Breaking

Just after I turned 30 my life completely fell to pieces, and in its falling it stuck like glue to new positions and angles, completely unexpected designs and sharp edges. Leaning through the new pathways created by this restructuring I found myself being sliced deeply, bleeding from my center, thick pools of life force flowing live a river out of me. The shell left behind stares blankly at me now. I flick at her face. "Wake Up!" I want to scream, and a horse dryness holds the words on the other side of my disembodied self. The force of the scream reverberates through the alien structure I now inhabit. I try, without success, to peal away the layers. I scrape at the eyelids that give this version of vision. Cranking my head side to side, I try to make it rotate in all directions, it is encumbered by a few singular views. Pointless. It could be said it happened cause of a baby, or a boy, and then maybe a baby. Again. None of the answers are complete. They are all just part of this tumbling of artifice, this making of nothing out of all the things that I could have made, why this? I inhale now deeply. I feel the holes in my face working as they are meant to and color seems to seep back in. But even as it fills me I bleed. Draining out empty. I am a sandcastle. No sooner do I build up, then an inevitable wave crashes me down. Around me I try desperately to create a barricade. Still I have started too close to the shore. Too close to the waves. I think of a new lover. Her hair is a mixture of toffee and cocoa. She smiles wryly at all times and she moves into me. "Be the River, not the Rock." she says. The river is so hard to break, made of water, not glass.

I Didn't Mean for it to be this Way

The blog I mean. Not at all. I had high aspirations for a themed blog about always looking for the progressive path (s). Not from a frame of mutual exclusivity, but from a place of inclusivity of multiple paths. Instead, for the most part, times like now included I come here to wallow through writing, to process some angst, to describe a confusion that is the worst malaise of action. I feel paralyzed. All this learning and connecting and knowing where to move towards, but always the feeling I have gotten nowhere, have not been quite understood, will not be able to even make a dent in this issue. I told a mentor I admire the other day, when he inquired as to how I was doing, that I was breaking under the weight of the issue, that I felt the whole cause on my back, and I was not doing it justice. Later, I was shocked I had admitted this to this person, on whose impression of me rests much potential for my career. More shocked though by his empathetic and understanding response, "You can't do that to yourself, you have to just do your best and know it is everything you are able to do and accept that as enough." This is why I have identified him as a true mentor I suppose, because he gets me and relates to how work. But I cannot accept his advice. Even as I sit here paralyzed, knowing that today I am not doing my best, not doing enough. Knowing that today I have retreated and am trying to go deeper into hiding. "Illusions of Grandeur." That phrase keeps coming to my head when I get this way about the work. Who do I think I am in anyways? In what world is this burden really mine? Why have I constructed my work as so important? People I love are living perfectly happy lives by doing normal work and leaving it at work and spending time with their families keeping the house and building gardens and offering community service. I am running around like a manic doomsdayer trying to get people to wake up to a crisis that I myself have not fully acknowledged. Every time I run the water scalding hot so I can feel the ache subside from my joints as it burns my hands while I scrub dishes I feel the guilt of the energy being used to heat the water. I see the flame light and its connection to the natural gas peaking plant, the hydrodams, the coal emitting plants. But I still run the water hot, thinking this may be the last year I have the privilege to do so. And I know my greatest handicap is my attitude towards the work, the guilt, the panic, even the passion. I know that if I could center and believe and operate not from a place of shame but steadfast optimism that I would not be so afraid, and then the work would be more effective. But I am just so afraid still. Instead of choosing a path, I am running up and down all the paths I can think of. When I am sick, or hurt, or tired I hide, disoriented. Which WAY??!! All I know is that it cannot be this way.

“I would rather die than live in fear” -MLK

-Quoted from Alice Walker’s The Way Forward is With a Broken Heart

I came to understand this quote most completely when I watched "White Light, Black Rain" in commemoration of Nuclear Free Future Month through a documentary about the horrors of the the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic Bombs. I watched the film twice, once at home late sick with the flu, close to my computer screen. The second time I was projecting the image for a group, pulling out themes and facilitating discussion. People's mothers were vaporized, babies lost heads, homes were incinerated. 220,00. They woke up and were living there lives and then they were literally radiated, deeply. A pillar of fire, describes one witness. Not a mushroom cloud. And one of the hibakusha (survivors of the atomic bomb) lost her whole family except here sister and then her sister killed herself and the only surviving one says, "there are two kinds of courage, the courage to live and the courage to die." I would never have aligned with that claim in the past, not ever seeing a justification for taking your life, or accepting death. And now I see what was meant, what is meant. The bomb makes me so, so, so , sad.

Why are all the girls in New York City Oh, Oh, Oh So Pretty?

I really asked myself that several times on my latest journey into the city. I had the good fortune to experience a night in the cities, through the city, in the village. All because I had the foresight, when a flight got canceled to realize that with the same connection it was better to start early in New York then to arrive late in Chicago. I traveled on the subway from Queens and a free stay at a hotel near La Guardia, traveled into the Village and to my favorite restaurant "The Caravan of Dreams." Ahhhh, a dream come true it was. But really, the girls in New York City are sooooo pretty. From blondes with golden almond skin and smiles full of sunshine, to remarkably sophisticated beauties of all hues and styles of all scents and mental kinds. It's nice they are are all so pretty, all them girls in New York City.