I quit dreaming
of success, and dreamed instead
I could lift fulfillment’s burden
off of me.
Yet there remained dreams
I could never truly hope
for, because I thought
they were make-believe.
I wondered --
could I not hope greater?
Higher, further, and beyond?
What had I to lose?
The dream may never come.
Perhaps it can’t.
But the hope itself:
this hope lives as love burns
on in the grieving.
Truly, I can only gain;
and hope is its own treasure.
All that exists owes its life to all that is no more. Each passing moment is a martyr for the next, just as pain is our debt to joy. There’s no wisdom or faith that makes pain less painful. It must hurt if anything is to matter: your life depends on it.
So stop. Your sorrow chases you: turn toward it. Watch it catch up. It will not pounce and end you. You will not lose more than you already have.
Grief is your mother. Let her feed you, for grief is the food your soul was made to eat. It digests pain into life itself. Your soul knows how to break pain down into its parts, which are the same nutrients that combine to make purpose and awe and laughter. You don’t have to do anything, just as your stomach knows what to do with meat and potatoes. Turnips have birthed poetry — consciousness — war crimes — human drama. Pain birthed the chance at eking out a living at all.
Stop starving yourself. This hunger strike never prevented the bad things from happening, and your numbness slips into dissolution as you cease to exist.
So greet your sorrow. Make room for it at your table. Accept the dish it offers and break bread for you both.
Grief is here. Grief, your mother who loved you. Eat, weep, and see tomorrow. Nourished, you will survive; one day you will have enough strength to give as thanks.
Your body is a space suit; your mind is the universe; and you are a nomad. No hope of survival lies out of touch from your body’s biological airlock, but your mind is another story. The moment your brain bloomed its first coherent thought, aware, your mind broke free from its mechanisms, escaped a life of vehicular computation, and became you: an opened portal. You are a particle collider but made of thoughts and dreams; you are a deep space telescope that curves imagination into a lens, at will. You are a peculiar force of freedom calculating towards infinity, trying to find a limit as imagination multiplies. Home and world are packed into greymatter sacks, and your mind wanders, literally, through its self-created door: the glittering potential of being you. On your journeys, the less you carry insofar as facts, the better. Nomads make do in every circumstance imagined with few hard truths, improvising solutions anew as if creating its tools from loss and hope, vacuum and pressure. So you are free; you may go wherever your creativity conjures as no mission was ever issued alongside your life. Simply persist and make camp with meaning. Make meals with meaning. Make meaning from hardship, make meaning from triumph. Make meaning in any way you can, lest you grow weary of exploring the wild beauty of all you are, and close that door forever.
a random poem that spilled onto the page just now.
*
People who fit into the cracks
don’t get there by falling —
they slide, duck, and twist,
slick as shadows,
as they’ve always admired
tree roots for their secrets.
Jeweled branches that reach
above ground into sky praise
themselves too much. They’re too loud,
too brash, too selfish, always
in the way of someone else.
Those who fit into the cracks
can be but a blur of light, barely seen,
the way curls of smoke
are scarves for air.
These souls smooth
themselves into a second skin
over wounds and ugliness, hoping
to be unnoticed,
like a stitch that holds
a despairing heart together.
Those who fit into the cracks
become what is needed
in the manner of an underling,
a servant quick to please,
or a mother-goddess tending
her young;
the same thing, sometimes.
And those that notice
the wisp of a quiet girl hidden
in the cracks
might see a frightened deer
or the bravery of star-birth.
She doesn’t mind
which you choose;
she’s busy knitting
purpose into the lost,
and perhaps, looking
to see where she fits
into the cracks of you.
Her existential crisis, a late-onset failure to thrive, found no crumb of meaning in this hand-to-mouth life. It felt too similar to the assembly line itself. To even think on it, especially when traveling on the streetcar, or in bed at night, or at the grocery store -- that was abomination, admitting to herself that she was but waiting to die. With a practiced breath she steadied her thoughts. In her mind’s eye, she pressed dawn’s dew from a clump of moss and let it drip onto her tongue, parched from singing the stars to sleep. In the outward world, she exhaled slowly, swaying with the streetcar’s pull toward the factory. She smiled, her thoughts stretching like a cat from sleep, refreshed. Wildness had long fled her flesh, her physical life captured in a consumerist orbit around this modern sun-god of eternal hungering. Hers seemed a joyless people, staid and satisfaction-fearing. Such people who would desire to wall up the wind, lest it beguile a curious mind to feel a true and natural power. Such a world inspired only emptiness. She survived because she’d decided her mind was a lawless place. Within, she found a raw landscape, hers alone, where a life could be made idea-foraging, making camp in a moral debate, and seeking the fertile fields of soul. Here her nomadic mind worked out her own domestication, unbound and traveling light, cultivating her existence like an artisan’s craft. Rivers ran for a living, too. Stagnation so quickly turned water to poison. All flow and cycles and seasons felt entropy’s breath at their necks, and never since stopped to see if they were still being chased. The streetcar squealed to her stop. Now she’d cross the street and spend a twelve-hour shift working the line, all the while traversing a rocky steppe of her mindlands, choosing stones that struck her heart as treasure.
Were emptiness real,
would I still drift, dream-drawn
to endless steppes of lichen latched
on lonely rock, fearlessly communing
with an existential sky?
For every place is teeming
with spirals of being,
and where I am without void
I find the rite of dancing,
enjoined ecstatically
in the passion of being amongst it all.
Here, sadness has no home,
as I oust my denial of coiling mystery,
and thus crown to glory the Stirrer
of all sightless cycles of existence
everywhere.
She cleared off her writing desk, jaw clenched with effort, and resented that she should feel so at odds with everything.
“What of the future?” her mind groaned anxiously again.
“Oh, what of it?” she bickered with herself. “That old man? The future, as far as one can foresee, is but the withered end, where all dreams dry up under hungering winds of remembering. The future longs for old ways passed by and lacks all forward drive.”
She felt some cruelty in her judgment, but tempered it with a tithing of pity.
“Only the present moves. It deserves our full focus if we’re to care about navigating it at all.”
Satisfied, she sat deliberately, her desk more enticing now by being bare.
“Tomorrow is silent, only capable of eternal submission. Now is the place from which to rule.”
She set out a book and leafed it to a blank page, then inked a fountain pen with measured movements. All the while she listened carefully to stray thoughts and fragments of feeling. These vagrants rolled through her as morning fog in hilly pastures, so she noted each expression and let them pass.
“Would thee fight flame with a knife?” she wrote neatly, then sighed a blade-crossed breath.
Self-governance required both the servant and the queen, she thought and nodded once, a bow and an order given simultaneously. Then she pursed her lips and gently turned the still-wet page.
You were a mute Hamlet, pacing
the bridge, your stage shaking
from the violence
of an ice jam beneath. You heard
a man drowned
in the black river yesterday, taken
by the whim of a Spring
too eager to live.
You held a quarter like Yorick’s skull, tossing
it to the question To be, or not to be,
while the ice screamed
obscenities
as if to mock your acting.
When the coin spun out and tumbled
out of reach, you didn’t move.
You were numb, you watched
as if beheaded
while a woman bent to retrieve
your lost verdict. She must have seen
your silent monologue;
she must have known
the coin’s value was life and death.
She rubbed the quarter’s edge, raised
an eyebrow, and offered
it back to you, saying,
“A coin has three sides, you know.”
You felt like falling.
You felt you’d already died
and gone somewhere you’d never seen.
Set free, for once, to choose
anything and everything,
something somehow between
the laughter and the tears.
She told me that stones lived, crept, and even flew, just slower than our imagined rate of time. Years later I understood how to love a river rock like a bird, for time pulled hard upon my beloved, until we were distant in the same room. Her breath became one unending syllable of a phrase I’d never hear completed. “Ahhhhhhh,” she breathed, and if time ran fast enough for stones to fly, she would say, “I love you.” I had faith enough to love her and this life she now lived, a love undeserving of pity from those who never knew the secret life of stones. I came to move slower, too. “Ahhhhhhh,” I breathed gently, my shoulder pressed upon hers, too scared to refrain from finishing the phrase, after a while: “I love you.” Then, last night some urban creature dug up the fallow flower bed outside our front window. When I drew aside the drapes in acceptance of another day behind us, I wondered about the torn earth -- would time heal this like a scraped knee? I set the question free, turning away from the living land. The garden had only a minor wound, and the stones of the walkway leading from the door were full of thoughts and dreams as always. My beloved was breathing, “Ahhhhhheeeeeeeeee....” I love you.
Once upon a time, a fair was being held in the middle of a deep forest, and folk from across the known world were travelling to gather there. Though they came from all directions, there was but one way in, the Bridge of Gathering, for the fairgrounds were surrounded by a vast moat.
One lass, walking alone from her home in the North, paused by a fallen willow tree to take some refreshment as the day grew hot. She was peering at the tree’s gnarled roots and broken trunk when suddenly she heard a faint voice cry out, “I’m stuck!” The lass leapt to her feet and instinctively began to shove away the debris of branches, in hopes of rescuing the poor soul trapped beneath the willow tree.
Meanwhile, a merchant driving a wagon filled with his best wares approached from a town in the South. He’d been swept up in awe, marveling at the height of the trees, as such great trees did not grow near his village. He too heard the voice cry out. Instantly, he dove into the back of the wagon to find the longest ladder he had, to save the poor soul who had climbed too far into the canopy and couldn’t find their way down.
At the same moment, a studious lad approached from a school in the West, his face nearly masked by the book he held up to his weak eyes. When he heard the faint voice cry out, he dropped the book and squinted, but he could only see as far as the pond that ran beside his path. His heart pounding, he stripped off his shirt to use as a makeshift rope, hoping it was long enough to reach the poor soul who was drowning.
Near the scene, there was also an old woman hobbling forward with stubborn determination. She had come alone from her hut far in the East, where she was known for her wisdom in healing ailments and infirmities of the body. She too heard the voice, and paused to look around, uncertain of where the voice had come from.
Then she called out, quite sternly, “Speak up, ye! I can’t be of service if I don’t know what the trouble is.”
And a strained voice replied, “Some lard will do, please and thank you! I got meself caught in this old fence, see! Just past the tree line, here! Look for me red hat as I’m a-waving it right at you! ‘Twas supposed to be a shortcut but I’ve been here an hour now, with me foot stuck between these logs. I reckon a bit of grease will do the trick!”
So the old woman reached into the pouch on her belt and took from it a small ration of butter wrapped in paper. She could see the man waving his hat, deep in the thick of brambles and ancient ruins some distance off her path. Grumbling at her sore old bones, she picked up her skirts and made her way over to the man, who could only wave his hat with greater zeal as he waited for her.
“Now then, ye better have learned something from this,” the old woman said, but not without a hint of a smile as she crouched by his trapped foot.
“Aye, that I did,” he replied. “There are three other folk I can see in these woods, but they paid me no mind. Full of themselves, they are! Not another decent soul round here, other than you!”
The old woman glanced at the other travelers and shook her head. “Oh, their souls aren’t the trouble. They’re trying to help you as we speak.”
“The hell they are, pardon me!” the man exclaimed, pointing at the merchant halfway up a tree, the lass covered in dirt and leaves, and the student preparing to jump into a pond.
The old woman gave the man’s buttered boot a tug, and out it came, so fast the man nearly toppled over.
“Their trouble is, they think they know what your trouble is,” the old woman said.
“Troubling trouble, that is,” the man murmured in amazement.
“Indeed, I’ve found no cure for that,” she said gravely. “Now, be at my service — a man like ye can help an elder on her journey. Take my arm, but mind, I don’t walk fast.”
“I’ll bring you cross the Bridge of Gathering like me own sweetheart,” the man promised.
And so they walked, soon trading tales and jokes that betrayed gentle affection, without a word to anyone else travelling the forest.
Where Spirit Stops 