came the time to go down
and die
smothered by dark
and lie
there completely unmoving
Light Light Light
all my seasons are named
for you
Light Light Light
I’ll be hollow and wait
for you
He has his shoes and coat on, standing in front of the door.
Bag full and slung over his shoulder and late for work.
But suddenly I am pouring out a new pride. I have triumphed.
As I recant the gleaming details he sets his bag back on the floor,
Relaxes his knees
And listens.
I woke feeling wild. Unrestrained in an environment I belong to. So I roamed.
I wore a cone shaped hat and a mustard-yellow, velvet jacket and let the long ends of my hair stick out from under my scarf like straw. A glance in the mirror told me I looked like the scarecrow from Wizard of Oz. Though, not to be just silly, you see. But to conjure. To arouse mischief. A glamor that had happened when I wasn’t intending - that cheeky element of magic that wants what it wants. It’s a true power of Autumn, not only owned by Halloween, not being the simple child’s play it seems. So, I would be the fool today and step out with my carelessness falling through the holes in my pockets.
“I must learn to love the fool in me the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries”
Theodore Isaac Rubin (found at 78 Notes to Self)
A fool can have a conversation with anything about anything. The literal world is a useless place to a fool. Ridiculous and wonderful things are profoundly true. The misted, humid haze whispering secrets to the dip of grass around a tree is really a window to unreality - If you’re not afraid of a little madness… a fool is not.
And, for a fool, it is fully permissible to talk aloud to oneself: “Why is it that I can overflow with sensations when I am here in London, taking in more and more and more and just get bigger to handle it all. Then I go to Toronto where I am suddenly overwhelmed and clogged up? I don’t understand who I am in that world!”
It was the Trees who answered me. “You are not overwhelmed. It is because to you that place feels dead that you suffer.
So tinglingly true, once it came to me in that way. Dead without the nourishment of decay, even. Not transformatively dead, even. Not even forbiddenly tantalizing and disgusting, undersides-of-life dead, even.
It could have sounded so final and hopeless but somehow a grin found it’s way to my lips. Those words may be solid but so were the rocks on the river bottom, selfishly forcing the water to thrash and swirl around them. And yet, the water made a good time of it just the same. More than a good time, there were mad tinges of ecstasy. And eventually, even a rock could be worn down or moved. And it didn’t matter anyway, since water knows a secret or two about forging ahead, making rocks irrelevant or by manipulating a rock’s contrariness to the water’s own purpose. A secret or two I could uncover myself.
So I come home as a bit more than a fool though not entirely wise. Just smart enough to understand the message for me when I stumbled upon this glory of a poem found existing profoundly here (a place worth the visit).
Kopis’taya
(A Gathering Of Spirits)
by Paula Gunn AllenBecause we live in the browning season
the heavy air blocking our breath,
and in this time when living
is only survival, we doubt the voices
that come shadowed on the air,
that weave within our brains
certain thoughts, a motion that is soft,
imperceptible, a twilight rain,
soft feather’s fall, a small body
dropping into its nest, rustling, murmuring,
settling in for the night.Because we live in the hard-edged season,
where plastic brittle and gleaming shines
and in this space that is cornered and angled,
we do not notice wet, moist, the significant
drops falling in perfect spheres
that are the certain measures of our minds;
almost invisible, those tears,
soft as dew, fragile, that cling to leaves,
petals, roots, gentle and sure,
every morning.We are the women of daylight; of clocks and steel
foundries, of drugstores and streetlights,
of superhighways that slice our days in two.
Wrapped around in glass and steel we ride
our lives; behind dark glasses we hide our eyes,
our thoughts, shaded, seem obscure, smoke
fills our minds, whisky husks our songs,
polyester cuts our bodies from our breath,
our feet from the welcoming stones of earth.
Our dreams are pale memories of themselves,
and nagging doubt is the false measure of our days.Even so, the spirit voices are singing,
their thoughts are dancing in the dirty air.
Their feet touch the cement, the asphalt
delighting, still they weave dreams upon our
shadowed skulls, if we could listen.
If we could hear.Let’s go then. Let’s find them. Let’s
listen for the water, the careful gleaming drops
that glisten on the leaves, the flowers. Let’s
ride the midnight, the early dawn. Feel the wind
striding through our hair. Let’s dance
the dance of feathers, the dance of birds.
Yesterday I woke up crowded. My entire sense of myself scrunched up in the space between my temples. A searing, too-bright, too-hot, too-dense space. Dense in the way the heat of the sun can crowd the vastness of the desert.
The couch too small, the street and it’s noise too close, the constant proximity and interaction with people - meaningful or otherwise too much. I was desperate to drain, instead I felt like a bathtub clogged, the dirty water filling the tub as I take a shower. And no where any space to stretch out my soul. No where any space to breathe.
My head all pressure and my body normally so sensitive, a semi-permeable membrane of transition between my inner realms and the Earth’s physical realms was dead, numb, the absence of my familiar sense of vastness. I curled my body up as small is it would go around the waves of nausea as I rode the subway. Trying to shut it all out and open inside, feeling only barred from myself and thrust into the oppressive over-exposure of the big city.
The dullness, the throbbing pressure finally overcame any sense of being in class and I excused myself after the first break feeling a desperate, almost frantic need to go home.
I made a cacoon of myself and my sweaters, curled up tight in my seat. Some sleep came. But so did a violent, physical ill - suddenly and forcefully half way through the two-hour bus ride - all down the front of my dress and eventually into the plastic garbage bags that hang on the side of the bus at each set of seats. A certain portion of relief came immediately after that. But the deepest, wildest placest in me were roaring.
Home. I captured the comfort of my bed, delving into it so deeply it was more than physical. I slept immediately and woke to space. Sweet space. I lingered. Rose up to the day wrapping it around me like a shawl. The autumn-ness of the day soothing the places of my soul that were still shaky, and bruised. I walked through the calmness of the day. Savoring the taste of cool air, the sounds of birds, the wordlessness in my heart. The sheer roominess of it all. And with all effortlessness the draining finally came. Always in the form of tears. My heart, like a rain cloud, ready to burst - did. And just like anticipated rain, it cooled, and refreshed, and cleansed the accumulation of dust and clutter. The near panic of overload floating up to the surface to be fully felt and with it a very clear plea.
Help.
Monday was my first day of school. School is in a foreign land. Urban and overwhelming. I prepare myself with a steadily - paced transition on a Greyhound bus, the rhythm of momentum under me, carrying me forward smoothly. No skipping ahead, no hurrying, no control. The time allows me to slip out of one skin and stay un-contained for a time. A time to be undeclared. A time to be free-associated, not associated. A time to carelessly wander around in myself.
And then, before the bus dips into the intensity of too many people, too close together, I can slip into a skin that can take it on and find it exciting.
And then again, in reverse. Time enough for all that I have purchased with my attention and activity to slip off like a heavy bag slips off a tired shoulder. Time for emptying out - to be undeclared. Time to be free - associated, not associated. Time to carelessly wander and time to not wander at all in myself. And then, before the bus returns to my familiarity, I slip into the life I chose purposely out of all enticing options, and kiss my waiting husband and come home.
Sometime yesterday a painting mysteriously appeared hung on the fence outside my window. Today, it’s still there and it makes me entirely happy as i sit at my table and contemplate things.
The visitor woke me up today by pushing her head against my back. When i rolled over she nudged my arms, and hands and then pushed her head under my chin..
(right now, as i type this, she’s resting her head on my arm and purring and gazing up at me)
she seems pretty happy with all the snuggling. She has lost some of her austerity in her eagerness for my attention..which is fine!
Picasso was put out by the whole thing so she got up from her perch in the corner to sit on my other side, meowing injuredly and with protest but not actually hissing..just a lot of back turning
here is the tip of Picasso's tail as she snubs us.
The visitor
At first she only came while we slept. Leaving quietly when we stirred. Recently she started to poke her head in at random times during the day and evening, as though she was checking on our status - if the environment did not intrude on her silence and solitude then she would stop to share the space with us calmly and freely…but if we were not suitable in our frame of mind i could see the assessment forming in her slow-blinking eyes, the adjustments in her body, slowly looking around for comparisons…and eventually her exit.
so her time here feels like a blessing. and receiving the blessing just once makes me want to have a wide-open welcoming heart all the time. Just in case she shows up again. I would have made the kind of space that’s suitable for her. even without ever really knowing why she comes or why she leaves.
And especially enticing to me is Picasso’s total lack of reaction (whose ear you can see in the bottom left of the picture peaking over the edge of the blanket). Picasso who growls at us if she feels we’ve interrupted her by coming home. Who whines if we disturb her rest. who hisses at other cats without much provocation. This same Picasso stays in her vulnerable napping pose inches from the visitor, unmoved. My imagination feels glee at the possible hidden meanings of this.
the mystery makes it all so beautiful and meaningful.
A message carried so elegantly - aren’t all hearts looking for the appropriate environment to open up in?
She starts to take steps closer to me as I type, maybe my appreciation has inspired her to snuggle me, but then we hear footsteps outside and she decides instead to hide under the patio in the back….i wonder, now, if she is always that close by, waiting for the right sort of stillness in order to visit.
I am in love with this summer.
The humidity sharing space with rain-cooled air, it’s lips lightly pressed to my skin. The sun has been kept humble and the clouds have been fair so that i am unsuffocated by heat or gloom or light or wet but all blend together so that i feel loosely kept - wanted the exact perfect amount to feel loved but never constrained. And some unnamed piece of my soul is mirrored each day in the days shades, it’s unhurried pace, it’s soothing tones. A similarity so clear that I yearn to describe it, but so meaningful that I can’t.
It’s not a gushy, giddy love. but a smoldering, hushed-tones love. Carried out in the depths of your heart for none to see.
A love whose glances slip out secretly from under long eyelashes and whisper over his body before dissipating like smoke in the air.
Sensing this summer’s imminent presence on my skin, my hair raises softly, and then I hear him rustling leaves that sound like rain and my mouth gets dry and but I stay quiet to receive him.
It’s the feeling of love before anything at all happens yet I am crushingly thrust outside any normal sense of time or place, knowing we will never meet or speak outloud. The only instrument of love I have are my senses and I fling them out to meet him.
All that there is of this love are my senses returning to me filled up.
the sounds of the day stirring brought me awake in those freshest moments when you can smell the dew in the air and nothing has quite happened yet to determine the course of the day - a glorious and unfettered liminal space. I find it a perfect time to collect myself as I most desire. A day can feel like an entity unto itself to me and if each day could be personified, that being would visit in the early, not-quite hours and make itself available for communion. Some part of me seeks to discuss what sorts of things would make the best use of that day as though we could work in tandem to accomplish anything as long as i don’t miss those ephemeral moments.
I woke up in the same position I remember falling asleep in, which is rare and allows me a sense of relaxation I don’t often get. A stillness in my limbs and an overall sense of restfulness that makes it a physical pleasure to lie still and breathe - in no hurry to stretch or start.
The first light was diffused by a thin, light layer of cloud leaving not only just enough light to notice that alongside my waist and thigh a very soft and comfortable cat that i didn’t recognize had fallen asleep. But also not too much light to break the misty spell of finding a stray animal peacefully curled up next to your body for warmth and possible comfort. The sort of light that lets you believe that you’ve managed to slip into an otherworld while in your sleep and as long as your mind doesn’t move too much and your body stays calm and the light stays thin you will remain.
I leave my bedroom window open so my cat, Picasso, can let herself in and out as she pleases and the size of the bedroom means that the foot of my bed meets the window ledge conveniently for traveling animals.
it wasn’t the new cat’s first visit. I’ve seen her in the yard at a distance. and the night before last she wandered inside but got spooked before she got to rest and i was shocked awake by her sudden weight by my head and her claws on my arm as she landed on the bed before dashing out the window letting me catch only a sleepy glimpse of her face.
I sat up to pet her and she came awake, meowing brightly and rubbing her head around my body and nuzzling my neck and curling up in my arms very much at ease now that she’d had her night’s sleep in a warm bed.
As the sky got brighter I could see that she had crossed eyes and one was particularly milky. She had a smoky color to her, like a siamese cat, with long hair and patches on her cheeks that made her nose look narrow and her expression alert. her joints seemed a bit stiff and her body on the gaunt side of things.
Foxy, the dog, sat curiously at the side of the bed hoping to catch a sniff and picasso sat wary and irritated on her perch in the corner attempting to purchase bed space somehow near me but not near our intruder, ungraciously resigned to sharing her domain and affection with yet another animal more genial and cuddly than she.
I let the gentle swell of the day rock me back to sleep and when my husband came home later in the morning he found three heads peaking to see who it was and none of them was mine. Although the sudden noise of the door and entrance of someone new scared her out the window I was glad that she’d had a safe harbor for a night and hoped she’d feel welcome again - although i couldn’t speak for picasso more inclined to hiss and moan than welcome and foxy, who i think means well, but doesn’t understand that chasing is not a particularly sensitive way to encourage friendship between animals of other cultures and so while she returned after my husband left again Picasso and Foxy made short work of the visit and I haven’t seen her around again.
But something more than a cuddly visit appeals to me about this. The idea of being a haven, both in myself and in my home resonates with me. In this particular way. I didn’t set out looking for an abandoned heart or stray cat - it found me. and when it did I didn’t set about fixing it or figuring it out or any other grand response - I didn’t have the chance to make it about me or what I was giving away because I was sleeping and it was welcome in the simplest possible way. By just being allowed to be there in the space it chose for it’s own reasons (left unknown to me).
There is a welcoming which is solicited and efforted - well-intended but yearning for someone or something to welcome…and there are welcomes which are begrudging and offered after the fact and more in between and I feel those sorts often. This one was special to me in that instead of being the force behind it, I was simply another ingredient. It is such a great way to feel a sense of harmony to just be another part of something before my ability to deliberate creeps in to try and navigate myself to the center as the cause again.
I would like it to be true that the deity of a fresh day could often call on me to be a simple part of welcoming the lost or left who may then evaporate with the dew in that magically temporary way.
