Category: faith

notes on suspension

in limbo

Sometimes you hear something that sounds  like the thing you always wanted to be true,  and you wish you could fold the words of it inside you and nurse them into full release, winged and alive, even when they land with the weight of the dead. You wonder at the animation of  the severed appendage that does not know it yet.

A lifetime student in the practice of devotion makes me disposed toward believing against what some would call my better judgement. The weakness comes from being honed toward reframing the unseen, from nothing and just an illusion by a lens bent on recognizing both as possible sites of some becoming still dark. This tendency has invited a great deal of trouble. I still don’t know what it all means. I suspect I won’t, ever.

How often I might have died by the hand of who I thought might yet live. This when the vessel by all accounts (including several often-repeated sentences), seemed bent on killing me. I am frightened, looking back, to accept how little this frightened me. I wanted only what I always wanted which was to heal the wound of severance from her origin, but I had misunderstood the equation. I remembered only part of the delivery, and repeated its final words. Take this body, I thought, and meant it, meaning to emulate the prayer I most revered. I give it up to you.  I did not think any further, about my rights in what I gave and to whom, and my responsibilities for getting both right. I thought if I could get the giving part over with, I might be saved. I was profoundly wrong. Even the self-professed sufferers, it turns out, want the easy route––[strike that/ rephrase to avoid diluting responsibility]. I thought if I could just find a way to give it all away, the rest would follow.  Awareness of this leaves me poised to accept that in any given moment, I may be profoundly wrong. A fact that either aggravates or sustains the situation. I am not sure that I will ever, in my current form, be able to tell which. 

Giving it all away is one thing. Being careful about how and when is another. To be human is to be suspended in constant limbo until death, between the not-yet, the undead, and those other, transcendent states. So am I.

lump

of clay

You go around putting on the necessary faces at the appropriate times, hiding the other mess in the back spaces of any given place or moment. In conversation you might allude in an offhand manner to the messes waiting in the wings but you know not to break certain taboos. One of these being an admission that you live entirely in the wings, just flying around in the shadows keeping company with the discarded stuff that has always been your kind. 

Then you are going about the motions of your seemingly appropriate life and then there is this urgent material flopping over and beyond the edges of every shut closet door, every drawer. One day, during a vigorous cleaning, you decide to collect the stuff. You throw out lots of things, but this stuff is something else, you set it aside. It waits, being regularly looked at, appearing to pose a question about handling. 

Yes, you tell it. Yes. I hear you.  Maybe it hears you, maybe not. You touch it. It holds the indent of your finger. It holds space, a malleable and formless lump. One moment it is magnificent in its strangeness, luminous in soft light, and another moment it looks like something a dog left on the sidewalk, and you wonder who does this?

One day, you pose  a series of related partial questions to the lump. Will you? And pull. Reveal to me? Knead. Something? And you spend time just holding the cool, lumpy mass of it in a hand, warming. 

Its formlessness is part of the appeal, and so is its willingness to bend to any form but precisely.

You handle it. Set it down. It now has a spot on the bedside table, beside the lamp, the pile of books, the coffee cup. The cat approaches, sniffs it, turns, sits beside the lump, then moves away.

Will you? You ask the lump. Show me? You mean your whole life but are embarrassed to say this aloud. You are not yet ready to admit to yourself what you are hearing when the lump whispers back.

You are sleeping, dreaming, or otherwise away when it talks. The cat, who listens with more experience and a more advanced sense of time and purpose,  gives you a pointed look when you return. You carry on, leaving, prodding, kneading, arranging, and setting it down. Then you sleep. 

Here I am, the lump whispers while you dream. Your whole life.

to find them

who live beyond measure

If children are disappearing it does not seem like a stretch to wonder if some have decided that there is no place for them here. Most of us are made of something that does not innately know its place & must be welcomed into being.

Let’s do more of that & more to read them, and more conversing with—and much less of the poking, prodding, scrutinizing “temperature checks” that are supposed to pass for paying attention to their needs & wondering why they look away.

sapere

whale music

to know
to be able to
to taste
to feel
only this how
i am because we are
& need know only this
& how machine will disagree
does not make it less true
but only more like the living
and less like the thing
whose badge of being
is of efficiency
& departure from
the dirt & blood
& flow of living
earth as she
remains
still
here
an offering
beyond product
or production
in echo
beyond
any other sound
however loud however
bleeding it leaves us in our ears
where we swim deep underwater & still here & here & here to hear us––
tho bleeding it leaves us in our ears however loud
however any other sound beyond in echo
still our offering here remaining
in dirt & bloodied waters
beneath you

what even is

this place at this time

maybe it’s a story about being a body in this world
in an age of destruction on the verge of
remembering her collective life
despite the current bluster
i cannot be alone
in having have felt it creeping all of mine
while regularly and inexplicably injured
by the force worked so aggressively to stifle
that still, small voice that has always been
all i ever wanted to hear until nodding
in response to this thing
David Wagoner wrote, which I paraphrase
regularly in my thoughts
as Here is the place where you are,
and you must treat it like
a powerful stranger.
so here we go again––


Hello, strange stranger, you are
all of us now, and i can’t keep from
dreaming some possible arrival
even here
even now

to present yourself

ideas for an educational panel of inquiry

Here’s a talk i am going to give
in theory anyway called
teach like an animal
& its genesis is in understanding
that i failed in my intention
of becoming someone who
knew things well enough
to tell them with authority
the more i look the more
convinced i become that
there is a lie at the center
of the whole idea of knowing
and it is congenital with the myth
of the preeminence of self, and
i want my panel to include
shapeshifting nature &
the pride of ancestors refusing
to be erased, whose voices echo
in the shimmering electric currents
coursing though the cells which
make my body of my mother’s
and the mothers before her.

I grew up reading a single
line about an all-knowing God
on loop, and even this God
said only i am that i am
in response to demands for
explanation but knew how to
show up–for the stutterers
and the dispossessed, the wretched
and the women, who consistently
challenged the important somebodies
when asked for announcements, when
asked to show face, who turned to sashay
away revealing only the back parts
in graceful admonishment of the
asking mouth’s presumption
of being filled in a single
gulp of word and then
done.

phalanx

in flight

Hello, i
am still here
flying through sky
into riverbed, into body in river
in bed into ocean ––either way
disinclined to make points, only pointing,
ever to erosion and becoming and I tend
to erode the best intentions of anyone who tries
to name me as a fixed point & sometimes when
i take this skin shirt out for air i am reminded
to dress in layers after going into places
where so many are so eager to use
their ready points as points
of contact when these
only make me bleed
& then I am back
to being current––
again

yes but

questions of direction

how do i go?

only by revelation
only behind a veil
only through a glass, darkly
only by messenger
only dream vision
only the back parts,
sashaying away
with a wink
reminding
not to forget

not
to forget
is there anyone
who will remember?

turn it over
and turn it again
for everything is in it
this is how you teach
a stone to talk you listen
to the river that smoothed
it
& hold

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