blues

Origin Story 1

Posted on by Nuts To Soup

Free association cacophony jumble of what began when, what is now -and how- and tangents upon tangents. Superstitions and silence and prayers and gratitude and a giddy, foolishly earnest hope, sticky as honey.

Everyone begins somewhere. I began almost forty years ago.  I have vivid, and faded (and intentionally blurred) memories of the slates which paved my path from then to now. With the exception of holding very dear some friends whose knowledge of me is longer than any of my other histories, I do not usually dwell over those stones and steps. I’m here, now, grateful.  That is more than good enough.

But this year! This whirling, freaking blueshift of an amazing incalculable year. This year I recant my new origin story (to myself) almost every day. Incredulous, I guess, at my satisfying present? Anxious not to forget where I came from? Trying to learn the route by heart, should I need to walk it again. Entertained by its twists and turns.

I don’t know, but I will tell it again -as silly as it sounds. And again, and again until it is all true.

The fall of 2011 was the beginning of a two-year descent into a sad, worried, scary place: a heartbreak; a job lost; big professional hopes brutally dashed; a terrible new job -abandoned at the cost of  a small chunk of my pride; an equivalently bad new job -maintained at the cost of a small chunk of my faith in humanity; unemployed…And then in the fall of 2013 a sudden end-of-Act-I turnaround. Full ensemble on-stage, jazz hands and high kicks, the head-nodding ditty that everyone will be singing as they leave this “instant classic.” The new job that set me on the road to this current paradise.

Yep it was all honey and roses for a few months except for the adjusting to my new job, a process that isn’t over more than a year later. A process that was stressful when I first started, so much so that when I (metaphorically) bent over to pick up a paper clip, the cheeky universe  put a foot on my bum for a lark and sent me stumbling into the Emergency Ward for an 8 hour Christmas Day visit. And it was that crucible which birthed this delicious year.

Daily – Sept0414

Posted on by Nuts To Soup

The days of the week have no significance. Time is all relative anyway. But today I am wondering if maybe all Thursdays have some similar element:  smell, a subtle cant to the ground we walk on, the way the light shines through the trees, some wobble of the earth’s axis occurring only on the fifth spin. But then the week would necessarily start on Sunday. And, truly, neither Sunday nor Thursday exist. They are just agreed upon words in our constructed reality that have facilitated a great deal of human cooperation and societal development. Thank heavens!

And yet there is no Thursday. Time is independent of shape, beginning or ending. How quaint our clocks must seem to anything omniscient.

I am emotional today. I am disappointed by this. Which just adds to the gentle background strain. Low-level worry, like when an impeccably punctual friend is late. Generalized pall, like the lingering pain of a particularly tragic news story. And some confusion and wonder that such gloom should visit me at all, without reason.

So I wonder if it’s Thursday. Was I like this last Thursday? Is Thursday the catalyst of bush-league dolor? Is Thursday pitiful? Can’t be. Thursday doesn’t exits.

So probably my wings have just flapped too many times this week already. They’re laden with pollutants, sticky and itchy. Heavy from use and toxicity, they droop.

 

First Sunday This March

Posted on by Nuts To Soup

Woke up blue this morning. The sky was dark like in the heart of winter, though we are now in her outskirts. I was thinking about everything anyone had said to me recently that I didn’t want to hear. Those thoughts crashed meanly into the things I said to myself last night that made so much sense. Knew my toilet was angry, but I had high hopes for it. Dashed. The tentative, mental hand I stretch out to remembered places and moments that warm me, recoiled. Everything felt so stale.

I woke up blue this morning, and I don’t want to be. It’s that simple. Direct opposition of the will and the heart. The heart should aways win you know. To stay in the present, you have to own its mood, its, sometimes peculiar, outlook. There is no denying the heart. It will out.

And so we are blue, my heart and I, until we are lifted. The will will have to sulk. No gain there. Turn it to other tasks: like a post. Each task completed is a tether cut free. Eventually the will can float, and caper in spite of the heart. So there, heart! The will and I will make a start of it. Catch up when you can.

Jotted. Released.