What is wanting, anyway?
There’s an off-the-shelf version that I know about,
but it feels like getting suckered.
A trick or a game where I declare/
declaim/ pronounce/ et cetera/
some little pageant for my ego to strut around,
peacock feathers bouncing,
all the world looking on, clapping at just the right time
cooing you tell ‘em. You get it girl.
Because, you know, I can have it all
if I want it.
Maybe the specifics of my wanting
Are some deep secret I’ve kept from myself?
I mean, okay. I do want connection.
Empathy and decency given reciprocally.
So there’s a few things.
But, really? Those all seem like basic animal wantings.
Nothing particuarly unique there.
Just a layer of desires, normal, that sit upon my
basic animal needs.
Is that what wanting is: noticing animal stuff?
Or is that noticing just stripping bare
something that should’ve been bare the whole time?
Is there another word for what I’m pointing at?
I still don’t get it,
that goal-oriented/ peacocky/ off-the-shelf wanting.
It’s like how I often don’t understand frosting.
It is necessary?
The cake is already so sweet.
Let me tell you. True wanting seems to me
like a curiosity that seeks to witness the living images
as they arrive in front of us,
vital and holy, a surprise,
yet still completely familiar at the same time.
Once upon a time
I stood in Ben’s room in the basement of that filthy house in Wedgwood
(where we had jumped out of bed when the earthquake rattled Seattle,
the room with the softest navy blanket and the small desk in the corner).
That room where we were tripping and
in came Lowell, not tripping, like some Viking god, proud.
He gripped my hair in his fist,
yanked my head back and exposed my throat,
commanded me to kneel.
Ok, really he just stood there and ignored me while he talked to Ben.
Later he walked out of the room forever (though
I did see him by chance in a magazine twenty years later, just human),
but now and then I still remember him.
Well, no. Actually
I remember that slowed-down moment
where he glowed with power
and I wanted to bow to him.
Did the Viking god within me rise up in that moment?
(Is that ridiculous?)
But really, how else could I have recognized such force?
And furthermore, that riveting power, even if it lives within me—
can I ever even own such a thing?
It just felt so vast, so arresting.
Does it instead belong to the commons that I come from and return back to?
Maybe you’re thinking I was just susceptible to some tall guy with doe eyes
who knew how to stand with his shoulders back.
Sure.
I guess that’s probably part of it.
But not all of it.
Here’s how I see the rest of the story:
that evening, that moment, he became a god and I remained mortal.
For I, too, have also been a god.
These things ebb and flow.
At times we channel divinity from some ancient, dark well
and other times we live small and scared, half-full of actual shit.
(Projections, or: both and neither)
Defend the nest, defend the next.
Some 80s secretary-isms that hit real right now:
Emerald shoots, emerald city.
I’ve been thinking about spiritual practices, and about my strictly secular upbringing.
Also, I had an experience that felt like privilege and I cherished being in the fold of it.
Here’s that experience: I rode my bike freely and with ease across town and then through the arboretum, into a showcase of early-blooming pinkish trees covered in petals the texture of which seemed to come from a range ragged-edged brushes. It was a sunny day with a hint of that heady, biting, raw spring wind. I felt comfortable, warm enough but exposed how I like to be.
Later, entirely alone (even though I rode the edge of a densely populated neighborhood), I wound up and then down a steep hillside covered in ferns and alder and a scattering of fancy houses. Endorphins behind my eyelids, icy air licking down my neck…racing through the cold shade, I wove back and forth across the empty road and howled like a wolf because everything felt so fucking good.
Why tell this? (This old question, this never-answerable, suspicious question.)
This could’ve been a sort-of haiku, right? Why carry on so long?
I don’t know why. Or maybe I do.
I suspect that later, days after I’ve written this and I come back to re-read, I’ll cringe and think what ass I seem like for sharing such blushingly earnest able-bodied, safe-environment things in the midst of the confusing and often violent politics of public sharing.
But, okay. Here I go anyway: from here, right now, I guess privilege and gratitude cross paths sometimes and those moments feel like prayer or holiness and I’m moving in the thick of it all. In my body, wrapped in cold air like it’s heaven. I’m here. I’m also miserable sometimes, and don’t know how to live, not really, not as well I wish I did. I feel angry and bereft and lost and I overshare when I’m excited and then retreat in shame: it’s the new moon and full moon, the day and the night, and why can’t I praise both?
*
Post-script note. Dark, warm feelings of being seen on the non-verbal plane: Anthem for No State, Pts. I - III, Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
I wake and cannot remember my dreams.*
If I allow a bit of space and time, though, an image usually bursts up through the surface of that still water which separates my waking and sleeping life.
Perhaps it’s Charon ferrying a burnt bone the wrong way across the Acheron: he brings it up to me, a prophecy of what is only known, at least right now, in the House of Hades.
*Last night, the prophecy spoke of eating dinner with friends from high school in an industrial kitchen while working with great focus and seriousness on a particular, tight top knot (of my hair). The trick, it seemed, was in snapping my fingers correctly to get the magic of the bun to set into place.
Praise and admiration to the dazzling James Hillman, and to his The Dream and the Underworld.
A softness of petals opens. The wind blows.
I worried last time that I’d quit. And you know what? I did.
But then I didn’t.
I had passed to me again Rilke’s poem that says I circle around God, around the primordial tower / I’ve been circling for thousands of years, and I remembered that sometimes what looks like quitting is just meaningfully resting, or doing something else.
And just so you know, I had coffee when I woke up today.
Edit: let me share this whole sweet thing so that you also might consider your circlings.
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I will give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
Rainer Maria Rilke
The eagle has her nest in the bare trees. Rain falls.
Today, again and like most days, I had coffee when I woke up. I peed first, though. Then I thought about making toast but I didn’t.
I thought again about finishing things, how I’m afraid I won’t do it. I’ve quit lots of times. I worry that I am a type, that I have a pattern. How I’ll just get distracted, or disgusted, or enamored with some new fancy.
Like here, with this little experiment I’m beginning. Will I quit in shame and confusion, because I am sharing mundane life details shoulder-to-shoulder with my various inner voices?
I fear that I will. This fear shares space in me.
The spider, the leaves, the circling North wind, the rain and the quarrel of sparrows: all return to their sources.
Jamie and I took River to school. It was cold and humid in the car. I wiped condensation off the rearview mirror on my side so Jamie could see out. He did the same on the driver’s side.
Later, driving home, we talked a little bit about how it might be nice to go to Hawaii, and I again said that I really wanted to spend a month in Rome investigating ruins and thinking about myths. Jamie said he wants to go outside more and I said, gesturing towards the buildings we drove past, “the outside is right there, just open the door.” He didn’t reply, because I’ve said that a lot of times and I think he’s sick of hearing that, and that’s not really what he means, anyway.
The spider, the leaves, the circling North wind, the rain and the quarrel of sparrows: all return to their sources.
Soft winter rain
Clings to my body—
What a marvel.
No moon/new moon:
A day is half dark, after all, like us.
What power fear has
The eagle has her nest in the bare trees. Rain falls.
The sky of the plains—
vast and close, a lightning dome.
Fear, my steady friend.
Gutter with fall leaves,
winter’s endless rainwater,
and a cast-off mask.
“D.M., the wife of the chief of staff,
was spotted carrying out a stuffed pheasant from her husband’s office
and loading it into her car.”
— CNN
What a vast nation.
Mostly it’s a nightmare that
I can’t quite recall.
Shortest days. Is the light on the inside?
I am my mother’s daughter
I am my father’s son;
my brother hews a stack of sticks
and gives my sister none.
I sit and knit and count the days:
one and one and one
Each breath is new, yet
Nothing known to me is new.
Waves slide on the sand.
Shortest days. Is the light on the inside?
Done. Wring the rag and
drape it on the bucket’s edge.
What work is next?
The spider, the leaves, the circling North wind, the rain and the quarrel of sparrows: all return to their sources.
The vast gray outside,
much like the vast gray within:
a tangle. Not simple.
A touch and a touch;
another and another.
An endless drip at the door.
The earth may shake us,
Though typically it will not.
Why wait for tremors?
Shortest days. Is the light on the inside?
a fulfilling long term vision always looked fuzzy. now some real-life new experiments may be in order.
there’s abundance on many counts here, though: look at its external and internal benefits. see its lessons! enjoy it, even.
but think on this: is the abundance really that? or is it also a trap you’re stuck in?
body says
let’s change our environment so we can change our outputs
but mind says
please visualize the future vividly before drastic changes
and the spirit says
the higher road can be a harder walk. Slow down.
When the eagles are overhead,
you wanna watch the water extra closely.
The steelhead swim upstream.
The spider, the leaves, the circling North wind, the rain and the quarrel of sparrows: all return to their sources.
thesis
move on with kindness
antithesis
but move towards where?
conclusion
follow your intuition
subconsciousness says
movement is important. keep moving.
consciousness says
focus on the destination you want, not on the one you don’t want.
superconsciousness says
there is joy is using what you have to create what you need.
Leaves cure into red, and between their branches webs quiver.
a little bedding
but otherwise just rats
in the rat’s nest.
as fall advances,
squirrel moves quickly.
the trees tremble!
Two men slurp tea.
The crow shifts to preen
upon the wire.
All night long
At rim of the canyon
The mouse shivers.
The heron fishes.
I see, or do not see.
She carries on.
Fresh, sharp air and heavy sunlight polish the final labors of summer.
beneath the small fruit
sparring sparrows twist and flash—
hard to say who wins.
sticker bushes, and
a golden autumn day:
perfection, it seems.
the moon, they and I
we both move widdershins
a sinistra
what’s next?
the sun or the moon—
simple.
rowdy children,
social time, then sleep:
a simmering glow
night rain,
the weight of a work day:
inertia.
how to show
a ranging set of thoughts—
the world, compressed.