I am so small: a midget-mind of tiny, round stature.
I crave what I have not achieved:
My book to entice others to read what I write,
The weight-loss program from Jesus, or maybe Mary Mag who got to walk off her calories in rope sandals.
I don’t have fame/fortune/freedom to practice
Traveling, walking in crop circles, napping in the King’s Chamber for what dreams may come.
I don’t even have someone to talk to about these things,
So perhaps that is first.
I’m not polite anymore
I can barely hold myself in check
When things aren’t going my way.
I often say I’m feral & others think me joking
But I’m not, really.
And I don’t want to hurt feelings,
But when you’re in front of me & cannot say what you mean
Your analogies falling flatter than Florida panhandle,
When your ideas cannot leap even a curbstone
Your life is a cartoon of uncertain nature,
I haven’t’ the patience to await your figuring it out.
I walked out of a movie yesterday filled with the F word, with suffering women & girls riding fast horses, dismounting into their mothers’ shoes…
I practically ran out of church today after a lackluster, energy-less, error-filled display of what was purported to be a DNA upgrade. My own DNA slipping away as I sat; the woman next to me with eyes closed – sleeping? Meditating? And I would have likely kicked her bare feet escaping. Now I will take the end seat always…
As the uninspiring talk droned on, I chafed, rearranged my purse, tapped my legs: anything to keep from simply exploding into a bloody mess on the padded chairs in a wedding chapel of a room. Bloody hell! Chained by politesse.
Captive to still life when I want to simply walk out walkabout.
I need a teacher: a leader, a healer, a crone, a hero.
All is divesting, I drop endeavors like heavy rocks no longer to be carried – out of volunteering genes, out of knowledge of how to deal with the knowledge I have even as I acquire more.
I have put myself in a small place & caught fire.
I have put myself into a whisper while harboring the biggest voice in the world.
I watch those I perceive making a difference from a new place now.
From being born to teach, I see I was born to learn
But no one to instruct me, no one to act out new understandings, no one to see it my way. Three no’s form a knot.
What would I tell someone in my position?
Don’t be still anymore.
Dance it out.
Do something.
Begin.
Become the beggar at my own door.
I have wake-up nightmares of inability to resolve:
People want to steal my car & I cannot turn it on to drive away.
I envision a town where all the streets are named for book topics – Mystery Ave or SciFi Way.
All the stores are bookstores & you can live atop a spiritual bookstore in bliss, soaking in the emanations rising from below, setting your mat atop the Yoga Section for best results, or settling your jack chair over the Meditation Collection with its quiet hum of “Om” rising up.
You can walk along Cookbook Alley for dinner ideas, or Home Improvement Row to learn how to build – what else? – a bookcase.
All the books loitering in basements of libraries, in attics of septuagenarians, in back rooms of houses all over America can be sent here – any book in any condition is free to mail in for repair & residence.
Tiny glass carrels line up like lampposts, an ergonimic desk & supportive chair in each, while wallpapered cells with one comfy recliner and a perfect reading light are availble for rent in Parkbutt Place.
You’ll find skin care on Beautiful Street or banking hints on Money Road.
Are you with me yet?
Heading into town will be strip malls of opthalmologists, opticians & optometrists along Tosee Highway. Restaurants serving only symmetrically arranged food for color & texture branch off on Foodies Lane. Stationery stores will line Papers Boulevard along which reside cul de sacs of Penn’s Way.
Just imagine being able to dispose of old books which is a haunting connundrum for many, by bringing it to a box in the library or post office which can be sent off at no charge, sorted, spruced up, set lovingly into place for display. Every year there will be a Penny Plus Sale to keep things in circulation & set the flow for the following year. Libraries will finally have a resting place for all the donations of outdated novels. Any topic ever written about will be found in its own setting, like jewels.
All roads will have a turnoff for Bookville. Tour buses will be lined up outside town limits & free jitneys available for tours, or to visit the restaurants or stores.
I could spend a day or a season, or a lifetime there. I would live above the Self-Improvement Stair in constant hope of betterment, jog in Grammar Park, cycle around Tours Trail.
We practice life mostly along its edges. Who among us emerges stage-ready, the award waiting only our perspired (inspired) clutch & craving?
I walk the riverbank, longing to be in the Flow. I seek the source outside of my own Being – an ultimate & ulterior stupidity (cupidity)?
Yet this is fine.
One becomes wise in discovery, that wisdom is a, if not the, goal. Putting on music for creativity, then settling an activity atop it muffles an intricate rhythm already in expression. I apply the brakes to examine the flow. How many do this? What matters the number, as I’ve noticed I’m only concerned with myself right now. In (at)tending to myself, I tender to all.
The great God of creative force has only to reach to tap me. I don’t need that cattle prod anymore!
If I search for the god of my being, how may I do so other than becoming a prayer?
I am at the stage in my life where returning to Source is a real goal. Returning to the boundary I crossed over into birth, I burst out from life influenced by this truth. Back & forth have I gone into the arms of & out again – a reflection of Spirit as powerful as the reality. It all is Spirit! Crash! Boom! Bang! Then resettling with a sigh.
The breath coming from deeper inside releases more of my inner being out to share. One writes to become real & writing at a time when the blind are in power makes for the impulse to become compulsive.
I cannot say Amen to this life while the prayer is in progress!
Sometimes I’d like that: just once to arrive at a goal that does not springboard me, catapult me, back into living more life. This is nonesuch – nonsense.
My life won’t end when I write my epitaph. An ending is a revolving door, after all. I go round & right back into it, whatever that proves to be.
I admit it is nice to take a breath & think it a compilation or summary. Yet each one is a summons for the next. That next one may bring my keenest & best future to me & why not?
BUSHWHACK LIFE!
Capture it, lasso it, for it’s long past midnight; all conclusions foregone. A period becomes instead an ellipsis, the next thought pulling into a station I thought a destination, As Bilbo said, “The road goes on forever.”
As a Journeywoman of life, I have sought & provided comfort, meals, ideas, feelings, responses & so much more. The continuum of flow belies dead ends. There is no respite from or for life.
Like the old couple leaving the theatre, I turn to myself & say, “Always is coming next week, a good show!”
LOVING VS. FORCING
Love is not necessarily the savior it’s touted to be. Oh yes, love can be so much. But love is also the opportunity to be better, gain more, progress faster. Love & its admission (a hairline admission there) still implies forward movement. It’s slowing down to smell the roses, noticing a flower blooming on the stalk while below is its upside-down mirror on the sidewalk. Instead, we acclimate to speed, to diagnosis & concurrence.
It’s the rarest who respond to disparagement & pain with creative sparkle. Pain is a self-absorption of its own, the body becoming experience. Pain can be the truest digression from living in Spirit unless it is found to be a gateway.
What do I live for? Why do I count forward from my half-birthday to the full? Is this for the very young & the somewhat old? Why am I compelled to tell my age to strangers – a kind of egoic brag – I made it this far! – doing it my own way, with my own vocabulary & dodging the blocking of circumstance. I found the workaround to life & stuck to it!
I am lifelong a morning person. A day begun at 8 is already half-done. I was once annoyed with awakening at 4 a.m. but I have found this a gift: silence, potential, an intake of innocent breath. Pre-daylight is pure. Animals pad ancestral paths to water. The moon hangs separate from earth, earnest now upon its own journey, inviting the sun to follow. This time is the shifting of the energetic Tide, in to out. The breeze freshens to fill limpid sails limpid in dreaming.
My Spirit & my body are less entwined, one seeming remote to the other. I push back the covers & reopen the conversation. The invisible dances back lightly, wrapped in shadow. The divine brings itself to awakening organically. There are no responsibilities at this time of day, no drives to take, no clothes to don. Naked is okay at 4 a.m., sealed in my room, wrapped in my thoughts, standing at the foot of the bridge, about to cross over water. The invisible Divine waits, holding out a hand with its invitation to Light.
Flutters in the interior breeze bring tiny eye movements – I think I see bits of light at edges of dark, I swim from dream into carbon-based life, replacing dreams with solid tangibles.
Life is never ordinary. I won’t believe that in a million years.
I have times of crushing exhaustion. Too tired to even swipe my face free of makeup, I head to bed, catching myself at the last minute to head right instead of left, to enter the bath instead of the bed & clean my face. I sometimes am not as thorough as I want to be, but I do what I can so as not to wake with bits of mascara or smears of eye pencil which I so love to wear.
These times occur mostly after meals, healthy or not. The food, which should energize activity & move me to take on more – or at least finish what I’ve started – knock me out instead. My eyes close over the book & sleep wells up so I nod over the pages. I “lose time,” returning to activity depleted more – the nod-out not even restorative. I nap at 6, wake at 8, returning to the bed at 10. The good news is by 4 I’m back & setting up coffee, brushing Hanna Bell, writing notes to friends… By 5:55, I’m gathering purse & water bottle, heading to they gym to push & pull, to walk & lift, to swing & balance. I come home to fruit & flax cereal, setting out once again for work by 8.
I’ve been blaming age, the heat, my use of a lifelong right eye dominance. It’s difficult, channelling an entire universe through one orb. Tiring (that word again!), enervating. And it’s a lifelong pattern, this losing speed & spunk with darkness. Perhaps it is simply the light inspires me to activity while darkness sets upon me like a succubus. I don’t hear the stopper pop, but the well of energy drains away.
Lately I feel the years settling upon me like a colorful cape fading somewhat. I am exalted by the number I’ve achieved & fearful of losing to them as well. Where this me will go is unimportant. I’m happy with the progress I’ve made, the influence I’ve held. I haven’t built cathedrals, but there are many tiny shelters for hiding away in, there is much nourishment stored in the words I’ve put together, the paragraphs planed from formlessness.
Once a seer asked me if I’d like to know who I’d been in the past, assuring me I was world-famous. Once another assured me I’d have that fame once more but “posthumously.” I live by the sea now; I know tracklessness. I’ve lived in the desert, too, where a footprint can last a thousand earth-years.
That I wink in & out of time & timelessness is appropos to my years. That I may spend more time on one side of the veil than the other is a balance more delicate to navigate when I hold the edge of the bureau to pull on my pants. I once heard a fellow say, “The older I get, the farther away the floor seems to be.” This is a truism as well as a grin.
If the only one I’ve made happy is a random reader, it is enough. If my life satisfied one whim, one promise, one wish, it is enough. IfI cannot measure in full any longer, oh well. I’ve built none but stone cairns & buried much beneath them. I’ve made myself happy & had others laugh with me. I’ve taught the light a few things & carried darkness to the outer edges of my life, far from direct experience, leaving it there for the kind of jackals that gnaw this fare to feast well. I am amazed constantly in my ability to move forwardwhen all I want is to turn back, make a pillow of my past to rest upon.
I have no symphonies gathered in a trunk for some child-genius to happen upon, no recipes to feed the masses, no prayers to bring on salvation, except in the personal. My life is an excerpt, a condensing, a draft & a draught of what a life should be, can be, & in my case, is.
That will have to serve.
It is past 10:00. I close my eyes again & pull up the covers. If my life is only a dream: it is Enough.
Riding the Light - 