How many days into autumn are we? Seems I started seeing the leaves fall a while ago. Now it’s October. Back when I was falling in love it was before the spring, When the green was starting, but short of the official okay of a date. It wasn’t April 21st then, like it’s not September 21st now. It’s October. We’re past the heat. Then, we were before. Any day I expect to hear the sound of leaf blowers. I think I have a rake in the shop.
Never liked the sound of those blowers. Never liked the harshness of it. At least around my house, things should be done by hand. The leaves that had done their duty should be met with some kind of honor of exertion. Yes, and honestly, I like the feel of the ache in my shoulders as I wade into the effort. I like the feel of the handle in my hands.
These days there’s a good chunk of people who don’t believe in rakes, who don’t believe in love. They’ll point out how it never lasts, how you’re blinded to peoples faults, how childish it is to dream. They’ll say you shouldn’t rely, you shouldn’t give up, you shouldn’t … you shouldn’t. And when the summer comes, they’ll tell you you’re tricked.
Still, you suck up the sun, lay on the beach, open up your arms and let it take you all in. Regardless of what they say, you still do it. It’s because this stodgy goo that is our everyday perception wants to jump. It wants to move and dance and fly, to be away from this sameness, to hunger for the other -and feed.
They’ll say there’s more than one, that it isn’t just the heat of the sun, but the smell of the flowers -just like in the greenhouse – or not the warmth of the day -just like what you can get from the fireplace. They’ll say that to be balanced and healthy you have to enjoy everything.
But more than anything, they’ll say that, once again, you’re wrong. That to be normal and healthy, like everybody else, you have to do what they say. Don’t love.
But These leaves keep falling.
Wrong doesn’t matter. Wrong doesn’t care. Wrong is it’s own kind of glory, like those leaves. They did their duty, with no one telling them it wasn’t worth it. There’s cycles to this. Giving into what you want, letting go of all the should-of-beens, it’s kind of all the same thing. And with each pull of the rake the body remembers.
It’s like those nightmares. Have you ever had those nightmares where you’re falling and there’s nothing there to catch you? The kind where only dying is at the end. And if they last … yeah, I know, crazy. If the terror lasts, right? But if they last, if you let go of the fear and turn in your dreaming eye, … if you can do that, you’ll find
… you’re flying.
And the seasons turn and the wheel creaks. It’s the cycle, it’s the circle of things that we’re made for … not to measure up to someone else’s description of better or best. And the honor and attention that we give to these falling bits of ourselves, and the thrill of the wind tearing it all down in a sudden … all of that required a beginning.
“If you’re brave enough, often enough, you will fall.” – Brene Brown
And the leaves are everywhere.
Category: Desire
Longer
Longer.
This could be longer. This could be a long time. I can see us for a long time. Longer.
The words flash by; they slide by. I feel the need to reach out, to touch her.
“Yes.” I know. I feel like I’m becoming visible. I’ve loved her for hundreds of years.
And my mind is catching on something. We’re caught in this ballet, in this sweet chaotic choreography of emotion, like birds in flight. And my mind, lost in the joy of movement, is having a hard time with time.
It’s always so.
I still play poker with guys I’ve known since I was seventeen.
Floyd, our family medicine man, told me last year “you’re the only one who still comes around.”
Time wants to have a battle with me in the badlands. I can feel it waiting in the ache of my bones, in the little heartache I feel when, far away, I wonder if she is okay. I sense it when my siblings, spread to the wind, are blinking on and off in my consciousness like Christmas lights. Those are the hints on the horizon of that coming fight. Inktomi, the trickster, is there to witness. What time doesn’t know is that the trickster is on my side.
After my cousin’s open heart surgery, I kept flashing back to that time we walked down the street to go see a matinee in Greenwood, hand in hand. I was fourteen, he must’ve been 6 or 7. It was called The Sting.
Thinking of it makes me laugh.
I need to land for a bit, I know. She’s talking about day to day practicalities. She needs me to say something. I’m learning the ebb and flow of our dance.
“Wow”. Longer would be better. Time to heal would be better. No more battles, not for today -my love is here. Let’s make it a river. It’s so fucking me.
Then, I remember, I’m the one who mentioned time.
It’s why we have gods.
It’s a river, baby. “Looking like a big one,” he says with his gap toothed smile.
Darkness Darkness
The moon this morning was still full, the sky so clear, the world seemed cracked open under it’s soft yellow gaze. As I walked with Jake, I felt my body relaxing. This, in so many ways, is how I pray -body first.
Eventually I reached a point where I could stand and see the moon centered on my skyline, the trees opened up, and I stood up straight and reached out with my mind. I prayed some more. I felt the distance and the vastness, I felt that darkness on the far side, and longed for the flight around that far curving arc. That desire to know that space pulls at my heart. And so, feeling her power, I asked for a blessing on my new love.
“You have the legs for it,” I’d told her the other night, her arms wrapped around me in a dark corner of a local pub. She’d said “ I wish these were my legs,” as she aqueezed me. My mind was lost in the softness of that long sweep of her inner thigh.
Like that long line of sky traveling round to the dark side of the soft full moon on this morning. This is my track and my love, and so I pray for us now.
We’re building a web of dark energy to sustain our magic, bar to pub, plant to tree, and watery depths. I know it was fueled by our darkness, our efforts to work out issues so hard and deep these past years, this in such close proximity to each other that our hearts seemed to be breaking from the acceleration.
“Dark matter is the invisible ‘web’ that holds galaxies together; … the even more mysterious force that is pushing the cosmos apart.” – Dark Matter Unveils First Results
Old With Want
I’ve been seeing more of a friend. Not like I’d meant to, only like she stepped into my field of view and said “here I am,” while I was looking at big posters of her, and little remembrances of scary things that’d happened in the past, and weighing so heavily all the things that weren’t her. She stepped up, I asked, and she pulled me through with her lips.
Through to a clearer reality, where we see each other not for what we think, but for what we are shown, and for what we experience together.
She came into view not a whole person or a whole impression in an instance. I had stopped looking at her -I remember. She came in first as eyes, then as a collar bone. I notice this small thing, then that, like my eyes are shy. Then a belly, a soft belly that I love.
That’s how she came into view, and still I don’t know that I see everything. I’m trying to do it with my ears, trying to remember each word.
Her lips fire off old neural networks in microseconds, me awkward, remembering, wanting to shake off this old skin, see and hear and breathe. just breath again.
I try not to think about love, try not to let it break me. Yes, I can say it. I will, and I do. But it’s me that does that. And me, and I, can be a scared moodiness. No, I want to do it with my life. Not wrapped around anyone, no, but drawn out and easy, with plenty of room for attention, dreams and desire. I want to see everything, piece by piece, maybe a whole life someday, but for now the parts of her coming together are plucking at my heart strings slowly, the dust falling.
You would’ve laughed to see me rise up this morning.
The dust, old with want, falling from my eyes.