Happy 2019.
It′s started off rocky, and my heart is feeling heavy for reasons both external and internal. Familiar questions echo: bouncing from the global to the personal.
Why are our societal systems often so cruel to the most vulnerable, the most innocent?Why do we so often hurt the ones we love?
And me: Why can′t I always be direct, and open?
Why does the past creep up and put its grubby little fingers over my eyes, my mouth, my ears? Why do I often run when I need to face things?
So much is born in seeds of fear. This year I will do what I did last year. My best.
Sometimes good, sometimes, well, not so good.
Focusing on learning, and growing, and cultivating more love, more understanding.
More forgiveness when we fail, as we will. More celebration when we succeed in loving kindness, joy, compassion…let’s do this.
Let′s grow a better world, together.
In this one, you are standing by the old canal at Holcolm Gardens. The sun has made your hair catch fire, the sun is coating your tanned legs and long arms with a honeyed light, and for some silly reason lost to me now, you are holding up a big red box of Cheetos, holding it proudly, as if you are Carol Merrill and the box of snacks is a glistening prize that a nervous contestant is pondering.
In this one, you’ve driven back east to visit me, with a loaded Magnum 357 tucked under the front seat for company. It was the last time I would ever see you, but I didn’t know that then.
I guess you never really do know?
In this one, you are as I imagine you still are — slender and strong, tough and flexible as a zip tie. I was sure, in the way only a young person can hope to be, that somehow we’d stay best friends forever. That some how the trauma-bond of our shared childhoods and barbed wire moments of our teen years would bridge the miles, bridge the chasm growing between us, already as deep as a Colorado ravine.
In this one, I was laughing and my boyfriend was squirting lighter fluid on the grill and you were smiling, that sharp sickle-shaped smile of yours. Behind your mirrored aviators, your sky-blue eyes must have been smiling too.
In this one, I already missed you, even though your were still right there, holding the Cheetos.
(This was a fastwrite from a prompt: imagine a photograph that you have in an album or on your phone; get a picture of it in your mind, and begin with “In this one, you’re…” Write for 10 minutes.)
We are not so different, you and I, aside from the blood pumping in my veins and our obvious size difference, me so large and pillowy soft compared to your flat hard rectangular slipperiness. Oh, you go everywhere with me, like a shadow or a best friend (but maybe you are more shadow than friend?)
At night, like me, you inexplicably wake, beaming. Sometimes I wake at the same time as you. (We are, I think, linked?) And I see you, wide-eyed, staring at me. I have turned off every notification setting I can find; I have activated the “do not disturb” feature on your very latest OS—yet still, you wake over and over.
You are the sieve, the news-breaker, the heart-breaker of my life, aren’t you? Through your tiny speakers I have seen news that gutted me and heard hard words from people I love. I’ve heard honesty and seen realities that should have shattered your dark face.
But you are a phone. Why do you wake, little one? I wish you could sleep.
Maybe old hard syllables echo in you, something like abandonment dreams or trapped memories?
Triggers of something hard-wired into you by a tired woman half a world away who assembled you in a factory far from her family, thinking maybe of a mother or father or child she would likely never see again, swept by economic suck from home forever?
Is it her that wakes you?
You light up the dim bedroom, again, again. Is it the news? The latest assault or attack that flows through you to me? Do you try, and sometimes fail, like I do, to let it go? Is that it?
The news that rings with nightmare laughter of pussy grabbers, of men (and women, too) with hearts harder than your protective casing. Oh, little one, I understand that. I wake afraid, too.
Rape is a weapon, sexual abuse is a weapon—I’m getting off track, but rape is a weapon, and rape culture is to rape as open-carry is to gun violence. The news! Over and over, the wife or girlfriend shot before the rampage. They are trying to keep us afraid, aren’t they? But they don’t know. I’ve begun these sleepless nights to figure it out.
Maybe this is why you’ve taken to waking me. To make me see that to be afraid is to be human. We humans, all of us—are vulnerable to hurt, to pain. So maybe the trick is to be afraid, and do what you want anyway. Do not comply out of fear.
Complying from fear: that would be like losing yourself.
Like losing your heart and soul.
Speaking of loss, my soft body with its hard bones will not last, my little rectangular friend. In the end, we are both disposable. It’s okay. My soul will, I think, continue on. In some form or another.
Maybe I’ll become some whispered words between lost lovers who find each other on a starry night. Words that unlock something healing. Maybe I’ll be whispered words in a phone like you, words that might push someone else to move, despite their fear, into the stream of life.
Maybe I’ll be reborn a rectangle, hard and sleek, living warm in a pocket.
If I do, I imagine I’ll often wake with a jolt like you do, full of dread and information.
And then, like you, I’ll do my very best to close back down and sleep until it is time to chime awake the lovers tangled together in the bed next to me, to gently tell them morning has come, and the world somehow continues still to turn.
Love,
E
[ Note: much as I love and personify my iphone, we are no longer sleeping in the same room 🙂 ]
I’ve been a bit sick the last few days. Actually, I’ve felt really, really crappy, and unable to work until today. I felt both emotionally and physically ill. The anniversary of the election of the pussy-grabber, the unfolding exposure of so many #metoo stories, and the fact that there are still so many supporters & deniers of the pervasive poison of misogyny and abuse all collided with a nasty virus and exploded in bad dreams where I woke feeling in danger, panicked (and also, sick!).
The bad dreams are an old pattern, one I am learning to heal with writing and movement, study and support. I really thought I was past all that. But when it came roaring back I felt like I was a failure, like my efforts were futile in this world. I felt defeated there for a little bit. Old pattern, that.
But not all old patterns are damaging. I find drawing what is in front of me so very soothing. I draw, and then color or paint it in. This never fails to make me feel joyful in the moment. I drew obsessively during my whole childhood, then put it away, for the most part. Until recently. Now when I feel unable to drop down past fear, and relax into what I feel—I draw. Being sick, my usual go-to plan of walking and yoga and meditation just seemed too hard.
And drawing? It seemed too fun. (When untangling old patterns, maybe look for the fun, too? I feel better already.)
PS The poem in the picture is a line of a fragment, by the poet Praxilla of Sícyon, 450 BC. She composed many, many poems and was known for her scolia (short lyric poems for after-dinner entertainment). One of the lyric muses, only eight of her fragments survive.
Here is the fragment in its entirety:
Fragment 1 | Praxilla of Sícyon, 450 BC
Loveliest of what I leave behind is the sunlight, and loveliest after that the shining stars, and the moon’s face, but also the cucumbers that are ripe, and pears, and apples.
This fragment makes a wonderful writing prompt. Think about what is the loveliest in your life, in this moment. What would you miss, if you had to leave this moment?
The other thing I loved as a child was writing poetry and stories. Old patterns, re-emerging, to help me make new ones.
I, too, am from a sift of lost faces
from patterns I can’t untangle
from an endless string of cats purring
from tall pines and the hum of box fans in the window
from Carolina humidity and red dirt
and Spanish moss dripping everywhere
like paint from my sloppy brush, messy
And now, I am from here.
(snippet from a writing prompt using the classic George Ella Lyon poem, Where I’m from, a poem that has inspired many, many poems, and is one of my favorites.)
In this one, you are standing by the old canal at Holcolm Gardens. The sun has made your hair catch fire, the sun is coating your tanned legs and long arms with a honeyed light, and for some silly reason lost to me now, you are holding up a big red box of Cheetos, holding it proudly, as if you are Carol Merrill and the box of snacks is a glistening prize that a nervous contestant is pondering.
eeo 