Slower Ways of Knowing
I have pitched my tent wide of the mark and the catalytic converter in my heart has not done its job in several years. The rain does most things well, but today it does not have its normal piercing character. Everything is smooth, eroded. Handholds grinning distant in the fog. I’ll falsify the moments and collect them, invisible and insubstantial. Building castles, building ways to stay away.
For a while, I have pretended not to want the things I am built to want. I have not escaped my design, and so I think the dayglo asceticism I used to take pride in has never been worth using as a foundation. Maybe because it was rooted in allowing myself to care less frequently and in more inconsequential situations as a means of preserving a delicate balance (of something I don’t really have words for) that was never really much in balance at all.
Trudging to the car after a noncommittal goodbye. O how I have fallen, O how I wish I had chosen something else. Brave the patter to an old comfort haunt and stay shorter than expected. Run away and stare at the redblue flashing OPEN sign, get stuck behind a UHaul, go to Walmart. I am out of lettuce. The floodlight insubstantial. The off-day prohibitionist. They’re all out of strawberries.
The dense air of home wavering over the fryingpan. The Summer Funk in full effect, humid gray orgones beam thru the dangling shades. It’s a bit too warm to justify trying to try. The space around my head feels like a fishbowl stuffed with feathers. My vision is getting worse, I think. I have tried so hard to care.
40 pages before I give up and sleep. I don’t remember when either bookend happened, but it was close to 4 hours. Enough time for synapses to reload and to have forgotten the feeling of the sharpest parts of earlier today. It is time to try the way I promised them I would.
I am desperate for inspiration because I am static in every way. I am learning to move slowly through the days, no longer expecting the radical, no longer bemoaning the indirect. Instead, I try something new.
James is wise, belonging to the class of glorious attention payers that can reorient the moment, even from a distance. His advice is to praise, to give thanks through the desperation. I do not know too well who I am praising, but I know exactly what I have to give thanks for. And if the things I give thanks for come from that which I am praising, then I have quite the job to do. I am reminded again how I am profoundly fortunate. Beyond measure, beyond deserving. Flash of blinding images of the powerful, careful, detailed behind my eyes. All those good people, all those moments of care. All those books, all those trees. The ridged gray sky like a canyon sprawling over the fields of quiet cows.
It’s time to read again. Time to care again. Time to learn again. Time to get up again. If it happens again tomorrow, so be it. I simply pray for the strength to honor it all, the way it deserves.