Yesterday, it was all "walk and don't look back," sung, said and meant. Today, though nothing that can be seen or even known has changed, my center has become the astronomic phenomenon which even light cannot outrun. It could make a person feel leaden and stuck and more than a little deranged.
I would not describe myself as mercurial by nature, though others may disagree. As age and other things overtake me, I believe I am reasonably consistent, maybe even predictable. Yet following a day of inner peace and happiness, mixed with the confusion that now seems a fixture in our lives, as Donald Trump again, hey, presto!, flourishes President Obama's birth certificate (or so he says) for our scorn and rejection, today I have been called out by vagabond anxiety, thinking this looked like a good place to crash.
The morning began with email, including an Amazon promotion, books about Paris. One of them, I believe it was called Everything Looks Like Dessert, prompted me to take the "closer look" and as far as I could determine, the only things that looked like desserts were pastries. Awake at 3 a.m., I played with letter forms in my journal, a phrase I read yesterday: Do More Of What You Love. Well, duh. And I had planned to do exactly that today. Anxiety had another agenda.
Just now, a phone conversation with a friend, brought up - relative to Earthly swampiness and the aforementioned excessive gravity - the memory of a Kingston Trio song about the Everglades, "...if the skeeters don't get you then the gators will." I feel the need for calamine lotion and high, dry ground.
Any tolerance I once may have had for whining has been ground to dust. That includes my own. Anything I speak that sounds like a complaint causes me to feel that I've punched all my gifts and good fortune in the nose. And so help me, I see this as a mystery in which we may all be conscripted actors, but if it smacks of complaining, I apologize, as I do if I just repeat myself using different (or not different) words from post to post.
How it feels is like being the ball portion of a hammer throw rig (I think they call them rigs), being swung around and around and then let fly, to land - wherever. Being made of human stuff, the harder landings are hellish. I have bruises to prove it. What I am is misplaced, bewildered and in touch with quite a few people who are going through the same thing, the sense of having lost our way, become unhitched from our moorings.
(Hammer throw photo credit: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~zacharyr/zackHobbies.htm and blogger will not let me adjust the spacing between paragraphs, which will tell you something about the state of things.)
4 comments:
times like this i wonder if one of the reasons i write is to leave the ungrounded me notes to refer to when i finally find the wherewithal to try and regain the ground i lost. it's so easy for me to shy away and disappear- no one needs to see me like this, when i lose my way. so many times, this is where i come to find my way back to that steady balance of faith and trust in the hammer throws.
sherry
Sherry - Thank you. Between us we may be able to leave enough pebbles (the critters would eat the breadcrumbs) to find our way back. My hope in writing this was (a) to seek others in this same pickle and (b) to see if putting it out would get it out of me...exorcism-like. There is nothing easy about this earthly assignment. xo
Most of the time when I put stuff out there it goes away or at least fades into the background. I've actually never known what it would be like to be grounded and centered. So, I have no need to find my way back but rather to find my way there. I have doubts that that will ever happen and am content with life but can imagine it better. And so the striving goes on for me. I wonder if you're content if you keep looking for more. Perhaps I am simply a yearner.
Rubye - I seem to know grounded and/or centered in portions, not a long-running, uninterrupted continuum. I don't know that anyone, other than perhaps Buddhist monks, has that stabilized. There is a balance, I believe, in which we are able to be grateful and content with the moment, without giving up on growth, personal evolution, becoming more awake. We are, and will always be, works in progress. xo
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