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Spectrum
I’ve been teetering between two ends of what sometimes seems like a vast spectrum. Black and white. Good and bad. I try to squeeze my dualistic world into at least the gentler version, yin and yang, but it evades me. When at one end of the spectrum all I feel is the lack of the other. Pain. Emptiness. Heart-hurt. The way through this, I know, is twofold. One, I can believe in the concept of annica. Impermanence. What I hold in my hand today, in my heart, is fleeting. It will pass. The spectrum expands with me inside it, and I melt into one end from the other. Two, I…
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Pathway
There is a way through. In the dark times, all I can see are the walls that close in around me, the fears that fill me with dread, the gross inadequacies of my wounded heart and soul. In those times it is sometimes all I can do to take a breath, and another. Anything beyond breath is simply too heavy, too hard. I have been offered a path. A hand. A heart, tender and afraid as my own. And I am encouraged that this pathway may be the one that forever keeps the walls from closing in so tightly. This pathway, the one that is being created and crafted and…
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Adrift
My feet are still floating free, unmoored. The horizon shifts every time I gaze into the waning sun. All I can do is look inside and try to breathe, every breath catching in my exploding heart. Soon I am pieces, shattered remnants, adrift on the current. Exposed. Ungathered. Withering. Or, floating, my feet tangle in miles of kelp, deep green Medusa hair ensnaring my ankles, drawing me down. A long stream of bubbles surfaces, each one merging with the wind, rising into gray clouds drawn closely down, adrift. Or, my breath floats around me, encircling me, motionless. Last night’s dinner sits on the stove top, encrusted, unwanted. Laundry waits in…
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Blind
I am watching my life pass before me from behind an opaque screen, my eyes straining in vain to see something they cannot. Once in a great while, once a year or so, I sleep the sleep of the dead. A whole day when I can do nothing but sleep. Oh, I try to make it through wakefulness when this happens, but after an hour or two awake — even after coffee — all I can do is collapse again, gratefully, on my bed. Comatose. And I begin dreaming. No, not dreaming, exactly. More like falling into a world that I cannot escape. In this state I find myself dreaming…
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Loving
I think I am beginning to feel what love is. You would think, wouldn’t you, that after spending as many years on the planet as I have, I would have already known what love really felt like, but no. Not being loved like this. Not loving like this. Oh, I had an idea about love. Many ideas. An ideal. A dream. A destiny. And I loved, as best I could. With my whole heart, the part that was open. I really did. I loved and was loved to the best of my ability at the time. I also knew a lot about what love is not. My heart stretched across…
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Feeling
After a lifetime of feeling but not knowing (or wanting to know) what I was feeling, I am learning to do a check-in. This is what I am feeling right now: Sad. I feel the loss of something I really really wanted. Angry. I had expectations. Made choices based on them. Was I imagining things? Fooling myself? Did I believe in something that wasn’t there? Afraid. Now what? I don’t know anymore. I thought I did. Today I want to try to find my foundation again, but I don’t yet know where to look.
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Missing
I am a ghost. I am formless, void, hollow. I breathe and the breath wafts through me. I sing and hear only the wheezing of a empty dry bellows. I trace footsteps out of my bedroom, following the shapes on the golden brown wood that lead through the hall, past the tiny-white-tiled bathroom, down the steps and out the door into constant motion, cars going by at all hours, energy moving, people living and dreaming within a hair’s-breadth of me, and all I feel is slow, dull, invisible. I move, think, work, and speak in slow motion, half-time, endless loops circling around and around, tightening around me, constricting. I do…
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Movement
There is something about looking westward into the waning light that makes me incredibly happy. Once I drove through Illinois under a spreading wide field of fluffy white that extended into infinity, cottony sheep drifting gallantly and with amused authority over the highways through a sky-blue background. Then, for a year, I watched purple merge with golden pink over the jagged silhouette of the Front Range, lost in Chief Niwot’s curse of the Flatirons. When the year was over I could still glimpse pinkgold over jutting mountains in my rear view mirror as I turned for east again. Then for a brief time I saw gold in the brilliant dusk…
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Drowning
The waves crash around me, sucking me under. I cannot breathe. Water fills my eyes my ears my nose my mouth and I scream but there is no one there to hear, just the relentless surf, the pounding waves, taking me farther and farther from the safety of shore. I long for a place to put my feet. A stone. A post. A step. My feet long for firm sand, but all I feel is ceaseless motion, spinning, vertigo. My heart runs red into a pool around me and my throat cries soundless gasping wails. Tears become rivers, oceans, becoming the endless waves that roll over me, crushing me, carrying…
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Joining
Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove… In the morning I am awakened by warmth seeping in close to me, a breath, a heartbeat. I move slowly from dream into being, your heart-filled eyes inviting me into another day. Twin mugs stand by, steaming coffee’d warmth and life with each sip, feet on lap, talking of the day to come. The sun streams in through a wall of panes, inviting us to catch a scent of summer blossom through half-open door; or rain streams over, pattering, rivulets, and we two are snug inside with logs blazing into heartwarmed embers. Twin names on…