One Day Upon Waking You Realized That You Had Finished Mourning
Normal 0 0 1 724 4128 34 8 5069 11.1287 0 0 0 One day you awoke and said aloud, "It's over". Mysteriously as tragedy strikes, renewal flooded you on that particular morning. You had no idea how it happened, but you were finished mourning the break down of your family. Somehow you were no longer suicidal, panicked, full of dread, or waterlogged with regrets.
You were no longer living in fog of remorse, no longer as bereft and untrusting as a refuge of war, who continually checked over her shoulder for trouble.
You wondered, where did the tragedy go? And was the long strange tragedy even about those losses? Or was all that you'd blamed your heartbreak upon, really the burning of a heap of discarded roles and self-images, disappointed expectations with which you’d been smothering those you'd loved?
And you thought that perhaps the slow demise of the ones you lost might have been your own inability to see them as whole, when in fact their souls remained intact. Perhaps they were never the embodiment of pain and any more than you were the source of blame. Perhaps the mourning was more for your intact self that instinctively knew how to thrive had she the supports that would have made for healthy productive living.
Again last night you dreamt you couldn’t make your legs move fast enought. You wanted to feel the support of your legs and to have them swiftly take you home but they could barely move. In the dream you'd gone to a cafe that sold nothing and then when you left at some ungodly hour you didn't have $1.50 for a bus to get home, in some strange city.
One day you awaken an hour after you've opened your eyes, to discover that you have been summoning up the damp invasive darkness of your past, and in your jerky half drunken stupor, spilled it across the morning light like a stain.
You force yourself to get naked and in a towel and your boots you walk out back across the thin icy layer on the deck, out to the hot tub nestled in the snow. And as you descent into the steamy swirling water, you can't not yelp out with awe and pleasure as the cold air around your nostrils billows and the blue joy of morning lets you in on the reality that life, your life, and your breath is luminous and vaporous and changing as fast as that rising steam all around you.
You lean back your neck on the cool shoulder of the tub and listen to the gurgling water song and with your eyes so open you can see through your cheeks and forehead, your stomach tingles with pleasure in recognition that the sunlight on the locust and beech trees is lemon yellow. And you know beyond any remorse or holding on that your life and body are ridiculously beyond your nightmares, fears and dreams.
You had an accident long ago which somehow spilled and spoiled your consciousness so that it seeped into realms that you were never meant to visit, and you'd spent your whole life going into those naturally forbidden places, adapting as if you'd been born in the wild, frightened and uncomprehending as if you were feral and motherless, and you'd been trying to figure out how to get back home ever since.
How had you ended up as in that dream, barefoot and hobbled in some new age cafe that didn't and couldn't fulfill you?
And how had you dreamt you'd been the chosen one amongst 3 other capable and talented women, to be given the role of the great lover? And how, if you were so blessed and talented, had you become so devoid of a place and the means to truly know safety in the world against which you had so drastically defended yourself that you'd invented lies about who you were, opposed to all those who disappointed and wounded you, and in exchange for your lies, you inherited amnesia?
One day you made a list that read,
forgive
be gentle and protected as a turtle
go easy yet as stealthily as a cat into the winter night.
Find comfort in unlikely places.
Burrow with your breathing into the center of your cells.
Remembering how to be content.
Do not traumatize the ones who are weaker than you.
Know your own weakness and live within, not your imagined sovereignty,
but your real and honest limitations.
One day you woke up and even though it was the dead of winter,
you didn't need to say aloud as you'd done in those dark mornings for years,
"It's OK. now."
Instead you realized that you could rise from bed just as easily as you had as a happy young child, that somehow the losses had stopped sucking at your heart and that you were willing to let others suffer and live and fight for their own lives and sanity, and go down into the endless seeing quicksand of their wild imaginations because they believed that they had no control, as you once did, against the tidal wave of something had never been properly named, but that you'd finally discovered was Life itself, that you're still discovering happens all by itself, weather you stay in bed or arise to take your white tea and banana, that they, as you, are in a huge flow that cannot be stopped, and that only the loss of feeling can derail us, and then, only for a while.
You were no longer living in fog of remorse, no longer as bereft and untrusting as a refuge of war, who continually checked over her shoulder for trouble.
You wondered, where did the tragedy go? And was the long strange tragedy even about those losses? Or was all that you'd blamed your heartbreak upon, really the burning of a heap of discarded roles and self-images, disappointed expectations with which you’d been smothering those you'd loved?
And you thought that perhaps the slow demise of the ones you lost might have been your own inability to see them as whole, when in fact their souls remained intact. Perhaps they were never the embodiment of pain and any more than you were the source of blame. Perhaps the mourning was more for your intact self that instinctively knew how to thrive had she the supports that would have made for healthy productive living.
Again last night you dreamt you couldn’t make your legs move fast enought. You wanted to feel the support of your legs and to have them swiftly take you home but they could barely move. In the dream you'd gone to a cafe that sold nothing and then when you left at some ungodly hour you didn't have $1.50 for a bus to get home, in some strange city.
One day you awaken an hour after you've opened your eyes, to discover that you have been summoning up the damp invasive darkness of your past, and in your jerky half drunken stupor, spilled it across the morning light like a stain.
You force yourself to get naked and in a towel and your boots you walk out back across the thin icy layer on the deck, out to the hot tub nestled in the snow. And as you descent into the steamy swirling water, you can't not yelp out with awe and pleasure as the cold air around your nostrils billows and the blue joy of morning lets you in on the reality that life, your life, and your breath is luminous and vaporous and changing as fast as that rising steam all around you.
You lean back your neck on the cool shoulder of the tub and listen to the gurgling water song and with your eyes so open you can see through your cheeks and forehead, your stomach tingles with pleasure in recognition that the sunlight on the locust and beech trees is lemon yellow. And you know beyond any remorse or holding on that your life and body are ridiculously beyond your nightmares, fears and dreams.
You had an accident long ago which somehow spilled and spoiled your consciousness so that it seeped into realms that you were never meant to visit, and you'd spent your whole life going into those naturally forbidden places, adapting as if you'd been born in the wild, frightened and uncomprehending as if you were feral and motherless, and you'd been trying to figure out how to get back home ever since.
How had you ended up as in that dream, barefoot and hobbled in some new age cafe that didn't and couldn't fulfill you?
And how had you dreamt you'd been the chosen one amongst 3 other capable and talented women, to be given the role of the great lover? And how, if you were so blessed and talented, had you become so devoid of a place and the means to truly know safety in the world against which you had so drastically defended yourself that you'd invented lies about who you were, opposed to all those who disappointed and wounded you, and in exchange for your lies, you inherited amnesia?
One day you made a list that read,
forgive
be gentle and protected as a turtle
go easy yet as stealthily as a cat into the winter night.
Find comfort in unlikely places.
Burrow with your breathing into the center of your cells.
Remembering how to be content.
Do not traumatize the ones who are weaker than you.
Know your own weakness and live within, not your imagined sovereignty,
but your real and honest limitations.
One day you woke up and even though it was the dead of winter,
you didn't need to say aloud as you'd done in those dark mornings for years,
"It's OK. now."
Instead you realized that you could rise from bed just as easily as you had as a happy young child, that somehow the losses had stopped sucking at your heart and that you were willing to let others suffer and live and fight for their own lives and sanity, and go down into the endless seeing quicksand of their wild imaginations because they believed that they had no control, as you once did, against the tidal wave of something had never been properly named, but that you'd finally discovered was Life itself, that you're still discovering happens all by itself, weather you stay in bed or arise to take your white tea and banana, that they, as you, are in a huge flow that cannot be stopped, and that only the loss of feeling can derail us, and then, only for a while.
