Tuesday, January 17, 2012

postponing the inevitable

the living thing that's going on in the space i inhabit right now is what? words.  words are my only living thing.  words and strings of words and dream catchers made on long walks picking up bits of discared by the side of the road making webs of endless connections connecting to things, ideas, dreams, courage, willingness, freedom, forgiveness, stories.  or not.  the famous or not clause at the end of every foot.  sharp.  claws.  clawing. things clinging to what falls out of the sky and onto the ground as feather.  claws are harder to get.  one must actually pick up the dead animal--take responsibility for its remains--and play surgeon on its parts to part them from it.  i don't do this work.  i had a collaborator who did this part of the disection when i felt the need to bring him dead things i found in trees and other places.  i still find dead things--i just don't always know what to do with them now.  i always knew what to do with them when i was in collaboration with the river of life.  the river of life knows what to do with life.  knows how to flow with life.  knows how to stand still and allow mosquitoes to grow when that's the crop that's needed to do the bloodsucking transformation required to change life, raise bumps, extract things from things that need to change.  i need to change.  still.  often.  i need more change.  i need to have change changing all the time.  i need to change back to who i used to be just enough to be who i have become in another way.  ways are always waving from their places of diverging paths.  paths diverge in the woods and someone has to take the one less travelled by and someone has to forge a new one, with a machete sometimes, cutting at tall grasses that make for extraordinary roofs over new houses built of mud and luck and decorated with dreams.  i need something--but it is not a thing.  a practice of content.  a practice of contentment.  a practice of showing up, sitting down, watching things, breathing, being in the quiet of the still here long enough to summon up the courage to change.  to change.  to transform.  to be something wholly other than the caterpillar self of before.  cocooning room--that's what this space under the stairs seems to be.  and i wake up and write in it.  and i go to sleep and write in it.  and i drink things and cook things and laugh and make up stories and be fine in the finding of what is here now, in this hearing of tapping on keyboards and sound.  there are great sounds of water in this space. i can hear all of the flowing going on above me.  here, there is ground.  groundedness.  molten floor in the foundry of here transformed into the artist's lofts of now.  i put color on the white boards.  i put color and covered the white--the clean white--with the red and the pink it turned in the thick paste of glittered promise.  i am making little things now--little carvings of small frames of what can be drawn inside the smallish space of contained space that used to be orange.  i am here in this hearing.  i am clear in this clearing.  i am where i live.  i live here.  i am alive here.  i have plants and things and books and clothes and one pair of shoes at a time.  one pair of perfectly chosen collaborators on the walking journey of this moment.  when there is no telephone, i write.  when there is no best friend who likes to talk on the phone every day, i write.  when there is no collaboration game, i play with art supplies.  i play.  all i wanna do is dance.  no, that's not it.  girls just wanna have fun? no, that's not it.  what are all the songs about playing? isn't play an okay way to get through the day anymore? play.  what feels like play.  ohhhhh, plays! yes! and it was so much joy helping the kids walk to their space of organizing sets and standing up flats and cramming things that need organizing in a space that needs containers--there's that word again: need.  need.  need.  what about needs and hoarding and things and having and life and unfolding? what happens when a leaf wants to arrive? what happens in the stem of something? when a leaf wants to unfurl? ferns are my favorite things to think about unspiraling.  unspiraling.  hmmmmmmmmm--okay.  i found it.  what is it to straighten out the spiral? to make it back into a line? perhaps this is the quest and question for this day.  i shall endeavor to unspiral the line.  hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

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