. I want to discover all that lies, buried and masked in the demeanor of the season.
I want to thrive within my situation. I want to sing of truth.
I've always loved the snow, the way my perception becomes as though I'm locked in a log cabin, away from the world, snow cementing and nestling me into a safe-haven of contrasting warmth and frost. There is something enlivening to my soul when the earth becomes synonymous with the heavens, when I find myself in the middle of a cylinder of white, from my feet to as far back as I can lean my head. When the horizon vanishes, when it's white into infinity, I find myself at home.
I want to curl up on a windowsill and scribble in petite cursive all the workings of my mind, all the actions of my capacities, with my knees scrunched to my chest and the knowledge that I have nothing to do--no responsibility, no obligation, no plans--aside from absorbing the snow piling up against the window, taking breaths of the winter seeping through the double-pane glass.
It's a Virginia moment, one I haven't had for a long while. It's the desire for solitude, desire for cleanliness, desire for change and difference and peace; a certain sort of peace, an altered sort of peace from that which shrouds me constantly of late. Not the peace that life is working, life is right, and I am where I'm meant to be, the peace that makes words come, the peace that opens all the crevices of my soul up to the winds of words that dwell on snow drifts and swirl past in a haze. The kind of peace that brings longevity to my seldom failing heart and like a bellows feeds and fodders my spirit into a realm of knowledge, understanding, and creativity.
Perhaps the snow didn't bring it on, but is rather accenting the notion I've been skating with all week: that initial peace of correctness and joy. It presses in around me like a signifying beacon that here is where I should be, here is correct, here is beautiful like the snow.
I once imagined walking in a snow-crusted world, my hands in my coat pockets, unfeeling of the cold. My boots leaving soft prints in the unbroken ground as I traveled with head high, truly seeing the world, taking in the contrast of bark against scarves of snow draped round the trees, spying in the distance the faded existence of the forest, snowfall lending a whitewash across my senses, leaving the wilderness a duller version of itself, the colors faded and masked in a sepia grey scale, with an eternal light bouncing off of the winter it was shrouded by.
It's in these daydreams I picture the Indians. I draw back to childhood fascination of the natives to this land, and the early settlers that greeted and uprooted them. I read one book twice, Indian Captive, about a young blonde-haired girl taken captive by the natives and adopted into their culture. I imagine being her, or a beautiful red-skinned Pocahontas, taking to the woods by snowfall, at peace and at one with the land. My hand falls to the trunk of a tree and a remembrance of life rushes through my nerves to my core, and I'm half tempted to sit in the snow bank, to stay here and abide and breath this life and love. To stay until the snow fades away, a thought that never dawns in this daydream or the next, that the snow shall pass. A desire to partake of this world so often stranger to me.
There is love in my person, there is passion and acceptance to the extent that I could fling myself from this window to thwump with a puff of powder into the white beyond. I want to run away, I want to find Virginia, but not for a lack of satisfaction with where I stand, as it has been so often before. I want to take flight for the romance of discovering the white and feeling the possibilities that await awakened by the falling cold. I want to discover all that lies, buried and masked in the demeanor of the season.
I want to thrive within my situation. I want to sing of truth.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Closer to Fine
I brought a palmfull of water to my face and let it drizzle where it may. My hands rubbed over my closed eyes and across my mouth for good measure. Sometimes I wish I was absorbent, where water would never run down my neck or drip onto my blouse. It would seep inside of my pores and...
I imagine the water droplets making passage into my skin, and like white blood cells they begin swirling through my being, fixing and protecting me. If that's actually what white blood cells do.
If I was absorbent it wouldn't matter what they did. The water would fix me.
But as my reflexes lead me to wipe my face dry of the water that hasn't run down my neck or dripped to my blouse, I know there's no easy way to fix me.
She keeps saying I remind her of herself when she was younger. I'm tempted to scoop more water to my face but stop, knowing this time I am no different than moments before. I am not absorbent.
I panic so much because if parallels are the way she claims, destiny has written me a widow who never had a mate that could die: an old maid.
That's what she says I am.
I have to stand up. This kneeling by the stream is killing me in more ways than physical taxation on my lower limbs.
I always thought the first male to be truly interested in me would be the one I wed, not due to a sinking feeling that no one else would come along and I better take what I was given, but that no one hitherto approached or acted as though he would. It gave me reason to believe the one with the strength and desire to stick around would be the only one in the universe. It was not a matter of succumbing to fate, but that of accepting that I would be a fly on the wall until someone came to pull me into the action.
It falls back to romantic comedies from a young child's perspective. It stems from Disney and true-love's first kiss and one-take love stories. I idealized it so with dolls that it has cemented itself as fact in the core of my heart. Someday my prince will come. And unlike my mother and the majority of females the country over, I would not require a list of 64 Mr Wrongs that marshaled with pointing lights to the prince. Mine would come when he came, and he would be the only one.
But soon I began to panic that those who have thus shown interest are those I am not...of want to wed. It suddenly occurred to me through my own clumsy way of handling romance that I would need at least a percentage of the 64 so I may cognate how to respond to the prince. But the seed I planted at a tender age has been nourished daily by each cycle of my blood, and now towers indefinitely in my foresight, obstructing all but the notion that he who comes first is him that remains. I've choked with the idea that I will end with a second-rate companion because I am doomed to be sealed to he who comes first.
This is not so, but I cannot uproot this false truth out of my being.
Try as I might I am not absorbent. Water will not fix me.
I slump beneath a tree, wishing the breeze would lift me up to that Virginia in the woods where I could write and muse and sing in peace. Where I would walk with wilderness and thrive under branches and canopies or green. Where I could do all I dream to do without the prying eyes and responsibilities that cascade around my failing body like a landmine of clutter, choking with each tendril that reaches my shaking frame.
But in the depths of my quest for solitude, I do not wish to be alone.
In my mind her voice echoes again, like a bitter cricket continually causing friction between his legs.
If I am her, I will be alone.
The thought drowns me more than being permanently siphoned to a man not fit my make. In reality, along would not be secluded in a forest glade with no concern of taxes or the obtaining of food. Alone would mean in public and in bed. Alone would mean being auntie to the merry spawn of my brothers who fulfilled their one true task as males by carrying on the family line; this would only serve as comforter if I was a carrier of hemophilia and knew b not mating I was sparing my children and theirs from the condition my blood most fears. Alone would mean a general shame to the girl of yesterday who only ever picture love, who made movie after movie in her imagination with her dolls apexed on the ideal of it.
Alone would not be an alone of peace and creative plundering of the mind.
Alone would be hell.
I find myself staggering to the stream, whether I will attempt another prayer of absorbency or merely submerge my head until the constable lifts me out by the hair, my spirit floating off to the only place alone means not alone, until I find I'm sen to a sort of purgatory where those who left before their allotted time are sent, with no husband to follow my acrylic painting landscape like a map to my resting place of despondency to drag me from it to his arms.
I suppose I have decided neither; my fingers curl around the bank but I neighter plunge them nor my body in.
The air breathes the tender word Patience, and I know it's right. It's the action potential of my mind that bring the panicking to pass. I will survive this the way I have health classes and airplane turbulence and learning of FGM. It's a matter of focusing my eyes, breathing at a fixed and concentrated rate, and pleading with the God above to spare me.
And as he has in those near-breaking moments and the moments I now fail to remember, he will lead me safely again.
I will not be her. I will not be alone.
Water will fix me.
I imagine the water droplets making passage into my skin, and like white blood cells they begin swirling through my being, fixing and protecting me. If that's actually what white blood cells do.
If I was absorbent it wouldn't matter what they did. The water would fix me.
But as my reflexes lead me to wipe my face dry of the water that hasn't run down my neck or dripped to my blouse, I know there's no easy way to fix me.
She keeps saying I remind her of herself when she was younger. I'm tempted to scoop more water to my face but stop, knowing this time I am no different than moments before. I am not absorbent.
I panic so much because if parallels are the way she claims, destiny has written me a widow who never had a mate that could die: an old maid.
That's what she says I am.
I have to stand up. This kneeling by the stream is killing me in more ways than physical taxation on my lower limbs.
I always thought the first male to be truly interested in me would be the one I wed, not due to a sinking feeling that no one else would come along and I better take what I was given, but that no one hitherto approached or acted as though he would. It gave me reason to believe the one with the strength and desire to stick around would be the only one in the universe. It was not a matter of succumbing to fate, but that of accepting that I would be a fly on the wall until someone came to pull me into the action.
It falls back to romantic comedies from a young child's perspective. It stems from Disney and true-love's first kiss and one-take love stories. I idealized it so with dolls that it has cemented itself as fact in the core of my heart. Someday my prince will come. And unlike my mother and the majority of females the country over, I would not require a list of 64 Mr Wrongs that marshaled with pointing lights to the prince. Mine would come when he came, and he would be the only one.
But soon I began to panic that those who have thus shown interest are those I am not...of want to wed. It suddenly occurred to me through my own clumsy way of handling romance that I would need at least a percentage of the 64 so I may cognate how to respond to the prince. But the seed I planted at a tender age has been nourished daily by each cycle of my blood, and now towers indefinitely in my foresight, obstructing all but the notion that he who comes first is him that remains. I've choked with the idea that I will end with a second-rate companion because I am doomed to be sealed to he who comes first.
This is not so, but I cannot uproot this false truth out of my being.
Try as I might I am not absorbent. Water will not fix me.
I slump beneath a tree, wishing the breeze would lift me up to that Virginia in the woods where I could write and muse and sing in peace. Where I would walk with wilderness and thrive under branches and canopies or green. Where I could do all I dream to do without the prying eyes and responsibilities that cascade around my failing body like a landmine of clutter, choking with each tendril that reaches my shaking frame.
But in the depths of my quest for solitude, I do not wish to be alone.
In my mind her voice echoes again, like a bitter cricket continually causing friction between his legs.
If I am her, I will be alone.
The thought drowns me more than being permanently siphoned to a man not fit my make. In reality, along would not be secluded in a forest glade with no concern of taxes or the obtaining of food. Alone would mean in public and in bed. Alone would mean being auntie to the merry spawn of my brothers who fulfilled their one true task as males by carrying on the family line; this would only serve as comforter if I was a carrier of hemophilia and knew b not mating I was sparing my children and theirs from the condition my blood most fears. Alone would mean a general shame to the girl of yesterday who only ever picture love, who made movie after movie in her imagination with her dolls apexed on the ideal of it.
Alone would not be an alone of peace and creative plundering of the mind.
Alone would be hell.
I find myself staggering to the stream, whether I will attempt another prayer of absorbency or merely submerge my head until the constable lifts me out by the hair, my spirit floating off to the only place alone means not alone, until I find I'm sen to a sort of purgatory where those who left before their allotted time are sent, with no husband to follow my acrylic painting landscape like a map to my resting place of despondency to drag me from it to his arms.
I suppose I have decided neither; my fingers curl around the bank but I neighter plunge them nor my body in.
The air breathes the tender word Patience, and I know it's right. It's the action potential of my mind that bring the panicking to pass. I will survive this the way I have health classes and airplane turbulence and learning of FGM. It's a matter of focusing my eyes, breathing at a fixed and concentrated rate, and pleading with the God above to spare me.
And as he has in those near-breaking moments and the moments I now fail to remember, he will lead me safely again.
I will not be her. I will not be alone.
Water will fix me.
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Wherever I'm Going I'm Already Home
I once read Jason Mraz's blog, before he took all his posts offline, and found something that really stood out to me. It was at a moment in my life where I couldn't comprehend why people were consistently being false about who they were. I am of the opinion and practice that if you generally do not care for someone, don't play to their face as though you're their best friend. Merely limit the exposure you have to them. It has worked relatively well for me, but I couldn't grasp why everyone else just pranced about falsely adoring people they later grumbled about in private.
But for a statement that meant so much to me, I don't remember it. Off the top of my head. Luckily it hit me with such impact and internal, personal meaning, that I placed it on my facebook, where it thankfully has remained.
"Being fake about anything creates a block inside of you. Life can't work for you if you don't show up as you. ...Your thoughts, speech, beliefs, actions and attitudes create the picture of your life. Draw it well."
But it wasn't until about a month ago when I was going through the very girlish anxiety of what to wear and how to have my hair when I meet this man that it occurred to me not to go to extremes to guarantee I'll look good. I need to do what I would do any day; to be myself. This seemed so suddenly important and integrated in me that it took quite some time to realize I was paraphrasing that unforgettable statement that I could never quite memorize.
And as I searched it out and found it again, I realized this has been swirling in paraphrase in my mind for years now; congealing in the drain of my brain, leaving a sort of residue determined to stay for all time. The motto of my life, the way I regulate my days. A source of comfort. It was beautiful to me that I hadn't elected for this to be what carried me along, that it wasn't my teen-aged obsession forcing me to make meaning out of a well-worded thought an idol of mine happened to post online. I tried this last year with the Happy Now Year, which was a very good philosophy, but I never really lived up to it. Despite my fan-driven desire to live by this law, I kept living in maybe's, my tongue tied on someday and my heart draped on the past. But it isn't the fact that I am led to think of Jason Mraz when I think of my personal motto that inspires me; it's the message behind it. This statement has accumulated purposefully in my mind because it rings true to me specifically and entirely, not just my glutinous fandom. It means something because it means something. I can think about it and feel better, inspired, invigorated, ready. Innumerable times this week I have muttered or thought to myself "Life can't work for you if you don't show up as you."
It's not just about presenting myself to Jason Mraz with my hair straight and around my face, my CityStreet jeans gripping the contours of my legs, eggplant eyeliner around my blue eyes, and a Mraz t-shirt as if it's just another day in my life, not the greatest day. It's about being all of that with my attitude and personality every day I breathe. It's about boxing up the doubt and concern that I'm wrong and setting it up in flame. It's about taking the power and confidence I'm moved by when living in theatre and bringing that into practice when I'm living in the moment.
And a large part of my hindrance at "show[ing] up as [me]" is that I'm tied so rigidly to the person I was when that statement first graced my eyes. The admirable thing about Jason Mraz is that he hasn't let success be an excuse for being found drunk and high on street corners by the Po-Po. Life has worked for him because he has, and daily continues to, show up as him. He doesn't sing Wordplay in concert anymore because he's not that same cocky attention seeking guy (his words, not mine), he doesn't smoke anymore because it's derogatory to his health and career. In fine, he's changed. I'd like to think I have grown along with him, maybe not in the same direction, but I've been close enough that I don't dispute who he is now compared to the young kid who first set out for music. And even if I did have my qualms with his slightly gaunt face or almost homeless hair, what right do I have to question him? Whatever he's become is what is right for him. Whatever he does with his life works. Because he keeps showing up as him.
I didn't think this post would come back to Virginia, but it has. Whoever I am is so hidden by the clutter I'm sure Virginia would clear away that I'm unable to fully get life to work for me. I'm struggling and failing because I can't show up as me; whoever I am is concealed in an unreachable place. I'm still so tethered to this part of me that worries and daydreams and lives in the past or the future. But my core wants to live now. My soul wants to show up as me. I want life to work.
So I'm going to break my animism this summer; I am going to tear myself from all the things I don't need that keep tying me down because I may need them or miss them someday.
My thoughts, speech, beliefs, actions and attitudes create the picture of my life.
I can't take up the pen until I've purged enough clutter to see what those thoughts, speech, beliefs, actions and attitudes are.
Life can't work for me unless I show up as me. And I can't be me until I find me.
But for a statement that meant so much to me, I don't remember it. Off the top of my head. Luckily it hit me with such impact and internal, personal meaning, that I placed it on my facebook, where it thankfully has remained.
"Being fake about anything creates a block inside of you. Life can't work for you if you don't show up as you. ...Your thoughts, speech, beliefs, actions and attitudes create the picture of your life. Draw it well."
But it wasn't until about a month ago when I was going through the very girlish anxiety of what to wear and how to have my hair when I meet this man that it occurred to me not to go to extremes to guarantee I'll look good. I need to do what I would do any day; to be myself. This seemed so suddenly important and integrated in me that it took quite some time to realize I was paraphrasing that unforgettable statement that I could never quite memorize.
And as I searched it out and found it again, I realized this has been swirling in paraphrase in my mind for years now; congealing in the drain of my brain, leaving a sort of residue determined to stay for all time. The motto of my life, the way I regulate my days. A source of comfort. It was beautiful to me that I hadn't elected for this to be what carried me along, that it wasn't my teen-aged obsession forcing me to make meaning out of a well-worded thought an idol of mine happened to post online. I tried this last year with the Happy Now Year, which was a very good philosophy, but I never really lived up to it. Despite my fan-driven desire to live by this law, I kept living in maybe's, my tongue tied on someday and my heart draped on the past. But it isn't the fact that I am led to think of Jason Mraz when I think of my personal motto that inspires me; it's the message behind it. This statement has accumulated purposefully in my mind because it rings true to me specifically and entirely, not just my glutinous fandom. It means something because it means something. I can think about it and feel better, inspired, invigorated, ready. Innumerable times this week I have muttered or thought to myself "Life can't work for you if you don't show up as you."
It's not just about presenting myself to Jason Mraz with my hair straight and around my face, my CityStreet jeans gripping the contours of my legs, eggplant eyeliner around my blue eyes, and a Mraz t-shirt as if it's just another day in my life, not the greatest day. It's about being all of that with my attitude and personality every day I breathe. It's about boxing up the doubt and concern that I'm wrong and setting it up in flame. It's about taking the power and confidence I'm moved by when living in theatre and bringing that into practice when I'm living in the moment.
And a large part of my hindrance at "show[ing] up as [me]" is that I'm tied so rigidly to the person I was when that statement first graced my eyes. The admirable thing about Jason Mraz is that he hasn't let success be an excuse for being found drunk and high on street corners by the Po-Po. Life has worked for him because he has, and daily continues to, show up as him. He doesn't sing Wordplay in concert anymore because he's not that same cocky attention seeking guy (his words, not mine), he doesn't smoke anymore because it's derogatory to his health and career. In fine, he's changed. I'd like to think I have grown along with him, maybe not in the same direction, but I've been close enough that I don't dispute who he is now compared to the young kid who first set out for music. And even if I did have my qualms with his slightly gaunt face or almost homeless hair, what right do I have to question him? Whatever he's become is what is right for him. Whatever he does with his life works. Because he keeps showing up as him.
I didn't think this post would come back to Virginia, but it has. Whoever I am is so hidden by the clutter I'm sure Virginia would clear away that I'm unable to fully get life to work for me. I'm struggling and failing because I can't show up as me; whoever I am is concealed in an unreachable place. I'm still so tethered to this part of me that worries and daydreams and lives in the past or the future. But my core wants to live now. My soul wants to show up as me. I want life to work.
So I'm going to break my animism this summer; I am going to tear myself from all the things I don't need that keep tying me down because I may need them or miss them someday.
My thoughts, speech, beliefs, actions and attitudes create the picture of my life.
I can't take up the pen until I've purged enough clutter to see what those thoughts, speech, beliefs, actions and attitudes are.
Life can't work for me unless I show up as me. And I can't be me until I find me.
Friday, April 13, 2012
Get to Where I'm Going
I have moments where I feel as though I want to take my soul and sever it from my body. Not in a suicidal manner, but in a desire to be free. A hope to fly. I often wonder why I can't simply shed whatever it is that holds me bolted to the ground. I stare out windows in moving vehicles and my mind reaches through the trees and clouds and finds a place where I am alone with nothing but myself, a place where I have achieved a fresh start--a fresh thought--and there is nothing limiting me from being.
I often think of Virginia. I roll the word in my mouth and as my tongue presses it against the roof of my mouth the juices leak out and seep like a narcotic into my system, and I feel. I'm taken to there, to Virginia, that same place my mind travels when the world outside my window isn't enough. It started with Jason Mraz. His story of uprooting and forsaking everything to shed the old and build the new with nothing but biology and telephone wires tying him home; to be in that place where he could Be. It inspired me. He went east and found it: California. It sucked him in, it called him back, it altered his life completely. Being, myself, already in the western portion of the continent, I began to feel that if I were to find what he found, if I were to ever let go and shed what blocks the light from my eyes, I would need my own California. I would need to go east.
So I named it Virginia.
But as the years have passed it has become all the more clear that I cling so desperately to Virginia not as a geographic ideal, but as a state of Being. It may well be that, should I ever truthfully set foot upon Colonial soil, that my expectations would only be half-met. It's not about the plantation houses or the cobbled walkways anymore. No, there are too many dreams hanging off the unlimited branches of the legionous trees. Virginia is where I will be once I shed the clutter that wraps around my ankles and binds me at my wrists and grips me, fettered, to the stonework of my own soul's dungeon.
But as fixed as I am on the idea that Virginia will render me emancipated, I am unable to pick the locks here beside these mountains. My entire self is convinced that to find this Utopia and to breathe the breath of liberation I must first forsake these surroundings. It is as though once I traveled such a distance as it would be to reach Virginia, it would be too hard to return for all the clutter and chains the strangled me back home. I would be free of it all.
Alone with myself.
I'm afraid to do it without the physical abandonment of this place. I am afraid to reach Virginia without reaching Virginia. Instead I look out windows and let the man who used his California to change my life carry me to where I stand outside the limits of Virginia, ounces from the entrance, seeing all I'll have when I get there, but unable to shake the shackles enough to take the step.
I often think of Virginia. I roll the word in my mouth and as my tongue presses it against the roof of my mouth the juices leak out and seep like a narcotic into my system, and I feel. I'm taken to there, to Virginia, that same place my mind travels when the world outside my window isn't enough. It started with Jason Mraz. His story of uprooting and forsaking everything to shed the old and build the new with nothing but biology and telephone wires tying him home; to be in that place where he could Be. It inspired me. He went east and found it: California. It sucked him in, it called him back, it altered his life completely. Being, myself, already in the western portion of the continent, I began to feel that if I were to find what he found, if I were to ever let go and shed what blocks the light from my eyes, I would need my own California. I would need to go east.
So I named it Virginia.
But as the years have passed it has become all the more clear that I cling so desperately to Virginia not as a geographic ideal, but as a state of Being. It may well be that, should I ever truthfully set foot upon Colonial soil, that my expectations would only be half-met. It's not about the plantation houses or the cobbled walkways anymore. No, there are too many dreams hanging off the unlimited branches of the legionous trees. Virginia is where I will be once I shed the clutter that wraps around my ankles and binds me at my wrists and grips me, fettered, to the stonework of my own soul's dungeon.
But as fixed as I am on the idea that Virginia will render me emancipated, I am unable to pick the locks here beside these mountains. My entire self is convinced that to find this Utopia and to breathe the breath of liberation I must first forsake these surroundings. It is as though once I traveled such a distance as it would be to reach Virginia, it would be too hard to return for all the clutter and chains the strangled me back home. I would be free of it all.
Alone with myself.
I'm afraid to do it without the physical abandonment of this place. I am afraid to reach Virginia without reaching Virginia. Instead I look out windows and let the man who used his California to change my life carry me to where I stand outside the limits of Virginia, ounces from the entrance, seeing all I'll have when I get there, but unable to shake the shackles enough to take the step.
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