been afraid
i have been afraid.
yep i turned from certain thoughts; i decided i didn’t need to enter that room, or leave here quite yet. i’ve sat and considered considering, contemplated thinking, and wondered about wandering.
i created complex scenes with only a suggestion of a link to reality. i imagined details and assembled them meticulously like someone building a sailing ship in a bottle. they are cinematic masterpieces of what happens to someone who doesn’t wait. like a poorly-rehearsed orchestra on a highway median, uninteresting except for being so distracting. embarassing and mercifully private dramas of grief, disability, violence, prison, castles made of splinters. stress like a nervous rodent handling, gnawing, turning, and chewing every tuft and tidbit. inventing evidence to support my desperate hopes that i am justified in being afraid. it really is scary out there, isn’t it?
praying that what i know to be true is false, standing asleep, that you can’t conquer fear by sitting down in it. fear accepted is hope deferred, not a means to some other golden shore, any more than one can learn to dance by eating.
i wanted ideas to be enough. i wanted to feel the burst of light when the tongue of fire leaps from tinder as a match hits it. lacking patience, i didn’t want to tend to the ambivalent wood. i don’t want to nurture the guttering flame in a drizzle with soggy branches. i’m resisting diligence. where’s the warmth right now? where’s the pretty coals from fire well-made? my hands are shaky, i can’t sit still, and my concentration longs to stretch out with the wisps of smoke on the amber horizon.
December 3, 2006 @ 9:39 am
So I spend the morning catching up on the writings of various folks I know, after reading your entries, I will go on to Van’s blog, some of which has been amazing lately. I lie in bed with my laptop which is the hight of decadence. The cat is curled up, not on the bed, but nearby on a wool blanket and Daddy is outside with his doggies- three now with the puppy we rescue a month back- Sweetpea is her name. I write a ramble to get at the tangle that’s got many of us wrapped in ambivalent woods. Like a Xmas present, but the bows aren’t as pretty.
I don’t know that ambivalence is all bad. But then I’m a fence sitter. An atheist/mystic, an extroverted introvert. Sometimes, especially at this time of year, I think we are called on to sit with the uncertainity. Funny enough, it is a necessary part of group decision making, the muddle, the mess, the no clear sign of which way to go or why or how. Oh, but it don’t make it easy and at this time of year, I wish I could hibernate. Dream away the muddle and the mess and the anxieties. I stopped typing for a moment as I imagined a needle threaded with fear piercing my flesh and sewing the muscles and fat together- tightening. My life is good, very good, in most respects, but there are patterns sown in my flesh. Sown by my flesh.
You are subjected to this because well that the way of a Sunday morning now and again. I hope the show at the A Farm went well, and I hope that your birthday brings you much joy. May all sorts of blessings be yours in the coming year.