Fugue

July 3rd, a day before all the kaboom, I'd gone on a long walk and was resting both my body and my brain. My head was full because C had given me a tree field guide a few days before and the long walk I had just taken consisted of swinging from tree to tree like Tarzan, ogling flowers and fruit and bark and leaves, trying to guess at various trees, trying to keep everything I learned in my brain. I got myself somewhat dizzy from all the tree hopping and the data overload and all those shapes and colors and I sat surrounded by lianas and nepenthes and sky roots in the warm damp of the park's conservatory to read.

Stopping every five feet for a new tree.

As I was reading, a friend walked around the fountain and he called out to me and broke my concentration. A fellow writer. We asked after each other. No, that's not true. He asked after me. I had trees swimming in my head, and I was shaken out of my little hollow of water and hanging green and the smell of paper turning against paper and I didn't remember my social graces, so my answers were short and I didn't offer any invitations for him to talk. But it was nice to see him. He asked after the book I was reading. It was just fluff. George R.R. Martin. Which isn't bad, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't sing to me and I was abashed to show him and I wanted to say, no, it's not for me. It doesn't feed me. It's just something to hold and focus on, a little silly rock to scrabble against and climb onto while I wait for the tide in my brain to wash some of these trees away. An anchor. But how to say that?

We said our goodbyes and I finished my chapter. I got up from the little arbored bench I was on and squeezed past the orchid-gawkers near the entrance and walked through the park, my head filling again with more trees. I was thinking about the friend I'd run into in the conservatory, about when we'd met the time before that. He'd been showing me a book of prose poetry. He read me one. Maybe two.

I like the idea of prose poetry. But I can't recall reading any that stuck with me. I struggle with a deep, but awkward and mistrustful love of formalism. I love forms. Schema. But I chafe at using them for long. I've begun to think as I've gotten older, that my love of formalism is something fostered by my inner anarchist. We need rules. How can one go about breaking the rules, without beautiful rules to break?

But beyond that, I love idea of the challenge of writing poetry in prose. There's a terrible mental trick to staying in a poetic place. And there's something so overbearingly commonplace about prose. It'll drown you. It's everywhere, and everything every day of your life is written in prose. So, it's easy when writing prose to get into prose mind and tune-out and go into autopilot. There's a contortion of willpower needed to keep holding tight to your poetry when you write in prose mode. You have to keep everything present and just so. By abandoning formalism, there's a sort of spiritual formalism that has to imbue every word, to take up the slack.

So I read the poem he showed me. But all I saw was a paragraph of text. I mean, I understood it, but it didn't resolve into poetry. Everything about it was prosaic. It had a prosaic voice, it used prosaic words, and tramped through its lines with a prosaic tempo. It told a prosaic story using prosaic tropes. Everything was prosaic.

I mean, that's terribly unfair of me. He shared it because it moved him. He loved it because it enlivened him. I'm a big fan of everyone leaping into what enlivens them. But the poem said nothing more to me than what it showed on its surface. What it denoted was all that it was. And yet, when he came upon me in the conservatory, I was reading something no less two-dimensional. By all rights, he walked away with the word “prosaic” rattling around in the cubby hole he had in mind for me.

So I walked and I thought about what moves me from the prosaic, into the poetic. I thought about it as I stared into the trees. They were a swaying chaos of leaves, swept in the breeze.
 
I realized poetry for me is a knot of trees. Sure, you can state their names and give their heights and describe their basic positioning. That's prosaic. But then you look, really look. And you see the leaves. The smooth edges on these, the teeth on those. Those shine, these glimmer. And you can hear them. The little clatter of the long strings of beads that chime against each other, in the weeping birches. The soft hulls of little ships bumping in the crowded harbors of the elms. The boisterous drumheads swung back and forth in the dance that overtakes the cottonwoods. They all move. Each on its own, but tethered to a larger pattern of the wind as it nudges through the branches. The interplay between the individual leaf body spun on its kite string stem, the laden branch, the tree and the whole woodland, that aggregate that looks both like chaos and like an orchestra. And behind this leaf is that one and they swing across one another, scattering the light. The woven braid of elm bark, the peel of birches and their growing diamond rifts that cut across a delicate script of lenticels. And then birds dart through, picking for insects and worms, and squirrels clutch at the trunks and run new treasures to their stashes.

I look, and I see one thing, and I see another and I hold them both in mind and I try to hold in mind too the way they are linked. And then all the other things, the myriad, all linked, all individuated. And each one reminds me of something else, so there's another layer and another. And I stare into the green, and I step back to see more at once, hold more in my mind's eye, and all the movement sways in time to something bigger and as I step further away, I'm drawn deeper within. And I realize after a while that who I was failed to remain important and I that I'd been standing transfixed, my mouth dangling stupidly open and my eyes glazed and I was blown into pollen and fluff and scattered on the wind. And when I snap back, some of that grit of potential is still in me and I'm ripe with it as I go back home.

That's where I go when the spirit moves me. That's what I turn to in others' poetry, to find messages from the same beyond and that's what I need, I so very much need to capture when I write poetry. I hear that drive to keep all those links of complex interconnection in how I speak, so I know something of that is in my voice. But it's my goal to cultivate it. It makes me long-winded, I know. But there's no way to pare it down without cutting away all those threads. If the devil's in the details, I suspect my job is writing about the devil.

The next day, as C and I were walking, we met a pair of gardeners at work. She complimented their garden, and one asked if we'd like to see something nicer. He led us around behind his house and let us into his back yard, a little paradise of birdhouses and koi in chiming water and poppies and vine-knotted pergolas. C began taking pictures and he said we could stay as long as we wanted. I stood and looked into the depths of the pond. Everything I saw in the trees the day before, I saw in the water, the ripple and currents, the sway of grass at the bottom and the leaves floating on the surface. The light that danced on the water's skin and bent towards the depths.

I remembered reading about one method of meditation wherein you picture a tree. And branch has a set number of leaves and ripens a precise number of gemstone fruits. And each gem has a set number of facets and each face has another color and you hold more and more details in mind. And it dawned on me that I'm trying to write about enlightenment, even though I've yet to abide in enlightenment. A fool's errand perhaps. But what errand isn't?

And I recalled having fish as a child. And yearning to experience what they did. A sort of envy of the fish, swimming their circuits. Even when stuck in a tank they embodied something so meditative, all the fins and gills working and yet stock still. And I envied too the squirrels, up in their trees, leaping across branches. So fast and antic. They looked like they lived a life of play. They don't, I know. But they were so athletic and alive.

The fish are the formal for me, the squirrels are the anarchy. Fish movement is fluid, perfect, minimal. In a tank, they move one way then the other. When they all sit in a group, they are little unspent vectors, gathered in a cross hatch of lean lines each describing a potential of movement. They move like equations and in doing so neatly define spaces. Squirrels are frenetic, even entropic. They are Ratatoskr, running messages for the Gods, but also gnawing at the World Tree. They are the prairie dogs burrowing the bottoms out of paved surfaces, or raccoons raiding nests. They are all chaos, creeping in.

In the water and in the woods, I find the sublime, but as a kid before I knew what the word sublime meant or why I should care, I yearned to be the animals that dwelt there in those sublime spaces. And the irony is, that as a fish, I had no ability to stand back, ever further back, to take in the entire pond. I would be a part of the picture and could not step outside to write about it. Likewise the squirrel, who, among the leaves cannot stand at the field's end to turn back to gather all the trees in at once.

So at some point, I found ideals that live so thoroughly within my image of the divine that they cannot help but experience it as entirely mundane. And however else the fish and the squirrel serve me as figurative tropes that speak to me, they perfectly encapsulate that yearning, as I too look for that layer of meaning outside, when inside it's so elementally a part of everything I am, that I cannot even see it anymore.

If anything they are more like me than like what I aspire towards. And it struck me that that aspiring towards something is hierarchical. Life isn't a move up the chain. It's a trip around the circle. So if I cannot see the truth written inside me, I turn out to arrive at another poor traveler's encampment to search for messages written for me among their possessions. I value those messages. And so I do the only thing I can. I write to return the favor. If such a trip were a move upwards, towards a final goal, I suppose the only mode of writing would be technical writing. But around the circle, I turn to poetry.

Building Blocks

Oh yes. I've been writing. Just, not much on my blog. I've been writing poetry, mostly. And something else as well. It might be a book. I don't know yet.

I went to school for writing. After school, I lapsed into a blocked silence. I put the pen down. For more or less 18 years. I mean, I struggled with output even before. Just less completely. And after college I still wrote, a bit. I wrote a few short poems in the 1990s. I noodled with a smattering of blog posts peppered lightly through the early 2000s. I fiddled with an unfinished verse piece in the mid 2000s. And then I started this blog a couple of years ago, which I have given attention to intermittently. But my intentionality felt blunted.

About ten years ago, I had my Big Freakout. In the initial “What does this mean about me/what's happening to me” phase I talked about my yearning to reignite my creative impulse. But it was mired in performance anxiety and issues about what my intention was, what would be expected of me. It was so bogged down that the thought of writing was terrifying.

There's such a litany of “If you want to be a writer, you have to do the following: … And if you don't, you're not serious about it, so shut up already and why haven't you fucked off yet?” The advice to do the Writer's Checklist or Bugger Off loomed large for me. But none of that was advice on how to connect with the impulse to write. It wasn't advice on how to keep attached to that impulse, or how to keep true to your voice. It was advice on how to get published. Which is sort of the antithesis of the rest. It's in opposition the goal of keeping true to your voice, certainly. It's about how to whittle your voice down and process some of it away in the interest of sales and marketing. And in considering that, I would stop writing.

But what use is concern over how to get published if that concern stifles the very act of writing? So in the months following the Big Freakout, when I'd left work and was struggling to get on disability, when I was walking to get at least a little exercise, to keep myself as stable as I could be, a desire grew in me. A way to approach the idea of writing that was focused on the creative process and threw aside the critical eye of others, and both the publishing and selling processes. I wanted to spend the rest of my life writing a book I never finished that no one will ever read. No worry about completion, or what the finished product looked like. No concern about who read it or what was thought about it. No packaging or reviews. I've since replaced “that no one will ever read” with “that I don't care if it ever gets read.” I'm still working on the last bit. A goal in progress.

Also ten years ago, post freakout, about when I declared my desire to write the bottomless unknown book, bought a Moleskine journal. I've been gathering notebooks and journals my whole life. And all my journals, all the ones I bought and lost, or gathered, or had given to me as gifts with fancy covers and dedication plates from friends at the front, or I had for school and journalled in after the semester, they all had the first few pages filled and then a mass of blank pages that would sit in stacks in boxes when I moved, huge weighted blank blocks. A house of blank books that I knew I could never fill. I spent a decade not filling out the Moleskine either. But at least it was nicely portable and not so ugly that it felt ratty pulling it out, and not so ostentatious that it felt pretentious pulling it out. So I took it with me everywhere and failed to write in it in every place I went. A step up from hiding my writer's block at home, I guess.

Last year I made the goal of doing something creative every day. And out came the moleskin. I'd set up the goal to be creative everyday with the very clear understanding that I would fail. The process was what was important. It was better to fail and write tomorrow anyway, than it was to get it write and then lose hope the moment I slipped and missed a day, or slipped and didn't write the requisite number of words that would make that day a success. So, those sorts of goals weren't on the table. I decided to do it every day, in the expectation that I'd fail. And I did. Wonderfully. The first months, there's be a few days of nothing, then a day of five lines. Three days silent, the next yielded ten lines. That did not meet my goals. And yet, it was a success. And I treated it as such. And over the year, the silent days grew sparser, and I'd start to fill a half page. Then a full page. The last month, I've been filling 3-5 pages every day. I'd miss maybe one a week.

The book had about ten pages filled in the first eight years. And then the last year an explosion. It began to fill. I bought another Moleskine, plastic still on it. I've been carrying it, plastic still on it, with me alongside the old one.

But today, I filled my Moleskine. Filled it. Tomorrow the plastic comes off the new one and the old one gets retired.

Shiny.

  That's a decade. A huge meltdown, a career lost, a way lost, a whole long list of life goals abandoned forever, hope almost forsaken then aggressively reclaimed. A very messy, almost disastrous decade. And this little black notebook's been with me every day of that. I'm almost loathe to stop carrying it around.

My first ever filled notebook. But not my last. If I write at the rate I am now, I'll fill the next one by year's end. If my output keeps growing as it has, the new book will be full before mid-autumn. But that's hardly the point. If I do that, I'll get another one. And another. My only job is to keep near that creative spark. And in so doing, write a book I never finish. So my only goal is to open the book again tomorrow and put my pen to the page and start by writing the date.

Shaman and Shadow

That night in bed before we turned to sleep, we sat down with book and with app and we read. I was rereading my copy of Joseph Campbell's Pathways to Bliss. I was only in the introduction but already fading. I'd drag in a sentence at a time in between eye-lid collapses, and the scuddering of the book through my fingers would jolt me back awake. Many times the sentences were gibberish by the time they got to my brain, scrambled in my sleep-mired senses. But I managed to digest a few choice statements:

“In primitive societies, the shaman provides a living conduit between the local and the transcendent. The shaman is one who has actually gone through a psychological crack-up and recovery. The young boy or girl approaching adolescence either has a vision or hears a song. This vision or song amounts to a call. The person experiences a shivering, neurotic sickness.

“I recently read the story of a woman who grew up in a mining town in West Virginia. When she was a little girl, she went walking in the woods and heard marvelous music. And she didn't know what to do with it, or anything about it. The years passed her by, and, in her sixties, she came to a psychiatrist with the feeling that she had missed a life. It was in deep, hypnotic memories she recalled the song. You recognized it, of course: it's the shaman's song.”

The shaman's song: the last tune going through my head as I dropped the book onto my nightstand and turned out the light.

I'm in a house. I had been escorting C through, I think, but I don't recall her in the dream by this point. The house is entirely dark. The dark of shut closets. I have a flashlight, but it fuzzes out in a fading fog perhaps 15 feet out and beyond that there is nothing. I'm walking down a hallway—all I see are hallways. Something is in the hallway behind me. Something drawn to me but that doesn't love me. It won't enter the light. I turn the flashlight behind as I walk. But there's something ahead of me that feels the same way as does the thing that's following me. The hallway I'm in comes to an L and it turns right. I back into the crook of the L and I shine the light down each branch of the hall. Every time I move the light from one branch, whatever it is in the dark of the other branch moves closer.

I was flashing the light back and forth when I woke to the feeling of my flashlight hand's wrist flopping spasmodic against the edge of the bed. What awakened me was the horror of realization that my hand was dangling over the abyss in the dark room, in full view of whatever might lurk in the shadows underneath my bed.

I lay in bed with dread slowly overtaking me. I recalled another dream I had when I was thirteen. Thirteen was a bad year. I felt shattered and unsalvageable. One night, I got up to use the bathroom and get a drink of water. When I returned to my room the book light on my bedpost was on, as was the stereo but softly. There was someone sitting on the corner of my bed under the book light, hunched over something with his back to me. I called out to him in confusion and alarm. I got as far as “Hey—“ before he stood and turned towards me. He was me. My height, my face and hair, my anger. But not my eyes. His were all whites and were so much brighter than his darkening face. He raised an arm and a finger at me in accusation and he screamed the most terrifying sound I'd ever heard. I'd just watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Donald Sutherland's scream at the end had unsettled me. This was like that but it came from inside me, so it was much worse. I woke actually screaming.

Sitting in bed this more recent night, the two dreams circling in my head, I heard and felt a stuttering thump in the bed. In my fear it was not a good sound or feeling, but after a moment of fright, I realized it was C shifting in her sleep. Even in sleep she arches and bends towards me. As someone who has slept alone all of his life, I've found it claustrophobia-inducing, but even more reassuring. It is perhaps most comforting when I'm most stuck in that feeling of claustrophobia, as it often shakes me from that spell. She often puts her knees up in a tent and over time, the tent leans over—always towards me—and as her heels catch and lurch over the sheets it makes that creaking thump. I nudged her knees and she settled straight legged again. I looked over at her face, but in the grain-eyes of night and the horror that still stretched over me, it looked like she was in pain, her eyes squeezed in a moon-pale grimace. They weren't but I couldn't shake the sensation.

I touched her knee again and she opened her eyes. We talked a bit and she asked how I was. I haltingly told her about the dream I had. I told her I realized the haunted house was my grandparents' house. A house I've dreamed about often over the years but under the disguises of circuses, castles, hotels, amusement parks, and zoos. I loved that house in my youth. But in every dream it has a definite axis, where one side of the house is “good” and one side is “bad”. In the haunted house dream that night, the L shaped hallway was down at the end of the house that is always “bad”.

When I finished, she was drifting between snores and responses, but when I finished she began to share a dream she had. I was in a bad place however, and my dream was growing more connected even as it faded. Another dream came to me as I tried to listen to her. Like my grandparents' house, it's something that I dreamed often over the years. I'm at a door, trying to hold it shut. The house is dark. Something big and ungentle is on the other side of the door and ramming against it trying to get in. I hold it shut with my whole body.

My flashlit vigil at the hall's end and my defense of the door seemed to be the same thing that night. I pictured the hallway again and down both passages in the hall, I saw a ball of some sort of energy barrel down upon me. My skin crawled enough that I began to feel fuzzed out at my edges. I couldn't keep hold of what C was saying. I needed to growl at whatever was menacing me.

Most of my adult life, I've felt cut off from myself. That room where the white-eyed screamer accused me, was also the room I barricaded myself within in my early teens, away from my family. And when as an adult I tried to picture that cut off feeling, it was of me being outside that room, the door closed. If I tried to enter, within was waiting that screamer and I would buckle before it. But a couple of years ago, I started to integrate a number of my cut off emotional states and one thing I began to work with was a sort of bear energy. I would picture a bear standing on his hind legs and unleashing a roar at me, or at whatever I aimed him. If I aimed him at the dark, he'd roar it light. If I aimed him at fear, he'd put the fear to flight. When I aimed him at the screamer, the screamer would scream back, louder. They'd escalate until the bear would roar the blind white right out of the boy's eyes.

Pictured as an exercise in reintegration, it was fulfilling. I grew stronger; bolder. But in the midst of that new strength, when I last had the door holding dream a couple of years back, I failed to keep it closed, for the first time. It was also the first time it was a door that wasn't in my childhood home. It was the door in the room I was sleeping in that night, my bedroom in my apartment in Santa Fe. I fell back, and the door flew open. Two men stormed in, my father and my uncle and I shot awake in fear. Nothing would shake that fear, until I lept from bed, strode over to the door and threw it open. I'd growled, loud—my own nod to the bear's roar. I gave a speech then. “Come in. I refuse to hold this door closed anymore. I demand that you come in. But you had best know that I will not flee you anymore. I'm waiting for you. And if you show yourself, I will tear you to shreds and I will devour those shreds and make them mine again. Know this: I am the person, you are just a sliver of persona and you WILL dissolve back into me. I own you and will not cower before you.”

So, in bed after the dream of the haunted hallway, C half-asleep but piecing together her dream for us, instead I started growling very low at my own ghosts. And it shook that fear off. But then what I'd read came back to me, about the sense of losing the life one is meant to have by refusing the call of the shaman's song. And it chimed within me. In conversations I'd had in the past, talking about the deep sense that the life I was meant to live was diverted somewhere and I had no idea how to get it back. And suddenly my dream of the white-eyed screamer came back again and my more recent image of the bear roaring fear and white eyes out of the room and out of the boy. And I wondered if I wasn't just using the bear to continue for yet another decade to refuse the Call.

 It was a terrifying idea, and I had no sense of how I was supposed to healthily face that fear without a surge of the fighting urge coursing through me. How does one face down danger and the need to flee, without girding oneself in aggression? My father never taught me and I had no clue.

I got up to write down everything that had occurred and had occurred to me, before it was lost in the dawn.

When I finished writing and went to go back to bed, C was reading, sprawled part way across where I slept. We curled up again and I was grateful to have her in my space. But right before I embarked fully into sleep, I was again in the hallway's crook. Down both passages there came that menace. I straightened out in bed and said in my mind's voice, “Come, whatever you are. I will not hold closed the door. I will not flee. I will not hide. But more than that, I will not fight you and I will not flinch. I still dare you to come. I still demand that you come. But I will not tear you to pieces. I demand you come and I will not raise a finger to stop you.”

I recalled reading accounts of shamans recounting how they'd heard the call. Several stories were of spirits coming at the onset of puberty, tearing the prospective shaman apart, dismantling them, then putting them back together, but using different materials. No longer flesh and bone. Stones, gems, in some cases. Magical items of some variety.

I recalled earlier dreams, of an enormous wolf who would nightly tell me he was going to eat me before he would chase me down again and again. And I recalled how years later my father suggested that sometimes the guide we need is the one that as a child causes us the most terror, because the path offered is so right it's too terrifying to be considered.

So lying in bed last night, I added, “I will not roar. I was the bear, but tonight I will be silent as a wolf.” But then I knew that the wolf was what was coming, not what waited in me for its arrival. I'd threatened to tear whatever came for me to pieces. But it occurred to me that what I was waiting for was the reverse, to be dismantled and reassembled by the wolf whenever he chose to finally make his appearance again.

I got up again to write down my newer recollections and realizations. I looked at the clock. It was four am by now. Out in the enormous maple in the yard, a crow was shrieking over and over. I stood watching for a minute, squinting into the dark. There in the crook of the tree, was a moving shadow—a raccoon trying to scramble up to the higher nesting branches that the crow sought to scream back down to the ground.

I went back to bed and lay down. C was no longer awake but in her sleep she reached out in the dark to put her hand on my hip as I nodded off.

Out of Frame

Has it been over half a year? Wow. I'd meant to post before this, but it's been hard.

I spent the better part of a decade grappling with darkness. A darkness complete enough that I noticed people shying away from me if I talked about it. When I was in the midst of that stuff, and I lost sight of the end of it and no longer entirely believed there was an end, I spoke without hope. When I talked about it, I talked about irrevocable grief, insoluble mystery. I was a jumble of story arcs that had crashed, been crushed, and there was no sense of completion or respite. Enigmas were menacing; potentials threatening. The pessimism borne of that can sour the sweetest friend. After a while I felt people shutting down when they realized they had to talk to me. So I began to fall silent. To spare those I loved, but also to save for myself those I still had left.

So, much of the time ended up being time spent in hiding.

I took to blogging as an exercise in hope and empowerment. Making myself heard and tearing away any sense of being able to hide. And hope's a process of reframing, which is also empowering. I'd begun to realize the difference between hope and despair isn't anything in the situations I faced; it was found in how I faced those dire situations. Last I'd read, science suggests that depressed people have a greater connection to reality than do optimists. The world is depressing. Unless you decide that reality's less important than happiness. Then you take to yourself the task of reframing everything you see. Never to blind yourself, but to find how each dire portent of doom holds a kernel of success.And then you learn that those kernels are more important than the rest of reality. All the rest of that jazz is filler. So it's not a lie, not selective vision, but selective focus.

Blogging held for me a chance to reframe whatever I was facing, where my initial reaction was to sit in dread of it. And as such, it was an outreach as well. For as I retook every mystery for myself and resolved all those enigmas so that they said whatever was most significant and supportive for them say, as I reframed I put it into words that at once deepened the truth of it for me, and gave the people who cared about me a narrative that didn't grind them down to hear me speak it.

Which is great, but only up to a point. Isn't that always the way?

There's a double edge in such reframing. I found myself waiting. I wouldn't post until I'd found a way to find the light in something. And I'd manage that best when I had worked out what place in the narrative each incident held. So I wouldn't post until I had nicely bundled packages. Whole. Crystalline. But sometimes pat and too nice by half.

A little over a year ago, I started messaging with S. We found such a wonderful connection. Messages gave way to IMs, and then to voice chat, then video chat. Hours every day, then a trip, then we were both moving, her between continents, to be together. We have an apartment together and my life is full and filling.

And really, what pat little packages can I even hope to wrap any of that into? I didn't want to jinx it, too, sure. I still don't. I felt I ought to speak about it. But also felt it was no one's business. I wanted it to grow away from such clean platitudes.

Also, in moving, and in moving IN, my context fell away. I've never done anything like this. I had no narrative in which to put everything. That's not just a narrative shortcoming; it's left me disoriented every day. Which is to say, it sits in the back of things beyond any necessity to care much about it, behind the sea of instant, profound joy she and I fall into together, but it comes out maybe three random days a month and then I'm stunned by how vertiginously disoriented I am. Wow-we're-building-a-life-together disorientation, sure. But also, where-is-this? and I-miss-my-old-dance-classes and all-the-comforting-crutches-I've-been-leaning-on-are-gone varieties of disorientation. All pointy things that time wears the edges off.

Without prim little boxes of triumphs to share however, I had nothing much to report. So my blog's fallen silent for months.

But I haven't. Entirely the opposite. And I'd like to see if I can't bleed the edges a bit here, take a few of these posts out of their nice packages. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. Let's let those edges bleed a bit, as well.

Hi.

Warp & Woof

When I was a child, I wanted to be a dancer, an artist, a cartoonist, a photographer, an architect, a musician, a writer. I'm a creative person. I don't produce enough for those that judge to approve of me calling myself such, but all titles aside, creative is what I am.

However, I'm also extremely self-critical. For years, that's derailed most of my creative attempts. Part of the issue is that creative though I may be, in my own self-conception, I see myself as a copyist, not a creator in my own right. I see what others create and a part of me wants to reproduce that. A sense of discipline, of mastery of style and form, someone who can replicate perfectly someone else's dance or brushwork or words.

Perhaps in that, I strive to unmake myself and be recast in someone else's form. Perhaps I cannot view perfection and myself as occupying the same space, so I remake myself in the image of another, perfected creator, in the hopes of allowing space for perfection myself by showing self the door. I want to give up this me, this flawed me and reach for, grow into what I see in others, what I see as my own ideal. Eliminate my broken me, to replace it with my perfected me.

The problem, the self-critical crux, is that I am a terrible copyist. I have never got anything I've striven to create to look, to sound, to feel how I want it to. No matter how much I train, what I produce does not jibe with what I picture. And I lament that. For years, I've stepped away from the pen, the keyboard, the dance floor out of despondency. For long stretches I've struggled with, or been smothered by the sense that my desire for creative self-actualization is perpetually doomed to failure. There is a concept of the beauty of imperfection, called wabi-sabi. My copyist aspirations have no room for such stuff, unless I'm copying it from someone else.

So I riffle through the gardens others have planted for treasure. And if in finding and cherishing an object, a stone perhaps, I take it back to put it in my sacred pool, its appearance is distorted, it seems translocated. Water bends the light and changes the visual form of anything put inside it.

But that idea of this idealized future self blots out the self that already exists. And it's not self. It's a motley piecemeal of other people's performances. I may pretend it's self-aspiration, but I can't delude myself into thinking it's an accurate self-conceptualization, or a realistic self-actualization.

The sacred stone isn't my own. I take it from someone else's garden to put in my pool. So, why should it appear as I want it to, if what I want is for it to be as it was in someone else's yard? Over the last year, I've done a great deal to shrug off my self-criticism. But it's a hydra and self-affirming is full-time work. When I feel I've begun to make progress, I find that cyst of recrimination nested away somewhere new, using different rhetoric. I'm not down in the pit of self-hate. Not anymore, at least. But there's a long road ahead of me.

And new hurdles arise regularly. There is a wonderful dancer in town here, that I've said half-jokingly, “I want to be her when I grow up.” Not dance as well as she does. But dance exactly as she does. My dance does not look as I want it to. It's bent. My poetry is warped. My prose is distorted. My drawing is squashed—inasmuch as I want them to be like the paradigms I borrowed or stole from elsewhere.

And if they are bent, that begs a number of questions. What bends the “ideal” image into what it comes out as? What medium in this example is the water of the metaphor? Isn't it me that is the water? And not just water, but the sacred pool. So, the thing that prevents me from attaining my external ideal is my internal reality. I am that which prevents me from being other than me. The stone thrust into the water is an external thing. But I am the water. The stone may be lovely, but the lens that distorts where I want to see it and how I want it to appear—that lens is me. The distortion is the road map of the self.

Dark matter warps the paths of celestial bodies—in my own equation of orbits, I am the dark matter that pulls my ideals out of the perfect circles I envision them spinning in, into the parabolic wabi-sabi of me. Not my ideal me. My real me.

And so, it dawns on me that perhaps I am not failing at all. Perhaps the only way I yet falter is that I have not yet learned how to properly celebrate the way the field of my own gravity distorts external shapes into being an expression of what I am inside, perfected, being perfected, or otherwise. I bend that which I love. And the dent is me. Exactly as I should be.

After the End: Yggdrasil

I finally managed to begin getting through to and integrating the six-year old part of myself after ten years of some of the darkest, worst struggle of my life. How am I supposed to squeeze that kind of struggle and change into the next few hours?

And the truth is, I can't. It will take the time it takes. I will succeed on my own terms, in my own time and there is no fast forward button. A life is lived out over the course of a lifetime.

So, this wonderful woman will have to be wonderful just a bit more and make room for me falling to pieces as my internal Ragnarok knocks my foundations out from under me. But then, I don't suppose there's any other time Ragnarok can be expected to arrive.

She's the perfect chaos, the beautiful upheaval of love that makes me feel so safe my demons storm down from my mountaintops and knock everything down. Looking inside I understood, I choose her over stable stasis. And I realized, that's the point. With her, and with that ten year old in me. Kids, pets, friends, lovers, spouses—they make one's life messy. Your cats destroy your sofas, your dogs destroy your carpets, your kids destroy every material object you have and even the least friend brings a mess into an otherwise orderly little life.

And so, yes, the ten year old is Loki, is Fenris, and is Ragnarok. But after Ragnarok, Baldr and his brother return from Hel and the spring follows winter. Love is giving those you love the power to destroy parts of your life, with the confidence and faith that you both can rebuild whatever is shaken to ground.

So, I know the ten year old needs an opponent. Someone to face off against, and hold the line against him. Someone who will oppose without being an enemy. He needs a father. He needs me to stand up. And the little wolf being what he is, he needs me to finally embrace that wolf energy inside and stand in front of him, on four legs, head down, shoulders up.

On the day all this started to fall into place, I rode my bike across town. Twice I saw prairie dogs. Close at hand, not fleeing, which is uncommon. Regarding me as I passed within two feet of them. They were burrowing under a new bike path, the one I was riding on. They'd hollowed out underneath the path enough that the concrete had begun to collapse, so that their burrows peeked out from rubble. They'd destroyed a paved road. They suddenly seemed like that ten year old in me, not strictly the squirrel he'd wanted to be when younger, but close. Prairie dog and squirrel—not the same, but ringing the same bell inside me. And being a force for Ragnarok as he was, he was also the squirrel Ratatoskr slowly destroying the world tree, which would herald the coming apocalypse. And that nevertheless, he was joy and triumph, embodied. That one thing could be both.

Because the forces of life are the forces of death. Autumn leaves and the winter's Ragnarok unmakes the whole of nature's bounty, until Baldr returns to herald the spring.

And I knew then, I could rebuild. And welcome the uncertainty of the coming winter, when all my best laid plans will crumble. Even, perhaps, my own Yggdrasil, the very center of my own world. I might lose my center, entirely. But so be it.

S, I very much hope you're still with me at that point—I'd like very much to plant a new world tree with you.

After the End: Time Travel

It occurred to me, just last week actually, that finally, ten years on, I'd managed to figure out what “I want to go home” meant and how to go about giving it to myself. The boy wanted out of the hallway, had wanted to be invited into the light in the center of my life again, the living room. And I'd told him that was his right forever. Integration had finally begun.

In April, I met an amazing woman. I've tried to put in words how I feel about her, describe here or sitting with others what she means to me. And I can't do it. She inspires me, certainly. She makes me feel like striving as hard as I can, and settling in, snug and safe, both at once. And I can describe why, maybe, but it wouldn't capture it, so I've lapsed into silence around it, outwardly, for the most part. What's to say?

Last year, I turned my depression around and finally clawed out of that despair that haunted much of my life. But in doing so, I didn't reach for success. I redefined what I was doing AS success. Not having a job was success. Not having a car was success. Because I couldn't manage trying to reach for them, and the only way I was going to feel good was by celebrating what I had accomplished, with no anxiety over what I was externally expected to accomplish, but had failed to achieve. Life is full of what you haven't managed to do yet. Life's fuller still of what you'll never manage. Why bother with that stuff? Better to celebrate what you are doing, here and now, that brings you joy and real, visceral contentment.

And that was me enlisting the ten year old me to assist. By undermining the expectations of success, I was on his side. And with us on the same side, I had his passion and focus at my disposal.

So, redefining success, I began to feel so good that I contemplated moving. And beyond that, I felt so good I was in a perfect place to meet S, and that's when I did. And I was ludicrously happy.

We planned a trip. A trip after months of waiting for, we'll be off on this weekend.

Moving? Relationship? Those are success. And once again I wasn't on the same team as the ten year old me anymore, we were butting heads. I felt him, sowing doubt, muttering, glaring, plotting. I grew numb with worry and felt...not so much depressed like I'd been so many years, but...off.

He'd remade himself in my father's image with me as the enemy, or maybe it was the other way around.

Whatever way it was, I realized: I'm tired of fighting. For one thing, I know if we play it by my father's rules, I'll never beat him. And what use would life be without the generative spark that ten year old carries, if I did manage to win?

That ten year old me is devious, adaptive, fiendishly tireless, exuberantly focused, unflappable, unstoppable and while I was depressed when he stepped in to run the show, that part of me that was effecting my “failing my way” plan was not itself depressed. Angry, oh yes. But never depressed. So, why would I want to crush that?

But now the relationship, that part of me is up in arms against, has me on a trip with S for the first time, in less than two days.

After the End: Howl

Three months ago, I got the image of that four year old in the hallway, hopeless. I pictured myself as an adult sitting in the living room. I looked to the hallway, and saw the boy curled up in a fetal position at the edge of the light, the longing shining in his eyes. I invited him to come into living room and sit with me. He got up and ran in to jump onto the couch. But while he was happy, he eyed the door to the hall he'd left.

“Are you afraid of the Wolf?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he can't come in here. Watch.” And I pictured a clear shield going down over the door and the windows and keeping the Wolf out. “Whenever you want to come in here, you can, ok? You're never not allowed to be in here, ever again. And whenever you need that and don't feel safe, we can think up a word that when you say it, I'll know you need to be safe in this space, ok?”

The relief told me it was better than ok.

A few weeks after that conversation, I was in a class and I was having a difficult time of it. I was fighting the urge to flee the class in fear. I scrambled for a tool to help me stay. I'd been using the image of a bear last year. I tried it and it didn't do the trick. And there close at hand was the wolf. I turned my head up and closed my eyes and imagined myself gearing up for a first-class howl. And suddenly there was the safe word echoing within me, loudly.

I pictured the little four year old again. “Erik, go sit in the living room now. Me, I need to spend some time running with the wolf and I know you need to feel safe. So go be safe. I'll be back when class is over.” And he was gone. Inside, I howled. Outside, I ran that class down to ground and sank my teeth in. I rode home that night, fiercely proud, howling still, and this time, the picture of the boy was back, on my shoulders, howling with me.

After the End: Checking In

Today, I've grown in many areas of my life. But even now, I cannot hold a job because that is success. I cannot write a book or find a partner or buy a car or a house or start a family because they are all flavors of success, and to that ten year old they would be set ups for a worse fall, so even without consciously doing it, even while consciously realizing it makes no sense, I opt out.

Ten years ago, I was still working, but I was restless. My job was vaguely prestigious, and paid very well. I had enough money to get the house, the car, support a family. It scared the Hell out of me and I stumbled. I found myself sinking into fugue states again.

Even before I melted down, I knew I needed a change. I tried, ten years ago, to reach through the walls I'd built up within myself, thrown up to keep not merely my father from me, but me from Me.

“How's it going, Erik?”

“I want to go home.”

“Where's home? What does that mean? Is there anything I can do to get what I want right now?”

“I want to go home.”

“I hear that, but what does that mean? What do I need, to make that happen?”

“I WANT TO GO HOME.”

“I know. I want to get me home. Please, tell me how that works?”

“IWANTTOGOHOMEIWANTTOGOHOMEIWANTTOGOHOMEIWANTTOGOHOMEIWANTTOGOHOMEIWANTTOGOHOME....!”

And for perhaps eight years, that was all I heard rattling inside me, when I turned inward to ask what I needed for me to be happier being me.

About two years ago, I started getting a few other short answers, when times were calm. But if I asked about what something meant, or if things got tense in life, everything would again retract into the endlessly run-on litany of I-Want-To-Go-Home.

After the End: The Vow

At age nine, I was tested and found to be very intelligent. My parents scrambled to get me into an accelerated academic program. By this point I was already part of the way into the second semester of fourth grade. We toured the school and the class I'd be in. I hated the place. My parents asked me what I thought of it. I said I didn't know. They suggested I try it, and if I didn't like it, when the school year was over, I could go back to my old school for fifth grade. The idea sounded stupid to me. I said that sounded ok.

The school was worse than I'd feared. I was ostracized. I went from the smartest kid in my class on Friday to the lost moron in my new class on Monday. The teacher had no interest in getting me up to speed with the class. She assigned another student who wasn't fond of me to tutor me up to what they were learning. He did his best to fail and he did. And I learned in first grade not to bring my homework to my father. So I suffered feeling like I was stupid for the first time in my life in silence and went again into a fugue state. I suffered the ridicule from my classmates—and believe me, smart kids are the meanest kids there are—mostly in a fugue state, too.

The year ended and I told my parents I wanted to go back to my old school like they promised I could. They said tough, I was staying.

Fifth grade was very little but a red mist of anger and resentment. I realized then that opportunities that looked like potentials for happiness or success were a trap set to hurt me. They led to failure. And I realized that I had no recourse, no power to make it otherwise. I only had one source of power—the ability to sabotage my set ups for failure with a more fundamental failure. I could only choose to give into my father's failures for me, or opt out and set up my own failures.

So again, I made an oath. I vowed I would fail at everything in life, unravel every success. Partly to escape the traps set for me, and partly to illustrate to my father that he was a failure as a parent. Dark? Yes, it really was. But it was my only sense of personal efficacy. And for several years, it was the only thing that kept me alive. And it was another oath I took very, very seriously. And I proved to be VERY good at carrying it out. I was Fenris, swallowing the sun, and bringing about my own daily Ragnarok.

After the End: Confidence

When I was six, I was angry. I remember arguing with my father over math homework I insisted I didn't know how to do, even though I did. I remember again being spanked a lot with a belt and a lot of yelling and insults being hurled at me. What I don't remember is anything else from age six. It's a blank. I recall back to the crib at six months of age and forward from age eight. I'm told I changed at age six, and went from being happy, talkative, and agreeable to being surly, secretive, and argumentative. But six and seven are almost entirely blank otherwise. Aside from my father and the belt, I get a mental image of an uncle by marriage who I feel did something terrible, and a lot of anger and very little else.

I recall the fighting with my dad and the realization that I couldn't trust him. That I wanted to trust him, to tell him about my uncle, but I couldn't and I felt that despondency from four again, but constantly. I was angry, but to show that to my father was to get a beating. I was afraid but to show him that was to get a beating. I was deep in grief, but to share that with him that was to get a beating. I couldn't talk to him. My parents tried to get me to talk. The feeling that I couldn't trust them deepened, so that one of the few things from six I do recall is vowing to never tell them another thing about myself again in my life. It was a vow I took very seriously. I didn't have parents; I had enemies. I put on a mask and lapsed into silence. If they insisted I talk, I tried very hard to figure out what they wanted to hear, and parrot the expected words when I could. My own self-image on that level became a desperate attempt to mirror what was expected of me. I set my own gauge of safety and success outside myself.

By seven the despair from the isolation, the confinement, and the loss of a sense of self was overwhelming, and the only thing at all from age seven I remember is standing in a friend's back yard. Whoever the friend was, was inside, as were his parents. I stood at the edge of their pool, at the deep end and went into a fugue state staring into the depths of the water. And, staring thus, I leaned forward and dropped myself into the water and forced all the air from my lungs, and willed myself down. I recall looking up through the water and seeing a blur of shapes running around the pool, then diving in to pull me out, and that's all of age seven I have left anymore.

After the End: The Squirrel

When I was four, I dreamt every night a wolf was coming to eat me. I lived in terror of the coming night and when put to bed, I pulled my eyelids open with my hands and begged the Universe to permit me not to sleep. Every night my pleas were denied and I'd dream it again. And again.

I remember begging to be allowed to stay up. I remember being yelled at for doing so. I remember being spanked a lot with a belt. I stopped asking. But I couldn't give in to sleep. I'd creep from my room, down the dark hallway to the living room on hands and knees. As I approached the end of the hall and the door to the living room, I'd slink lower, and lower, making myself smaller, the closer I got to the warmth of the light, the sight of my parents settled in on the coach, the sound of them talking and the television burbling. I yearned. I couldn't go back to my room. I couldn't go any further forward. I lay on the floor at the end of the hallway, desperately silent, desperately small, and I wept without any sound, trapped.

I fell into a lifelong pattern of severe depression at age six, but there in the hallway at age four, was when I first experienced it, the hopelessness of being pinned between two flavors of loss.

If you asked me then what I wanted to be when I grew up, I'd have answered I wanted to be a squirrel. High above the dogs and wolves, of course, but more than that, they were motive, antic, playful, watchful, and simple. They leapt and ran. They were nimble. They were free.

Turning Back

I was late to my appointment. I'm always late for my appointment. Have you ever noticed when you can't stand people around you, that's when the Universe throws more and more people into your path? Them, their pets, their cars, their shopping carts. I find when I can't stand people the most is when I'm to my pompadour in them. So, being late, and feeling ornery, every empty street had one car right in my path as I rode, so it was stop and go the entire way. I got very tunnel-visioned and had retreated into grumbling. Grumbling, grimacing—no wonder no one waved as I rode past.

On a long stretch of multi-use path, off the road, running through a tiny strip of parkland alongside the railrunner tracks, the Universe added wind to the mix, so that the downhill felt like it was uphill with the cold headwind blowing grit into my eyes. I grimaced more and cranked with all my might, standing over the pedals and vowing utmost effort no matter the obstacles.

Two hundred yards ahead, where the path's downhill evened out before Second Street, I saw what looked like a roll of cloth fall into the bike path. Or like a tent being unfolded. I couldn't tell. It was merely an obstacle and it irked me. I pushed harder.

As I got closer I realized it was a man. Sprawled out like a sunbather across the path. I pulled to the right as we came together to pedal past him, glared down at him balefully and bit back the desire to bark out an insulting demand that he get his clueless ass out of my way. I shook my head and pushed harder. Anger's ugly company. Its got hardwired into the behavioral impulse to attack. Whether one does so or leaves, its payload is hostility. So I glared.

Fifty yards on a woman was walking the opposite direction. She flagged me down, so I slowed. “Is that a person there?” she asked me.

“Yeah, it is,” I responded with a tone meant to say, “It's ludicrious, right? Can you believe some people's gall?” before pedaling past her.

But her tone hadn't been incredulity, curiosity or caution. It had expressed concern. As I crossed Second Street, a creeping unease stole over me as it dawned on me that the prone man had likely been too hurt to give much thought to my convenience. And I had ridden past him, like the sort of New Yorker that exists in most midwesterners' imaginations. Shame flared in me.

I actually rode another 30 yards. Shame's a nasty masterpiece. It carries in it the impulse to hide. I was 30 yards along my master plan of riding away to hide my face for having turned my back on someone in need, especially from the woman whose concern I'd brushed off as I rode past.

But I couldn't do that. Anger gets bigger when you feed it with ungentle acts. Shame blossoms when you hide. The only way to reduce them is to act contrary to such instincts and to paddle the currents in the dark whirlpool of of your own unkindness in the opposite direction, until the feedback loop slowly grinds to a halt, then sluggishly begins to ooze at your direction.

I rode back. The woman had just arrived to stand 30 yards away from the man, unsure what she should do next. I got off my bike and approached the man. One eye was open blearily, scanning past me without registering me.

“Sir, are you ok? Can you hear me, sir? Are you hurt? Tell me, can you hear me? Please, sir, are you ok?” I said, voice raised, over the man. He lay, breathing, but unmoving. His eye had drooped shut and he showed no sign of hearing me. An abraised cut was under his right eye.

Had I ridden on, I don't know what the woman would have done. She had no phone and no idea of how to proceed. I called 911. I told the operator all the details I had and she asked if I would go to the street to flag the ambulance when it got there. I said I would, then got off the phone, turned to the woman next to me and relayed the information to her, asking if she would remain with the man while I went to the street to direct the medics here. She nodded. I rode off and flagged down the ambulances as I called to postpone my appointment.

The medics got out of the ambulance 100 yards off and began to walk leisurely towards the victim. They glanced at me out of boredom but said nothing to me. So I filled them in on what happened, though they didn't seem to care much. Another ambulance pulled up on Second Street, and two more medics began walking along the path behind us.

As the two medics I was walking with approached the victim, they called out to him brusquely, “Hey, PAL, get up. We know you're ok. Just get up, right? Look, if you don't get up right now, you're getting something unpleasant up your nose. So get up already.” They handled him roughly. The next two medics were putting on their blue gloves as the joined the first two, riffling through the man's pockets. I saw another ambulance pull up and two more medics began walking down the path as well.

The woman said we'd done all we could and walked back to her job. I remained. I wasn't sure if they'd need information from me, and I wanted to see if the man was going to be ok.

One medic finally took note of me. “Did you see what happened to him?”

“Well, I saw him fall, but I was 200 yards off. I didn't see what happened,” and I recounted everything.

The medic shrugged, “Enh, he's faking. Or at most he's drunk. If someone's really hurt, when we lift their arm and drop it over their head, it hits them in the face. His swerved to land above his head, so he'll be fine.” He shook his head. “You can go now.”

They loaded the patient into the ambulance and I rode off.

Faking. A little annoyance at the idea. And a lot of shame for wasting a minute of riding away and back when I could have called first thing.

Then it dawned on me that there's countless ways to be in distress enough to fake being injured in order to get help—I've been there before. And I realized the greatest shame would have been to give into shame at all. Which after 30 yards, I gave up on. Help is about the offer, not about the assessment of worthiness of the person it might be offered to. And bravery isn't about never running, it's about turning back to retrace the steps laid down in flight, to look squarely at the thing you fled.

Today, the Universe didn't throw people in my path, after all. It threw me in theirs. Because they needed me there.

Vast Forward

Revelations are in short supply. Then revelations are in abundance. The seasons roll through bringing an ebb and flow of different varieties of plenty without any sense of the lay of the land as I approach. Boon, bust—only the unfolding of time reveals which I am facing. There are revelations of who I am, and revelations of how I am. The first is food for thought, the second is food for action. Years of cognitive realizations left me ponderous but without recourse, and of revelations of action, I had none. So there were years where while I was thinking furiously I stood stock still. Finally, last year I made a string of realizations about how to do what I would. It was a spring, summer, and fall of ferocious transformation. Then the winter was a time for dreams and sleep, the hibernating of goals and epiphanies. And the returning spring brought the question: “What will I brave this year; what dangers will be mine to dare?” So that new revelations—behavioral realizations—began to surface.

Three things came to me. The first was that I can't work the way others do. I have things that the doing of them brings joy, but only if I dabble in several at once. I can't commit to one mastery, so I won't. I tried with Lindy Hop and it burned out. I learned that Lindy was the fuel, but not the fire. When one joy dims, the fire finds new fuel. Not out of grief at the old fuel gone, but in the joy of transformation, faced with new tinder, new timber and new warmth. The second was that my greatest fear is to forge a creative path. To write, to dance, to draw, to imagine, to create. I spent a life seeking office jobs because the creative path is dangerous. So, bravery for me, a penultimate bravery, would be to find a way to make the center of my being the center of my path, and find a way to live a creative life foremost and put the safe life away. The third was that creation isn't a matter of something from nothing, it is merely revealing what I already am. My life is already the narrative, my heart is already the beat of a song. The byways of my own history, the detours, the false starts and lurching pace—it's already a book, begging to be written in text the way it's already writ large in every one of my days.

I had a goal this last decade: “I want to spend the rest of my life, writing a book I never finish that no one will ever read.” It was about writing for writing's sake, creation centered on the process, not the outcome. But I realized, with my three epiphanies, that it was also about invisibility. My narrative is my path, and my path meanders, but it deserves to be seen—it's a disservice to live the invisible life. So, I've modified the goal now: “I want to spend the rest of my life living a book that I never finish writing, that everyone can read.”

Three things came to me. But they didn't come alone. I was perhaps four months from those three realizations; I could already feel them, nascent. They'd probably have arrived, in slightly different form perhaps, by the beginning of fall. But their final delivery came early and was in the arms of a woman. She brought them with the opening of spring. She is the opening of spring.

The Season of Yes

The question to ask in this newly-minted green, now that a year has passed since I woke again from a decade's sleep, and forged a path through fear and misery to find my way back these past four seasons, to the clamorous assent of all the byways of life, is this: now that year of old bravery is done, winter's past, hibernation's over and fire's rekindled in this wind-blown spring, what does my bravery look like this year?

Last year I learned panic's only beaten by marching right through it. I can't avoid it by halves and expect to see the end of it by detouring around it. Lethargy's only beaten by activity, activity that pushes the boundary to injury. I can't avoid injury and expect to feel alive. I can't avoid toil and expect to feel joy. Despair's only beaten by finding joy in falling down. And in knowing the gift of getting back up is the whole point of mishap.

So, what mishap will I dare this year? What injury will I risk? What fear will I face?

A Toast Long Past

When my best friend was married, it was to an amazing woman, but I admit before they wed I struggled with ambivalence. I was recalling the speech I gave as Best Man at the reception to someone dear to me a few nights ago, so I wanted to put it down here. This is the best I can remember of what I said, all those years ago. No doubt M and A remember it differently. But here is my recollection:

"I've known M for half my life. We've been through everything together. He's my best friend. I've always been fiercely protective of him and for years no woman was ever going to be good enough for him, as far as I was concerned. A, I know, is perfect for him and he for her; I think we all saw that clearly during today's ceremony, if any didn't believe it before.

"But today I got to see something no one except the groom, got to see. Standing to M's side and a small step behind him, I got to see over M's shoulder and into A's eyes. I got to look into her eyes as she said her vows; got to see into her eyes as she listened to M saying his. I saw a well of such deep love that I was dumbfounded. I already knew M felt as much for her. Today I saw her radiate as much for him.

"And a few paces away from them, I saw both M and A suddenly separate from the rest of us. We couldn't touch the thing they shared. They were too much a part of each other to share that paired isolation with us. So as we stood in the garden, and as we watched them, they were apart--in a clear bubble or orb that demarked a space none of the rest of us could enter into.

"That globe they were in, that they're still in--it's their relationship, and I saw it. They were suddenly within it, creating that new space themselves, that new thing out of the intense, perfect regard they gave each other. A new world within this one, that was made up of just the two of them, but was immediately more than just these two people. I don't know who else saw it, that bubble of otherness they shared, but I did today. I saw it. And I was humbled.

"So I propose a toast: to my best friend, and to his best friend."

Forgiveness

I dream of one woman.

There are many characters that swim in and out of my dreams: men, women, children, and creatures usually confined to Henson/Froud collaborations.

But when I dream of my time with a woman, not just a romp with one, but a connection, I dream of one.

Every time, she's different. A different person, a different face, manner, voice. But despite the changes in costuming, if I look at her out of the corner of my eye, the differences fall away and I see the same woman looking at me.

She is not anyone I'd met, though she's often looked like women in my life. And she is, despite Freud's breathless insistence, not my mother.

What she is, though, is an unwavering thread that weaves through years of relationships, isolation, infatuations, flings, and slapstick sexual pratfalls. She is the Universe. I do not see God in the world, I see her. She is my own personification of everything. I say that as an atheist, and the admission doesn't change one iota my connection to her.

I am not visited by her regularly, mind. She has probably not been a companion of mine more than 30 times throughout my life. No doubt less; I haven't counted.

Her visits have been profound, and alter my state of mind for a month or more. Typically, such a change is not a happy thing. For years, when she'd visit, wearing the face of whatever woman was most prominent in my life at the time, we'd fight. The disagreement would be over nothing of consequence, but it would be accompanied by such unhappiness, such psychological unkindness and emotionally manipulative disrespect from her, that I would wake in a funk that might take a long time to shake off.

Her last visit was perhaps four years ago. Our relationship was changed in that one. We didn't fight. Or rather, the dream began after we had. She was lying on a couch, exhausted by our distance, and was dozing. I came into the room and looking down, felt all my feeling of betrayal and hurt bleed out, leaving only regret. I lay down beside her and tried to whisper to her how sorry I was.

But I awoke before I could finish and, apology unheard, we did not speak again. In the years since I journeyed through some of the darkest ages of my life.

Then the year just past turned around. And after such despair, I've clawed stubbornly out of that shadow and have nurtured my health and joy for a year now. From the worst, I find myself in what is becoming the best time of my life. Stubbornness and claws being what they are, I intend to cleave to this path for some time.

This week, she visited me again. And this time, for the first time in my life, we did not fight. We were all hands and bodies and mouths, pressing, seeking. And when I woke, there was no month of despair awaiting me, only sunlight and joy and the ludicrous, perfect sense that I am welcome and needed in this world.

The Color of Winter V: Willingness

I can't describe how displeased I was as I took a seat in the waiting room. I was lost in that ire, until I heard someone crying to my left. At first, that made me angrier still. Late, odorous, filthy, tired, and now I was being made to wait in what was a nexus of woe, a hospital waiting room. Fucking GREAT. I turned to cast a baleful glance at the person crying.

I froze and fell to pieces in mid-glance.

The person weeping was a developmentally disabled boy of perhaps 14. He was in his wheelchair. Not a hospital wheelchair he was in for liability issues—his lifelong wheelchair. He was slumped over in his own lap. His younger sister was cradling him in her arms. She was dried-eyed and was looking over my shoulder with calm determination—I guessed she'd been through this scenario often enough to be inured to it. On the back of his wheelchair was a very large oxygen tank—I gathered he had enough difficulty breathing he needed to have a large supply at hand at all times. He was sobbing desperately against his sister, but his breathing was a terrible struggle. He wept, snuffled, shook, hacked, wheezed, gasped and cried out breathlessly. The woman at the counter, being helped ahead of me, that caused me so much frustration, was his mother checking him in. Tears filled me. I'm crying again, writing this.

The bottom dropped out of my anger and all my fixation on my difficulties came apart. What the fuck was I doing? What did I have to be anxious about? I needed a shower, had a sore throat and was late for dinner. It beat a large dose of perspective into me. I don't suppose that's surprising. But it occurred to me how much all our suffering would diminish if we'd have the mindful presence to step more often outside of our own narratives and offer consolation to one another.

I closed my eyes and pictured myself breathing in his despair, his pain, his suffering. Breathing it in like a poisonous black smoke, taking it from him into myself. And I pictured myself breathing out clean, crisp spring air, clear and sweet—breathing it out so that it washed back over him. I held onto that for several minutes. And then I prayed.

“Universe, my throat is sore, I'm on disability and I've spent years trying to overcome depression and social anxiety. But I recognize it's all a luxury. You can take my health, take my happiness, take my friends, take years off my life, take my prosperity, my peace of mind, take my home, take away the things that I love, or my sense of purpose. You can have any or all of these things already, I know. You don't need my permission. But I'm offering them freely anyway. Take them, if they'll help. Ease his pain. Take what I have in trade and bring that boy some peace.”

The family eventually went upstairs. The woman behind the counter called me over. She apologized extensively for the time it took. But by then, I'd let all that go. I smiled at her and said it was all part of life. She checked me in, I turned in the vial next door and I rode to dinner, smelly, dirty and late. And I had a great night. The next day I realized I couldn't let all my control mechanisms go. I tightened my grip on my diet and on my sleep schedule. I resumed meditating. I started managing my finances again. And in so doing found I had 500 dollars less than I thought and would be in the red by the time rent was due—I guess the universe took me up on my offer of prosperity. Honestly, it gave me a silly sense of warmth to see my account dry, thinking that.

And with that, my weight began to drop again, a goal coalesced a pace or two ahead of me, and I could hear the ravens laughing in this burgeoning spring.

The Color of Winter IV: Willfulness

After tackling the bicycle problem head-on, I felt actually able to do what needed doing. I rode across town to the medical clinic and got my throat looked at. They found nothing wrong but took a culture to be tested at the hospital. I was handed a plastic bag with a vial inside.

“What's this?” I asked.

“Your throat culture.”

“And why are you giving it to me?”

“So you can take it to the lab.”

“Me? I thought you would do that.”

“Oh no. The lab's at the hospital. Just take it over and drop it off. You'll be in and out in two minutes.”

I was furious, and anxious because it was getting close to when I needed to be at a friend's birthday. I was in clothes that stank of sweat and I was still somewhat smeared with bike grime. But I had no choice, so I rode it to the hospital. It took five minutes to find the lab and when I put the vial on the counter, the man behind it looked at me like I'd just spit in his mouth.

“What's that?” he asked.

“A culture from OnCall.”

“Why is it on my counter?”

“I was told to drop it off here.”

“Well, have you checked it in at the Registration desk?”

“Uh...no?”

“Then take it away. We can't do anything with it until you've checked it in.”

By this point, I was livid. I found the Registration desk. The woman behind the counter was already helping someone. I stood a few paces back. She looked up at me, surprised.

“Are you waiting, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Well, here, take this pager. We're going to be a while.”

The Color of Winter III: Not This Time

Two weeks ago I felt withdrawn. I was exercising a lot, but the effort to do so seemed inordinate. A few steps into my midweek dance class, I was lightheaded, weak, and a sore throat I'd had for two months became unbearable. I dropped out of the class and while it was a reasonable thing to do, I felt ashamed and shaken for doing so. I vowed I would finally get my sore throat tested the following day. That night, I had a terrible dream of both my parents telling me they were dying. I woke off center and couldn't find my momentum. The class had shaken my confidence in my body. The dream had shaken my confidence in my emotional state. Doctors' offices shake me in general. So it took the better part of the day to go. At which point, I realized I had a broken spoke on my bike.

I'd never replaced a spoke. It was on the right side of the rear wheel, behind the free wheel. I'd need to take that off before I could replace the spoke, then put it back on. I'd never removed or put on a free wheel before, either. I stood there, gaping at my bike, trying to make the logistics of how I would get the bike fixed, get to the medical clinic, and get through the next several days, come together. But they wouldn't and after a few minutes, I gave up and retreated inside. I felt the deep urge to hide. Beyond the bike and the trip to the clinic, I had plans for the evening. I contemplated canceling them.

And then I recalled the car I gave up almost a year earlier. Hiding hadn't helped then, and believing it might help now left me angry. I pictured everything paralyzing me with fear and pictured the hardest, most proactive thing I could do in response. I called a friend who'd know, O, and asked him how much damage it would do, riding the bike as it was, to the bike workshop. None at all, he told me. So I rode there. The place was deserted. I'd watched people do the procedures I needed to do to disassemble, fix and reassemble my bike. Once. I recalled it, held it in mind, and fixed my bike myself. The repairs were perfect. My dimmed confidence began to brighten. That bear's bellowing roar came back to me. I rode off to face the day, reinvigorated.