December 5th, 2009 (07:38 pm)
Location:
in the prayer hammock
Mood: zonked
Music: These Days - Jackson Browne
I woke up overheated and unable to breathe, threw the curtains aside desperately, and then stood in silent awe at the powdery white miracles floating before my eyes. Finally. Relief, then comfort. Priorities quickly rearrange themselves. No work till later. No clothes till much later. No food, no worries, no distractions. Something in me wanted to worship the snow. I had to fight down the urge to run out in it without a thought, without planning against the weakness of the body.
I've been out walking, sings Jackson Browne, and a longing for wood edging and bus lines and new ovens and kaleidoscopes and colorful wigs and songdust arises. We have so much, some of us, and we're blind to it all, possessions become nothing more than expected accessories to a functional, respectable life. So hard to pull away, or you can, but then you get labeled. Everything you do, you get labeled. You throw away what you own, and you travel to places where you can't understand a word they say, and you lose everything you loved, and you're sick just for the newness of it, or you write an old man's song from the heart of a fourteen-year-old kid, and people expect you must feel a certain way, you must be so unhappy. People worry about the right thing to say, when really that's the last care in your heart. It's not what you say, it's whether you say it at all.
Snowflakes. They're still coming down, and they change direction so they're blowing into my eyes no matter where I go. I come out wet and blinking and awed, and no one understands why I don't wrap myself up tighter, keeping myself warm and dry, just as if I spent my entire life inside, even when I'm outside. I don't even try to explain, for two reasons. The first is that I know my limitations, and many of the most wondrous things in my life are utterly beyond my capacity of language. I can barely trap them in words for my blog entries. I balance on the edge of permissible grammar and vocabulary and style most of the time as it is. The second reason is that I pride myself on my open-mindedness, according to my own definition of that quality. I can be perfectly happy to be misunderstood. Perhaps I even prefer it that way. I know what it does for me. If everyone thinks the wrong thing, I just smile to myself and continue to live like a gentle renegade.
When I come back in, to the warmth and the waiting materials with which I daily embody my dreams, it's still falling. I suppose everything could be falling, and then we'd never know. Even stillness can be motion in disguise. Even silence can sound like something else.