Ah, 2024… what a disintegration you have been. The great undoing, the ultimate solvent.
In recent months I have watched two people close to me emerge from complete breakdowns that left them unable to work, perform expected-life-tasks, or function in any recognizable way. I have also been plunging through my own mid-life moment with a sudden cancer diagnosis I was fortunate enough to catch in its early stages.
The thing about my feet is that I love them. They are the most capable feet I have ever possessed, and they’re a part of me I thought I rather shamelessly admired.
My feet do not conform to any western beauty standards. I don’t apply nail polish to them and only sometimes do I shave off the four to five dark hairs that sprout from my big toes after a good night’s sleep. I tend toward an inherited pair of bunions, and my left little toenail doesn’t really grow in at all, appearing as a Plutonian crescent orbiting the outskirts of my lower cosmos.
Today the air is clear and dry and tinged with the scent of fruit. It is spring, according to the cherry blossoms and the mornings alive with birdsong, the sunshine bursting forth over Mt Hood to bathe our Portland Metro in long-forgotten light.
I wonder if you have ever had this thought while doing something you love: When will I be good enough to be seen in this?
It’s an odd thought, the idea that there are standards for being visible. And that I have to hide until I’ve met them. I’ve asked the question of so many pursuits for so long that I’ve grown accustomed to an unending list and no ready answers.
Maybe, like me, you grew up like this…
I’ve been playing around with conscious and lucid dreaming lately, or the practice of bringing awareness into my dream life. These kinds of night journeys are sometimes referred to as waking up while asleep, and they’ve taught me a lot about my power to choose.
The other night I had a dream that was all about emotionally navigating a particular relationship in my life (I know, I know so original). Anyway, there I was bumbling around this dream world I’d created when suddenly I was aware of the emotions I was feeling and how I was using them to affect my interaction with the other person.
Then I became aware that I could choose the emotion I wanted to feel, and that this choice would change the dynamic between us.
So I’ve been practicing the violin again this week and it feels like I’m starting from scratch. Scratch means scales and finger exercises and bowing maneuvers and striving. Striving to improve.
The idea of striving to get better didn’t just come up for me in the practice room this week. When I went to my local violin shop and tried out a few more instruments better rose up to smack me fresh across the face. A mother and her daughter were in line ahead of me also shopping for violins. The young violinist couldn’t have been any older than fifteen, and her mother proudly informed their sales person that she had been playing for eleven years. They took a handful of fine instruments into one of the rooms off the main lobby where we all heard the daughter begin to rip through Mendelssohn at tremendous speed.
Once, in a fit of teenaged passion, I sold the possession most dear to me to buy my first car.
That’s right, some lucky person paid pennies on the pegboard for my precious fiddle and bow, and I, being eighteen and desperate for freedom, hardly thought twice about it.
What I did think about was this: I didn’t want to be the well-behaved repressed violinist anymore. I didn’t want to push anymore toward some unattainable standard of musical excellence, and I really didn’t want to keep falling short. I wanted road trips and nights out with friends that bled into endless dawns. Gas pumps and freeways and gear shifts. I wanted my great wild beyond.
This person I thought up
This person I am
is becoming something else
entirely
The bath she fills
drop by drop
and the crumbs on the table,
new foundlings
Patterns assemble
but less fixed
more space in
the kaleidoscope’s eye,
grounding
Days are songs
their verses come hither
and loving,
alone in the bath
is ecstatic drowning
I just got off the phone with a friend who is going through an Enormous Life Event. It’s one of those rites of passage most of us will experience—the passing of a parent—with all its attendant emotions, requirements, and mind-splattering world alterations. In short, it’s an effing lot.
