Sometimes I want to live in a low rent dive—the smallest enclosure with just enough space for a bed and a chair, both rickety and worn but bug free. Or worst, a ramshackle tree house like the one my neighbor’s dad built when I was a kid and I was instantly insanely jealous of, where I would climb a shaky ladder to a home cut hole and clamber in, sprawl out on my plywood floor (also bug free) and watch through a plexiglass skylight the branches sway with leaves. There would be nothing inside. Just air and light and cut grass smell. Just the simplest of quarters. As if simplifying space can simplify a mind, its incessant consumption of thoughts and relentless appetite for more thoughts. Or maybe not thoughts, but things to think about. Lots of thinking piled up like a multi-car wreck. Obsession. So is it the simple space I sometimes crave or is it freedom from obsession? All I know is that my house seems awfully big today and–although it’s filled with furnishings and appliances and clothes–awfully hollow. The bright spot within those walls, the two little dazzling spots are the mutt puppies I acquired last year from a ranch in Prescott. They make it a home with their tantivy toward me every time I return to them again, their impetuous rush. Their whole body wags.
Do you feel my fallibility today? My broken-openness? I feel thrown against a wall and recklessly kissed then abruptly left. I feel dipped in lava then subsequently, immediately submerged in ice cold water. I feel slung against a purple sky, moon-like, glowing and cloud covered. I feel like a bowl of light tucked away in a black pocket.
Where I thought I would be at 32 and where I now stand are inevitably dissimilar. But this isn’t necessarily a complaint. Not at all, actually. I am acutely aware of how the discourteous laws of the universe escort my continued existence, sweeping me along in a series of choices, in a succession of effects and their causes, add to my range of experience. To make me what and who I am. This coming and going, receiving and giving, discovering and letting go is the blood of the human condition.
I was talking to my brother the other day and he was nostalgic for our childhood. Somewhere in the midst of his reverie it occurred to him that our youth has been spent. We will never return to those ages. Everything surrounding those memories has also aged and been swept along, altered by a life. Everything perceivable is caught in the cycle of birth, life, dying, death. Things erode, corrode, decay. Moments bloom like spores and flourish into new chains of events, setting the cycle in motion yet again, the ceaseless, dizzying wheel. We all fall into its spin, undulate to its rhythms: we pull our bodies into new positions, we wipe the sweat off ourselves with thin sheets, we align our spines against cool walls to be braced for a long kiss. And even each of these spin. Everything spins. No sense in trying to hold it still.
I could have just uncovered the method of a hungry mind: it mimics the spin. Like a fan, focusing on the blurred blades can easily cause headaches and confusion. Rest your eyes on the motor at the center, whatever decorative cover it features. Focus. The blades will disappear.
I am steps away from throwing my brain out the window. I am tree house bound. But dogs don’t fit in tree houses.
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