Writing from the middle of meaning (horses horses horses)
Dog-Ear: Jan 30, 2024
1/30: The winter has been promised to us for a while longer. My best friend writes to me and says that maybe worrying isn’t always about care, maybe worrying is a bad habit too, just something we get used to. This year, I hold hands w/ both light and dark, know the ways in and the ways out. I change my tires and find all the possible ways home, through the slush of love and the storm of beyond I drive, through “known” and Unknown. I write to you LIVE, all cramped up in Soul, wearing red wearing white. I will not go back to 2015, no, I will stay right here w/ my hang-ups like hiccups, hiccups in my throat from the ginger beer. I will stay growing too slow. My days are never long enough, never have been. Time squished between my slow desire and finding something to eat to sustain it. If this life were never interrupted, it would still take me so long. I can only get upset about this so much, you know - I learned to get upset from someone else.
Hey! Who's in charge here? I dress myself in red in white. I drive to work and back. I manipulate my little words into strings, all the loose threads of me. I choose which to cut away and which to pull tight.
Perhaps what you call fear, I call particularity. Perhaps what I call fear, I should call my own tempo. I am learning to dance slower. My hands find my hips at every shape & my thighs at every size. My feet do not always have to be so deep in the ground. You've seen me dancing all on my own for a while now. Just because I find my habits ugly now doesn't mean I will think them ugly forever and it doesn't mean they’ll outlast me, they don't mean anything I could make them mean. I, Meaning Maker, stuck circling the center.
I can't wait for life to mean nothing but no, no I couldn't live if life meant nothing and yet! And yet and yet - no one else at the wheel! I choose the winding way home. I put the Incubus song on repeat. I save the best for last, trusting life to do the same for me.
I am honest in the middle of meaning. Free here to be both right and wrong. Free here to be both lost and in love, how I have always been. I get my answers in the wind when it whips and settles, in the sun when it finds me and evades me, in euphoric aches, in tomorrows and tomorrow's - the contradictory kind, where yes/no’s are alive in each second. Not answers really - I'll call them options for now.
I am not ether yet. I am too far in the ground looking around for the key I dropped. Have you seen it? I will find a way in w/out it if I have to. Rumi wrote “as you start to walk on the way, the way appears” and as I walk, as I write, roads weave and divert. I remember no right no wrong. I remember life is long, yes, life is short. I remember how it feels to be pulled apart, each piece of me claiming individuality and running off in separate directions - a way I can no longer be. I see horses horses horses sharing heads sharing hooves, not pulling apart but hovering as they run, hovering around the center - the answer I keep coming to, the only option that matters remains ever present.
I am getting interested these days, in all of it, in all of it I don't know. We all learn things at different times. I am a hard lesson unless I'm devouring. I would rather be tired than hungry, every time. So I am getting interested: in throwing clay and designed interiors and all the ways organisms have existed over a millennia. I am getting interested instead of getting offended because my curiosity is stronger than feelings I have grown out of (ouch, their reactions!!) Ooo we are sliding into this growing thing, this big heavy gush, how everything else was frozen except for the Awosting, falls all flooded, and she rippled, rippled out, sending spirals out to sea.
I have pigeonholed poetry to when I can breathe through how it feels in the body - I have to stretch and I have to laugh and I have to have time - my flow behind a finicky dam. So be it. We know love is part of it, all part of it. I am getting interested in love most of all.
(I go back and change "selfish" to "finicky" - I am thinking of you now, Lazlo. Our palms in purple light, the lines all traveled before, the changes from left to right. My palms had called me a name, one I hadn't called myself before: "finicky.” You and Emma both saw it before me. “Well yeah I see that," you got me laughing about it. I have been interested in “finicky” since I saw you last. It had been in a tower for a while. I am proud to say I have learned more about “finicky,” the importance of it & the simultaneous unimportance of it, how it can be wielded, knowing the difference between "can" and "should." Anyway ~)
When we learn the lessons we learn, we feel all the times we've learned that lesson before. Felt experience is not merely a romantic idea, it is knowledge we pass down, it is where our gut is rooted in, miles and miles in the deep deep dirt all the way down down, you know where I mean (the roots of you the roots of me). Our whole lives, relearning lessons all the ways we have to. The best way we know is by focusing on one thing at a time, one day at a time, spending all our time getting comfortable w/ instability (this word choice is for me, not you) (I am no longer afraid of never knowing!)