I Am/I Am Not

I was honored to be welcomed into the safe space of a women’s support group at a local women’s and children’s shelter last week, as a guest artist of sorts.  I was asked in by a friend who was wrapping up a poetry unit with the support group attendees, and so we did a writing exercise after we’d all shared work from previous groups/times. It’s been years since I really practiced poetry and, though my technical skill has yet to resurface, the warm rush of release seeped under my skin instantaneously. We were given this prompt:

“I am…”

“I am not…”

“I want…”

“I urge you to…” 

And this is what came out:

I am living someone else’s dream.

The creases in the sheets hide the smell of arms that aren’t here anymore and I’m sure someone, somewhere finds it sexy but I just feel cracked and wayward in my nakedness. My skin seeps love I’d like to give, it pools under my nose, and I look sticky and spent but I’m just lonely.

I am not going to be OK. I am going to be beautiful or absolutely nothing at all, what’s the use in using you if you can’t even see me?

I am not going to fall into your sour-breathed, almost-morning pantomime;

I am not easy to love.

I am useful to a pointed look and then deflated, all sass and circumstance but no conviction to fall back on when they stop needing me to make them what they were.

I am what you want.

Isn’t that terrifying?

You don’t know my name.

I want to sleep by myself because the taste of whatever this is makes me dream of surgeons silently removing the things about me you hated, I loved them.

I urge you to reach out in the dark and hold your own self still.

I want your eyes to sink into mine and we’ll both look exhausted out at at a day we have no desire to survive.

<3

I’m giving this to you. Not for good, but for now. I don’t think it’s right, how possessively we contain our selves. For me, this is just as much a radical act of community as it is one of romance. Today’s world seems hitched to passionless self-validation. I’m not asking you to un-hitch, and certainly not to validate me. Just, if you would, indulge my Communist love-dream and take this one little piece with you for a while. Don’t be afraid to take it with you when you garden, or when you work, drink, laugh, hug, dance…come to think of it, there isn’t much you can put it through that I haven’t already. Take it with you when you fight, cry, swear, poop, cheat, lie, self-destruct. I’m not leaving it here with you because you are gentle and perfect, but because you are so alive and beautiful in your volatile, messy, treacherous fallibility that it couldn’t possibly cease to beat in your presence.

And don’t worry. Like I said, this isn’t forever – just for now.

The Next Ten Years

So many things passed without noting – the end of my first serious relationship. The end of slumber parties. The end of being the first to wake up Christmas morning. The end of hating mushrooms and lettuce. The end of nose picking (thank god). The end of overalls embellished with farm animals (though that’s one I can see coming back someday soon…). The end of a horse obsession.  The end of “five more bites” and my daddy singing me to sleep at night. The end of public school. The end of bedtime.

It isn’t all endings, of course. In the last ten years I left and returned to Alaska. I learned to cook, drive, sew, knit, use a credit card, bathe a dog, flip a breaker, insulate windows, can food, hit on someone without creeping them out (OK, sort of), mourn a loss, do yoga, live on my own. I met someone I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with – I didn’t (whew). I graduated from high school. I had my first “real” job. I applied to the school of my dreams and didn’t even get wait-listed, and ended up exactly where I was supposed to be in spite of that. I made best friends, and lost them. I found religion and lost that, too. I befriended my parents. I befriended myself.

It feels as though I am being given a gift by time and the modern calendar. By marking the beginning of a new decade at this point in my life, it’s as though I am being permitted to close a door behind me. Not locking it, but containing all of the pieces and lessons and inspirations of that last growing period, so I can make the best of this one. The learning never stops, of course, but maybe I can use this fresh start of sorts to be more the person I want to be, to be happier, to become more whole.

Then again, maybe I can just work on keeping up with laundry and dishes and homework and work work and working a little more me-time, family-time and dream-time in around the edges. I’ve been feeling so tied-down lately, it’s good to remember not only how much I’ve grown up, but how young I am and how much I have both behind and ahead of me, how lucky I am to know the people I do and be the places I am.

Man, I’m looking forward to the next ten years.

Prayers For Today

I may be weary, but I am not lessened by my tiredness. I am as much now as I was when I woke up this morning, as beautiful and as strong, I am as little as I will ever be, and do not need to believe that the world is sitting on my shoulders to justify the rest I desire. I am allowed to be slow. I am welcome to be calm, to slow my mind and let unfinished tasks fall to tomorrow. It is all right to stop. It is OK to cry, to sigh, to seek comfort. I am as alive and worthwhile as I ever was and ever will be.

I forgive myself for being forgetful, selfish, crude. I forgive myself for yelling, for weeping, for wanting more than I need, for taking more than I want, for acting before thinking, for gray hairs and missed opportunities. I celebrate my age, my mind, my body, the things I did today and the things I did the days before. I look forward to all the chances I will have to do things tomorrow, both new and unfamiliar.

I relieve myself from the responsibility to worry, the desire to lust, the urge to complicate, the tendency to regret, the easy ways I remind myself of all my failings. I let go of all the tattered ends of things long since lost or abandoned.

I admit that I am imperfect, that I occasionally act like I am less than I could be, that I shrink away from pain and gravitate to tempting heat and ease when my strength falters. I admit that I can be impatient, thoughtless, tasteless, irresponsible, adolescent, self-centered and cold. I admit that I alone control the way I am, and I commit to making an effort now, tomorrow, the next day, and from now on to always try and be the best friend, woman, neighbor, employee, partner, dog-mom, and human being I can in every moment and instance.

I open my arms and breathe deep, because the grass is wet and I am whole and things are beautiful as they are, wonderful as they will be, with the mysterious and blessed future only moments away at any given time.

I want for nothing, I am letting go. I am free.

Yes, let’s.

Let’s live in a yurt and can food all summer. Let’s tell people we’re crazy so they stop asking questions. Let’s garden naked. Let’s talk about feelings the way we talk about books or license plates or snails – you know, just talk. Let’s go find empty caves and fill them with imaginary monsters and sound. Let’s drive well but make racecar noises to make it feel more dangerous. Let’s argue about Antarctica. Let’s have shitty jobs and amazing friends. Lets’ get drunk and swap instruments. Let’s swim, all the time. Let’s start a band. Let’s start another one. Let’s bake complicated bread. Let’s get through family holidays with our sense of humor intact. Let’s make our own traditions. Lets’ call when we say we won’t. Let’s splatter paint the driveway. Let’s play Frisbee in the dark. Let’s sleep in. Let’s talk less. Let’s hug more. Let’s be careful with each other. Let’s be happy.

Things Anyone Could Have Told You

 

It’s always a tough call when I meet someone new. Do I tell you everything? How about just the things that make good dinner conversation? How about just the things that anyone could have told you – things I can pass off as miscommunication or imagination later if it becomes a problem? How about half the truth?

 

It’s even harder when leaving someone behind, or being left. How much I deny? Revoke? Disprove? Do we divide up the private indiscretions like old records and bowls and picture frames between us, or do we take what we came with? Do we barter for all of the filth we created or leave it in the stagnant air of the rooms we’re sealing off inside our hearts, hoping it never claws it’s way out to daylight again?

 

It’s impossible when falling in love, to slow down long enough to split the deck evenly and deal them a hand they can play back to you without someone coming up short. The problem with gambling is that you’re always betting against the other person, or betting against yourself – there is no compromise.

 

It’s hard to explain to anyone, no matter how long you’ve known them, why certain movies make you cry, why certain smells make you nervous, why sometimes a memory surfaces for no apparent reason and you get so twisted up inside it makes you sick, why you wake up screaming sometimes, why you bite your nails, why you’re so secretive about some things and so incapable of discretion when it comes to others. There are some stories it’s impossible to tell with a straight face. There are some it’s impossible to tell without sounding like you’re seeking pity or redemption, and still others that seem to solicit validation by simply existing, even untold. The stories that define us might be the ones we’d never tell, but have left track marks on our speech patterns, blisters on our faith, tears in our defenses.

 

It’s impossible when I meet somebody new to know what stories they can see and which ones I can get away with sealing off in the dark. How long will it be before the howling drowns out the banter and the promises? How long until those barred windows shake so loud everyone can hear them? How long before I become the stories I’ll never tell and I have no secrets left to keep you here waiting for? It always feels like it won’t be long before I become something indecipherable from what came before – all of the things anyone could have told you.

Lewis H. Morgan VS. The Circle/Sphere/Globule of Life

In his work Ancient Society (1877), Lewis H. Morgan asserted that Evolution was linear and progressive. Though this theory has been long since disproved and antiquated, modern Western society still harbors some fondness for this concept when it comes to the individual. We demonstrate in our collective rituals (funerals, wakes, baby showers, etc.) that we consider people closer to the end of the line more sophisticated and advanced on a fundamental level. This is not, however, a complete, or even true, representation of a human’s condition at different stages of life. We do not become more perfect with age, or closer to the highest, most perfect tier of existence. We simply become changed. We may become older and wiser, but we do not become inherently better with aging.

According to Morgan, the least developed societies were at one developmental end in a state of Savagery and the most civilized (Victorian England, according to Morgan) were on the other end. Societies evolved along this trajectory from Savagery to Barbarism to Civilization, becoming more sophisticated and functional as spiritual and humane beings along the way, as well as becoming more advanced as a group.

We have, at least academically, come to accept that societies once considered “primitive,” like, say, Australian Aborigines, are, from a culturally relative standpoint, just as advanced as “developed” countries like the US. Though technology may not exist on the same level, societies are measured in their progress by their adaptations to their own environment and cultural context, not our own. We seem to have failed, however, to judge ourselves, within our own Western society, the same way.

The most obvious example is in our ritual reactions to death. The death of a baby or young child though tragic, is marked very differently than that of an older or elderly person. A baby’s death is a loss of potential, treated as sad because of the child’s un-lived life. We do not remark on their individuality, however small. We talk about the family, commemorate their unfulfilled hopes for the deceased. We regret that they traveled such a short length of the line between birth and death. The death of an older member of society, however, is marked by the commemoration of their accomplishments, and the things that made them who they were. At the funeral of an adult, we talk about the positive things about them – their career, their children, things they taught us. We talk about them as though they spent their whole lives moving closer to completeness, perfection. We celebrate their life as well as mourning their death, because, assuming they lived to what we consider “old age,” they made the trip. They arrived at the highest tier of being human and plateaued.

The fault in the linear theory is the same on both the societal and individual level: whoever exists on far or “high” end must not either regress or progress, in order to keep the line static. It doesn’t take into account that culture is always changing. Victorian England, for instance, eventually collapsed and moved into another phase of cultural developement, not necessarily ahead of where it was before. So with death of the individual, we cannot progress forever without collapsing. If evolution is linear, it must eventually end, as must life. Due to its finite nature, this directional theory of existence excludes the possibility of life after death, re-incarnation, or the possible equality of perfectness or progress of all humans, regardless of their place in the life cycle.

By placing greater importance on one end of the birth to death trajectory, we imply that humans get better, or more human, with age. This may seem to be true in some cases, when a person has spent their whole life indeed making a conscious effort to improve, but take, for instance, someone who has no concern for the well-being of others or the condition of their soul, the substance of their humanity. According to this theory, someone who spent the majority of their adult life committing heinous crimes, however sweet or functional they may have been as a child, is more or better at the time of their death. The lack of alternatives in the birth-to-death line implies that we can ONLY get better with age, that it is not possible to lose one’s humanity over the course of a lifetime. In the context of history and current events that is, unfortunately, simply not true.

Though children may not have had as many years in which to develop an identity or make positive contributions to society, it is important to gauge their progress as a ratio to the time they have had. A person’s worth or level of development does not depend on how close they are to one end of the line or the other, but, rather, what they have done with the time they have. Life is many things, but linear is not one of them. Death is not the end of the line, but simply one in a long string of events that may or may not end after our heart’s stop beating. Love and mirth and grief and inspiration cannot be traced on a grid. This world is one of seemingly infinite possibilities, but they are not all points on the same line between one event and another. Be it sphere, abstraction or blob floating on a plane of infinite happenstance, life exists neither here nor there. It has no end points, no corners, no direction. Life is dynamic and, quite possibly, simply one event in a series itself. We are no closer to perfection now than we were the day we were born.