Anyway, I found myself

A poym for the wilderness

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0

The first thing to admit is I don’t know: anything.

The next thing is to say that this outrage that I am feeling is more like loneliness—caused by something that happened a long time ago.

I know this because when I turn toward the loneliness, the first thing that happens is I panic.

I push you away: Don’t look at me that way don’t talk to me like that don’t leave me standing here alone in the kitchen watching The Great British Bake Off. I need you.

I

Sometimes, I lose the thread of myself. Something bursts into flames. Something collapses. Something dissolves in the palm of my hand.
The nest that I’d just finished weaving,
The book that I thought I was writing,
The castle that we built too close to the shore;

I am trying not to fill every moment with busywork.
Knit one, purl one, crossword puzzle, then Wordle.
But this emptiness has a suction to it, a demand to be filled

I am trying to write about something important but the television pulls on me, drawing me out of my life into some disaster somewhere. I am trying to tell you that when I sit in front of the screen, watching floodwaters pour through cities - every cell in my body is programmed to help but I just sit here—

inside the spell of numb dissociation that makes it possible to leave my work behind and sit for hours hypnotized by shadows flickering under glass; scrolling past people dancing people talking people chopping vegetables and tossing them in butter and cheese. There is always cheese, melting into pizza, into egg cups - always bread being kneaded and tossed around in flour - in between Instagram ads selling me mushroom coffee.

I am trying to find embodied language to describe the way it feels to be under this spell that makes it possible to see a person suffering and instead of helping them, to scroll by or, if I have enough energy, pick up the remote and click away.

I forget what I am and what this is. I forget what I was doing just a moment earlier
before the lights flickered out; and I fell against a wall in the dark.

I am trying to describe the breaking of something that was built into my design, something that should protect me - a shell or shield - which someone, somehow, figured out how to puncture in a way that makes it possible for them to penetrate me.

To impregnate me with ideas that are not mine and, to do it, while I am distracted inside of an alternate reality. A story or dramatization which takes me out of where I am, just long enough to be anesthetized - a space like Stars Hollow or Narnia where, suspended between compassion and cruelty, I float, trapped in a dream that is not mine.

Lost to myself. Forgotten for a moment by all that is good.

The pages pile up, the knitting projects tangle, the casserole that I assembled so tenderly — of organic vegetables and brown basmati rice — sits, abandoned, on the stove.

II

We'd just strung the Christmas lights
across the salvaged casement window,
that my husband had suspended on wires
between the living room and my office.

I’d just launched my next kite (I mean, class) into the world.
I'd finally found a tea that I liked enough to stick with.

III

You think that I am telling you a story.
You think that I’m describing what happened one day
when another fragile, heart-made thing was lost —
but this happens every day.

We get attached to everything
kites, lights — sleeping side by side.
We get absorbed by things, get used to things until we think we know
how it all works and then, as we are putting water up to boil,
the tidal wave, the forest fire, the rain clouds gather into a hurricane.

Breaking News - all the phones in the nail salon light up. All the alerts go off at once. We all look up. What’s happened? We all look down. Oh, that.

We forget that these walls that we place (so carefully) between safety and the great wildness out there, between good and evil; between sanity and insanity; are just stories, as fragile as the skin that keeps the blood from gushing out onto the sheets.

We forget that the wall between morning and evening is not the same sort of wall that we place between client meetings and picking up the kids
— One wall is real. The other, illusion.

IV

There is so much to do: the raking of leaves, the shoveling of snow, the taking out of trash. We are so very busy: working eating laughing arguing and sinking into tubs filled with warm water.

We forget that we are floating in the amniotic sac of a dream.
Also, we are always walking into and out of rooms,
trying to remember where we put the keys.

V

This time, when the lightning struck the first thing that happened was I took off running. Even though every explorer knows that in wilderness, the first thing to do is establish compass points; and build a little lean-to against the rain.

I ran
wildly, madly.

Of course, I knew how it would turn out.
There was no escape.
I knew that once I settled down and came back to myself, I would look around, asking: Where am I?

I knew the next thing I would ask is: Where are you? This is what happens with exile, when we are lost; we reach for the people who love us.

VI

Visiting hour ends. Night falls and the haunting begins: the unpaid bill, the test results, the friendship left alone too long and that damn phone call that I never quite have the time to make—

In the dark, the crack of a twig, the rustling at the perimeter of the campfire. How do we know the things we cannot see are even there? How do we know if what we CAN see is friend or foe? Good witch or bad?

In ancient times, when the sun set, the people were never sure it would rise again.
They lit fires and told stories, huddled together, hoping.

We do that now, too.
Huddled around the blue glow in the living room,
we watch shadowy figures move through the stages of grief.
We watch people we’ve never met
backlit by the glow of the fires
that are roaring through their living rooms,
burning their photo albums,
swallowing their book collections,
weakening their solid oak floors.

Then, “I just can’t right now,”
it’s so easy to click away,
to flip through the channels:
Beehives collapsing, forests shrinking, whales echolocating their pups.
We know so much and so little.
We miss most of what is happening.

VII

What is happening?

Is this the edge of a black hole, sucking creation into nothingness? Or is it a cone of stardust spinning new shapes out of luminous threads of light?
We won't know until it's over.

VIII

It will never be over.

IX

And then,
somehow,
today,
I woke up
in this white room,
light spilling in from windows that seemed to be
everywhere. all at once.
I am never sure how I arrive here (though I suspect angels are involved.)

I opened my eyes and found myself holding onto my thread once more
—Thread of hope, thread of peace, thread of equanimity or even, love. I mean, what IS this thread that keeps me going?

Was it here all along?—

Anyway, I found myself
holding onto it, again -
rinsed with a gratitude so bright
so deep that I was thank you,
I was gratitude - a thread of light myself
glowing
in the wild, wide open world.

Photo by Dyu - Ha on Unsplash