“your hands are conscious’ she says.
So is her skin if she can tell such a thing.
We look up to the evidence of the firm and gentle breeze

“I wish the trees could caress me that way”

My mom is standing in the door about to pick up another box of my things to wait in her basement while I find a home in the forest.  Without much of a pause at all and certainly no impatience about it she says:

“You can, and you will.”  an assurance that comes from knowing the panic is rediculous, whatever it’s telling me is complete bullshit and i’m full of it to take any time to consider it’s perspective.

And there is the liminal moment.  The threshold between the panicked voice that believes it can’t be done, and certainly *I’m* not capable of getting through all this packing, all the details, all the stuff I don’t have a plan for yet.  And the seeping out from there to everything else I can’t manage.  Between that helpless place and the self that turns toward the task with joyous determination.  I pause at the choice for a slight moment before i take a deep breathe of possible and able and it’s that simple.

I don’t know why this detour is so alluring to me each time.  How  helpless seems so instantly gratifying and glamours me with some promise of relief from strain when each time the step back into empowered and capable is so much sexier.

You can.  And you will.

I will.

So while I am patient with that and write each day anyway, I am also motivated by that feeling when a word or phrase has the perfect resonance with the experience on the inside and it plucks at me and I quiver and hum in tune.

Here is one such poem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7X7sZzSXYs

Her voice’s rhythm soothes me and each little sentence is a reassurance that life is safe to live as it is.

and how do you pick a favorite part?  the music building as the words gain an intensity and courage, but stay simple and reassuring. bold and reassuring.  that’s a delicious taste to me.  but also, the last part just melts my resistance to being human that much more - to my heart it combines the ‘get over it’ my tendency to want things smooth and easy needs to hear, with an encouragement to find that message relieving instead of patronizing or impossible. and also, i feel a sense of rising in triumph as the call is both to responsibility *and* to thriving.  it’s not just ‘how to be alone’ it’s how to thrive there.

Here’s is an excerpt from the end of the poem that I transcribed (hopefully somewhat accuruately):

Society is afraid of alone though, like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements.

Like people must have problems if after awhile no one is dating them. But lonely is a freedom that breaths easy and weightless, and lonely is healing if you make it.

You can stand swathed by groups and mobs  or hold hands with your partner, look both further and farther in the endless quest for company.

But no one is in your head and by the time you translate your thoughts some essence of them may be lost or perhaps it is just kept, perhaps in the interest of loving oneself.

Perhaps all those sappy slogans from pre-school over to high school’s groaning were tokens for holding the lonely at bay.

Cause if you’re happy in your head, then solitude is blessed, and alone is okay.

Its okay if no one believes like you, all experience is unique, no one has the same synapses, can’t think like you. For this, be relieved - keeps things interesting, life’s magic things in reach.

it doesn’t mean you aren’t connected, that community is not present, just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it.

Take silence and respect it, if you have an art that needs a practice stop neglecting it.

if your family doesn’t get you or a religious sect is not meant for you, don’t obsess about it. You could be, in an instant, surrounded if you need it.

if your heart is bleeding, make the best of it.

there is heat in freezing,  be a testament.

being responsible for my actions and for my life did not come to me naturally.   I have often just gone limp when something has gotten hard. And what often gets hard is what it takes to earn self-esteem, to keep an open heart and accept loss, to be humble and stand your ground - some things i’ve learned from being alone.  And while I learned well enough long enough ago that I couldn’t really build up from within living without responsibility, that tendency still wants it’s way.

And lately, that hasn’t felt good, or final, or totally true about me anymore.  When I hear it telling me about some part of my life, it’s feeble and narrow and only sees what might not be possible, how much it might hurt, how unfair it is or how i have no control so why work?  How I can’t be trusted with my own attributes.  That voice - I feel how it just hasn’t caught up - instead of letting that become the whole of my sense of myself i feel that - how it hasn’t caught up - to me.  Me who is doing things differently now.

Now,  eventually, I also hear the voice that says ‘wow, this isn’t easy, but what do we need to do and what do we need to get it done? and this is how it’s O.K.”  except it sounds like Tanya Davis.  and I can feel the thriving behind it.  Like the thriving in the words of this poem.  First, be patient.  If it doesn’t feel good at first, if it hasn’t been ok to be this way before, just wait.  Start simple. It’s about how trust is built.   and with that trust, being responsible for my experience of myself, that’s how to be a testament.

and that’s what it is for me from one moment to the next. Building my inner trust up is magic, sacred work.  Profound in it’s challenge and beauty and mess ups and triumphs…

Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live. ~Goethe

At first I couldn’t make out what I was made for, but now I think it was to search out the secrets of this wonderful world and be happy and thank the Giver of it all for devising it.

It always comes back to this.

How flimsy and inadequate it seems in a dark and unloving moment.  So easy to toss it heavily out of the way, stamp through this sort of thankfulness or happiness or quality of joy, which is really what my self-esteem is made of, toward the option to crticize or whimper that has convinced me it’s so much more empowering.

“that’s naive” it hisses at me.  and somehow, even though it’s never explained I have this feeling of understanding why that matters, why it’s dangerous or stupid or illusory.

It also knows my secret longing.  The one embedded in my heart like a shard of glass.  The one to be perfect.  Above reproach.  Gilded. And therefore unfailingly loved.   For a time It  always comes and I relish it, and love my state of perfection and how it feels to be held aloft with an uneasy uncertainty in the periphery of my senses.  Of course, it would shatter, eventually.  Shatter and cut at me while the voice of that uncertainty and insecurity would snort and lean back with it’s arms folded to watch how I panic, and eventually run to it begging for asylum from the tragedy of my imperfections.   “I told you so, how naive.  You’re terrible.  We’re all terrible.  To have hope is to be a liar.”

Only this time, I don’t beg.  I feel the sting and get very still.  and I wait.   I practice bearing the discomfort.  Containment.  Restraint.  I bear it instead of commanding it away.  And then I hear: “I don’t want to be perfect so how can failing at it buckle my spine?”  In a calm and very clear voice from somewhere far back inside me coming forward powerfully like the sudden rush of air in a subway station.

My Joy.

Joy was never asking me to deny weakness or ugliness or flaws or mistakes or to stop striving for improvement.  It was never suggesting I was perfect or needed to be or should believe in perfection and permanent, unmoveable goodness as the required context for celebration and being loved.

Instead, she says: “do you know something magnificent?  That you can hate and love the same person in equal amounts.  you can end up filled in both potentials, simultaneously, as far as they will go and one doesn’t automatically win out over the other.  Sure, it’s also an agony to be tossed between the two seemingly endlessly and without an obvious resolution since, sometimes, one just wont budge despite the other.  This, when reversed, is a way to say that love, your ecstasy, your capacity for joy and all your magic is as much a force as that which shatters those things.  When your heart is devastated and you can’t get a clear sense of it or what’s going on around you, I’m not asking you to pretend it’s not that way.  Joy doesn’t ignore the pieces, it’s just a way of collecting them. Or of dancing on them while your feet bleed.”

The space to talk, to laugh, to be alone and then to come together in whatever staccato rhythm the needs falls in, to fall absolutely apart and then be whole a second later without reproach.  Taking those first shaky steps with a new confidence with a friend like this is a profound blessing.  To be able to remind each other of what is our best in us and call it out when it sinks under the torments again.

“I just feel nauseas again - why this minute?  what is it about right now that it would suddenly come over me?” I lament.  We’re eating breakfast.  Well, I’m trying to anyway.

“Free floating anxiety….”  she understands, has had it floating around her freely so badly at times in her life her body would sieze around it and take her words away. “Write - take your journal out and write, right now.”

It takes me a second to process that she’s being literal and instructive before I pull out my journal and give the feeling words.  Giving it a voice softens it in me and as I’m writing, at the breakfast table, in the middle of a conversation I remember that I used to need to write that badly all the time - catch every little thought in a net of words. It was how I prayed.  It was how I absorbed the glory and wonder of everything I could take in.  It wasn’t about waiting for a writing mood or a poetic thing to occur to me, it was the simple urge to describe the breakfast table while breakfast was being eaten. And I don’t mean I remembered in the form of a memory of me doing this in the past, but that my body re- membered - put the pieces back together in me.  The feeling of doing it and supporting myself in that way was right there in that moment, intact.

Something very clenched and strained in me took a deep breath and let go a little.

After I go home to my own space - a space cleared out and more able to accomodate more of the intensity of my passion.

Later we meet to go shopping for leotards and leggings and indulge our unquenchable delight for Aerial silks.  And my  thoughts on how we weather storms becomes literal.  We walk in between rain falls.  Stepping under awnings just as it begins to pour and wait there for the lull, crowding under an umbrella each sacrificing an arm to a lighter rain when we’re between resting stations. Tucking the umbrella away when the rain pauses.  But none of this throwing us off the thread of each other and our conversation.  We just take our cues for movement from the sky . Something about letting the rain set our pace soothes me.

later when we talk about the muscles I need to stretch in order to create certain shapes in the air she tells me about using my breath to time my stretching, being gentle and doing it all the time.

“just take every opportunity to sit in the position that stretches those muscles - all the time.”

and I think that each lean into a new position within myself is like that.  The tug, the resistance.  the feeling of limitation which is sometimes motivating, sometimes frustrating.  Letting each inhale be a pause, a slight letting up.  And each exhale a gentle, controlled push that is just at the edge of that melting when the tension loosens enough for you to get a little deeper. If you push too hard you’re just inviting tearing or cramping and stubbornness that may never yield into suppleness.  I could stretch a compact once or twice a day - or I could take every chance to sit slightly strangely in order to feel that tug and coax it into a stronger and longer muscle so that I can use it to make gorgeous and currently impossible configurations of my body.

Until Foxy rises and grins up at me, reaches her paw to my lap and smiles. I understand that it’s time to visit that weather.

Storms hang languidly in the clouds spitting fat drops of rain at the ground.  the sky turns shades of purple-gray and a  dying sun splashes it’s last light across it’s moody cheek like a slap.  Illuminating this building but not that one.  Unapologetically.

A rainbow appears, echoed by a fainter rainbow and intensifies.  Lightening streaks in a sky too bright to impress, it flashes like a tantrum rendered impotent by apathy. Still sharp and electric, but pointless.  A wind picks up, like it suddenly has somewhere to go.  Rain drips onto the envelope i have found in my bag to capture the words that come to me.  some of the letters melt.

I watch the rainbow dissolve and mourn.  It was so bright and vivid that I believed it was solid. but it’s vapor and light - tricks.  Thunder grumbles it’s discontent and we’re all in a mood that can’t get over itself…or make it happen.

the sky turns orangey/yellowy/rosey - a menacing not-quite color on one side and deeper and deeper indigo on the other side. Meeting in the middle in a dirty greyish/purple.  The tension makes my heart pound uncomfortably in my throat.  A haunting sense of heat makes my spine moist - and i shiver.

as I loose the light my eyes blink, the hue making familiar things look surreal.  Cicadas send up warning calls.  If i knew what they warned of i’d take cover - instead I sit in my door to watch.

I’ll be a rainbow and lightening in the same sky

out of focus and sharp  at the same time

beauty and power on display while

it rains

my mistakes can make dirt into fertile soil

Now that my ways make you recoil

I’ll make a miracle - just  watch me uncoil

despite the pain

The knots in my words choke me.  those knots are strangling my love. In the air the silks embrace me and those tangles hold me up.  I can rise up. And I can let go.

In the space inside my head my exahaustion becomes a torturous dismantling of every stable thing i have built from within myself. In the air, it is what forces me to add a sensuality, a pausing, a laboured breath. A last minute grasp of what supports me before I hit ground.

In the air I know my arms are strong, they will lift me up.  They will hold me there.

In my heart my fear seizes my pulse like it intends to take back life from me. In the air, each last moment before release exhilarates me.   And my body gets used to a ground that is uncertain, a movement that is unusual, a trust that must be earned by letting go before it feels exactly safe.

In my heart, fear make my clinging desperate.

In the air they compel me to let go.

Light Light Light
all my seasons are named
for you

Light Light Light
I’ll be hollow and wait
for you