Prune Flinging and Noodle Arms

I'm sitting on a soft patio chair listening to traffic and the mumbles of morning conversation.  I can tell it’s fall by the way the air smells.  The sun is strong and the afternoon will bear down with dry, autumn heat.  

I just finished eating warm cereal with powdered greens - it looked like swamp sludge.  There were prunes in there too.  I placed one in my spoon,  covered in green, and catapulted it into the garden.  Maybe I did it to two, or all of the prunes in my cereal.  Watching them fly trumped their flavor.

A future investigator is exploring the dig site of what was once my home. What could this be? she wonders while examining the fossilized drupe.  Upon further inspection and after intense collaboration with experts in various fields, she determines it is part of a deeply profound ceremonial event, one that celebrates a rite of passage into the phase of life where a person, usually of advanced age, must incorporate more prunes into the diet.  The softened fruit is easy on the teeth and helps ease the constipation that often accompanies old age.  She determines that, rather than it being a shameful experience, for our Coloradian tribe, the process of aging was held with reverence and respect.  

The Painting of the Prunes emerged as a blessing ritual, wherein dried fruits of various varieties (prunes especially prized for their mild laxative effect and high fiber content) are colored with polychromatic food powders then tossed with joyful reverie around the person for whom the celebration is being conducted.  

Yesterday evening I watched two kids walk down the handicapped ramp from a Shell gas station.  The boy was moving as if on an invisible pony (or unicorn or any other rideable creature), galloping freely, noodle arms, mouth open, head nodding in rhythm with his step.  His older sister slithered sideways, her pelvis jutting forward, stirring the air with her fingertips.  

I wonder if it's possible to have action without logic.  Behavior like this is easy to accept, coming from a child's body.  Housed in the skin of a grown-up, these random acts of play are often distorted into something socially meaningful, explained and interpreted as art, or labeled as insane.  

A beautiful alien hears the thoughts of an ambitious young woman who is attempting to figure it out.  The extra terrestrial, suspended in time-space, turns circles, dances with bubbles and listens to the angst and curiosity that impel an invention of logic for what is humanly ineffable.  The young investigator proposes a kind of dried fruit ritual as the alien watches children move unreasonably and the narrator fling green prunes into the garden on a sunny autumn morning. 

But I am Naked Now

I’m naked.  Outside with the finicky sunshine, crickets, a plane rumbling somewhere near.  I like the free air and the heat on all of me.  The bees move as if they are being breathed - in and out, sliding along some invisible fabric.  

I am self conscious writing to you.  When you look at me, it goes deep.  An exquisite panic arises.  I build castle walls to keep you out and dig secret tunnels to sneak you in.  

You see me, not just the parts I show, not just the parts I consciously hide, but a whole of me that I cannot perceive.

A squirrel sits preening in a crook of the tupelo that leans over the pond.  Another scampers through mulch collecting acorns, its movements punctuated with any sound that might be cause for alarm.  I smell the work of a chainsaw - warm, astringent.  I try to relax into the familiarity of this world, but the pressure of you coursing through me, thickening my blood, is a new sensation.  I don’t know myself as I used to.

I feel compelled to ask if its reciprocal.  It’s a defense, an attempt to soothe myself with the idea that there is camaraderie in the internal quake.

The sun is sweet.  When it comes out, it lays on me.  I can see I am not the only thing feeling its heat.  But the squirrels and hummingbirds take shade, so it is just me and the rocks and the wood, fixed in radiance.  It feels good it because it comes from outside.

I want to travel with you like dragonflies, bent, twisted into each other, making knotted islands of our delicate bodies atop the murky water we know so well.

I want to write succinctly, matter-of-factly, less poetry, more substance.  I want clean and elegant simplicity.  But I am naked now and I can’t disguise these heavy prose - the exposure of a throbbing beauty, roots grasping stones, clinging to the Earth, screaming in anguish and delight at having been discovered.

Fishing and Flowers

She is sitting on a humid swing.  The air is full of cicadas and a smell of white flowers.  Her body rocks in the gentle seat.  Back and forth.  He is on his way home.  She hopes he is in a happy mood, but it's a shallow attempt at conjuring joy.  The truth is, it only affirms her expectation of his state of arrival.  Years it has been and always she finds herself trapped in the waiting.  Driving down 465 without air conditioning, imagining a lake and the fishing boat and the bass bigger than his arm, he pushes aside the tone of voice he knows is waiting for him.  Meek (when did it become so falsely demure?), concerned-sounding (when did she think this expressed love?), imploring (at what point did he stop talking to her?)

The weight of summer quiets everything.  All living beings within a ten mile radius, cease to emote, drop their patterns for this one moment each day.  It is a dense twilight, so big it cannot be measured in units of time.  Mostly it passes unnoticed, in fact the very nature of its existence is ephemeral, impossible - a snowflake in August.

On this particular day, high above them, a swooping gull split the snowflake with an eager angle of flight.  The gesture sent one half through the window of his car and the other piece down past the willow tree from which the swing hangs.  A tiny ice crystal landed on her nose, slid down the nape of his neck.  On this particular day, the invisible moment was mutually recognized.

The meat of their thoughts did not disappear, but all the residue - weeks, decades, generations of ways of thinking, washed through them.  He continued to drive, she, to swing.  Fishing was there, the heady scent of a garden, but nothing more.  Nothing else pressing against the moment, twisting it.

She gets up from the swing.  He pulls into the driveway.  They look like children.  She grabs a lemonade popsicle and runs to meet him.  He gets out of the car grinning.  She is tiny next to him.  He lifts her up under her armpits and licks the frozen treat in her hand.  “Fishing?” he asks her.  She wraps her legs around his waist like it’s a tree, kisses him on the forehead.  “Yes.”

Story Monster

There is a Story Monster inside me.  But I have not seen her for a while.

Oh why did I go for it?  Did I say yes to everything?  Why did I do these things that make it so difficult to find the monster.  The shy monster who loves time and loneliness and empty space.  Plans scare her away.  She buries herself, makes a nest in my throat and stays there indefinitely while I busy around and do stuff and check things off of my list.  

Who wants to be busy like this? 

I suppose I do.   Because I’m scared of her.  I’m scared of the monster.  She grabs me and I lose myself.  She moves me for her cause which, in surrendering to it, dissolves a part of me. 

Where are you Story monster?  You scary, scared being?  You brilliant wave, who takes me for your vessel.  I miss you.  I know I have not been a great house keeper.  The room smells like caffeine and importance.  I could clean up… Talk less, do less, worry less.  

Talk less, do less, worry less.  

Love more.  Thank people more.  Play more.  Rest.

Or I could stay here casting words around a unknown space, making desperate attempts at finding you, at seeing the invisible by scattering the glitter of language to reveal a negative image.  The Words point to you, suggest your whereabouts.  

Words are the lingerie for a truth that forever changes shape.  I could lose myself as a fetishist - obsessed with the form, mistakenly stroking leather and lace, forgetting about your body underneath.  

Beautiful Story Monster.  I’m sorry.  

Death Makes Me Beautiful

Death makes me beautiful.  The the bad decisions, hateful love handles, giant worries and failures - these become pieces of lint, with mortality near.

We think we’re grown-up.   We think now that we’re in our 30’s and 40’s and 50’s and 60’s, we know life.  Then Death walks up - gets all close.  Suddenly the everything that seemed to be important dissolves.  All that stuff was so easy compared to this.  This, this, this… immense nothing.  This too-big-to-make-sense-of disappearance.  You were here a moment ago - gorgeous vessel for my love, stunning light that shone in my sky.  You were here and together we made a constellation - even when you were billions of miles away.  But now you’re gone.

I burn more brightly trying to figure it out.  Trying to find you.  Listening for your voice. The others don’t matter - I want you.  One more laugh.  One more bear hug and wandering conversation. 

Somehow - the magic in you has turned to tears and grief. 

I don’t know why, but there is also gratitude.  And shame for that.  All I want to do is cry and celebrate my body.  I’m sorry I am grateful for your passing.  It’s confusing.  I want you here, but death makes me beautiful.  The flaws and imperfections are alive and radiant. 

I thought I was all grown-up.  But I’m not.  There is still so much I don’t know.  Information is everywhere.  Understanding is endangered.  But it begins to grow in the wake of you. 

Unless we open up, we never get to see or share the parts that come to life with the stimulus of grief.  Just as birth catalyzes that which cannot be known before parenthood, death awakens something.  It puts in motion the maturation of imaginal cells, those that sprout wings as we let ourselves go and expand into something new.

I undress:  every sensation is divine.  Every “could-be-better” is perfect. 

To the living:  Sit in the sun with me.  Let me smell you.  Let me hold your face and touch your skin lightly, like a whisper.  Let me know the parts of you I didn’t get to see in them. 

Death makes us all so beautiful.

Icarus and the Giant Clitoris

If we were all so open...maybe pain wouldn't be called such.  Because it would be shared.  And when it is shared it is somehow more comfortable, sweeter, unpainful.  It becomes a medium for connection. 

Happiness is Icarus flying skyward, on his own, delighting in the experience of individual corporeal incarnation - the freedom to be one.  Pain does not have a specific archetype (in this metaphor).  Pain is the mother of experience.  It is the impetus for surrender and the terrifying truth that we are all one, little nerve endings on the end of a giant clitoris.  All sensation is shared, regardless of the walls we build.

Why would it be terrifying that we are all one?  Because I am no longer... The reality of oneness suggests Katrina, in all MY beauty and insecurity and invented importance, is not real and never was.  All that righteous self-making, for what?

Who is the me that possesses the idea of Katrina anyway?  Could it be that happiness exalts the self, while pain dissolves it?  Does Icarus know that his elation pulls him to the sun, the heat, the perpetual orgasm that melts the wax in our wings and swallows our joyful bodies?

Strangers Die Every Day

I'm struggling today.  With death and birth and trying to understand.  Trying to do a good job.  Trying so hard.  All this gratitude and all this suffering at once.  I feel big and bright and lonely.

I'm giving a presentation tonight.  I'm proposing and working and all those things... but I feel  stuck.  What do we do with life?  There is so much to feel and explore and make - we stumble around in our glorious imperfections and get triggered and yell at our friends and then someone dies and it hurts so much because we opened up and then we ask, “Do I just keep opening to this pain?”

Strangers die every day.  (I had friends at Naropa who were in a band by that name).

Thank you for being someone I can write all this to.  Thank you for sharing dreams and searching for potatoes.

Sly's son jumped out of a window.  He was having a nightmare...that's what Sly thinks.  He didn't jump out of an open window.  He jumped through it.  Now his brain is dead and his body is alive because his organs will be someone else's organs soon.  Sly thought the crash from the other room was a painting falling off of the wall.  Then he felt a breeze and opened the curtain to see his son crumpled on the pavement.  His spine was crushed.

And who am I in this momentary, star-muted world?  What do we do when the ineffable happens for real?  I write a lot of manifesto-ish stuff, but now I feel so distant, so impotent to help my friend or even help myself understand emotionally what is happening.  I want to hug everyone...No, I want everyone to hug each other and hug me and why did I even put on mascara today?

Strangers die every day.

And I worry about love handles, bags under my eyes, whether to buy kombucha or kevita, if I'll ever make a lot of money...

And I realize that humans are superheros.  Because how do you suffer through suffering like this without being a hero?  This happens, terribly painful things, brilliantly painful things happen all the time and we keep going.  How is that possible?

Suffering, fear and pain are the stimuli for heroism.  It's what triggers the hero inside and what makes us such incredible creatures.  We love even when we know that as love deepens so too does the potential pain of loss.  It is a risk we can't not take.

People fall...in love all the time.  And strangers die every day.