A Letter of Lately
Dear all, dear another me reading this, dear whomever needs this…
as the autumn has descended upon us and I notice the first leaves dusting the ground and September showing it’s shining face in the doorway of time I have been witnessing the world from a deep recess within myself. This cave of the heart and of the mind has an interesting vantage point; it can be beautifully lonely and aching in the cold winds of thought and hopeful it it’s ability to hold a fire.
I feel often we talk of feeling lost, but I want to come now with the idea of feeling listless. Of when we desperately want to be enjoying what is around us but the fatigue is so great or the capacity so stretched that even when a rest point is gained, there is a loss of centring in where I am on the path. I have been feeling every day like I need to forge new meaning after every waking - like somewhere in the night I have dreamt of something that leaves me wracked with disappointment and loss as I awaken to a reality that feels less fitting than the one my subconscious derived for itself.
it’s not even that the stories of these dreams feel particularly like something I want to hold onto… it is more that there is a vividness to them, a presence, I can’t seem to grasp while I’m awake. I feel sometimes like I am walking already through a memory as it’s being made - touching but not feeling. Seeing but not registering. Hearing but not listening. I play these things back and they do not feel old or new, they do not feel like anything and then I sleep and everything feels like something but I can’t match any of it up. Like there are no right answers on the right pages.
I find myself thinking for long hours. I find myself forgetting I have a body, ambitions, and emotions. I simply just find myself forgetting and then painfully, like something physical regaining blood, realize the depth of my stillness and all it has kept me from. That in freezing I am preserving, often prolonging. That there are things that require me to use them and move through them; things I do not want to face or simply are too close to really see and I am wait to get a perspective that seems it will never come - a view I’ve told myself I need in order to safely make decisions for the future, for the present, and even for the past as there are versions of me now that exist that need the versions of me I am to become. Sometimes I can feel a moment of giving up that hasn’t happened yet because I lack the inner voice of my own future self - I sometimes hear her saying…. Just avoid it all.
The brightness of life… we forget to mention to ourselves the aftershock. The way that something can deeply shake us when we have finally grounded again, how much damage comes from this instead of the original onset. It happens in all things, not just the explosive “bad” but also the blooming “good”. There is a trembling in time and earth that knocks us down and I really do believe it means to, sometimes. I believe that there are forces that want to bring us back to the earth in many ways and our resistance to it is what can make things painful.
lately I have felt this knocking down, and the desire to stay down. Not in a lost battle kind of way, but more in the way the wind and rain will flatten the grass. More in the way where it is natural to be low down to things and not always try to be buoyant and ample and springy, but that there is a humility and a wisdom to letting the atmosphere of our lives change us. I am unwilling to be defiant towards where I am right now - I want the comfort of being low down where the leaves can cover me and I can be in silence and listen to the different tones of the world moving around me.
I have much to express and so little of it in words. I have much to feel and so little of it through exuding. I have much to hear and so little of it from a mouth.
This is a fine time for sitting on the line between surrender and exhaustion. I am trying to not pass the time, or change the time, so much as I am trying to be limp in it when it asks and study within it when it is required.
I am but everything falling and nothing catching.