i’m back.
renewed.
The door to the wild self is concealed by vines in the center of an abandoned warehouse holding the collected imaginings of what a mind has codified as worthy of being stored in perpetuity, which is another word for prison.
Holdings consist of far-fetched fallacies, arranged alphabetically and intended to bear the message of how one plunders time by writing the scripts of other people’s thoughts and feelings, by fashioning legal arguments of blame with Dickensian detail of points belabored and the blame so widespread that a virus crops up from the bad murk of it forming into zombies like the ones I avert my eyes from in The Walking Dead and The Last of Us.
I may not be able to look those freaks in the eye, but they are easy metaphors for that which can sap the life from me and keep me from pursuit of that vine-riddled door that holds behind it the wide open spaces of How Beauty Can Be Imagined by a human soul who has endured appointments with pain and fatigue and the slam of the brakes and the catch in the back that shows up like a slap in the face.
Then the story shifts to a catch in the throat at the memory of a slap I delivered to my daughter when she was 14, a slap delivered to me when I was not much older, a slap I imagine delivering to a tyrant mad with heart rot, a slap I delivered to myself, two cold hands against two lost cheeks needing a comeback — get yourself together, girl!
What happens next is to pull on my boots and head for a trail or a sidewalk or steps across sand where footprints never look the same way twice and the unevenness feels so true under my feet that i think of those souls who have traveled to the spirit world these past days, Andrea Gibson, Joanna Macy, joining forces with the ancestrals working toward compassionate reciprocity and hopefully some kick-ass moves that include a well-placed slap every now and then.
I may not ever be able to forgive myself for slapping my daughter in my play to be Mama Bear, but I can find some comfort in wishing that at the time I had access to better tools to manage our conflict.
And when I feel slapped by a world that is doing the best it can right now to keep itself together, I can pick up my heart and my sense of injustice and my feeling that things will never be the same again, and I can put on my sandals and go find a trail and lay myself down inside the burned-out shell of an old growth redwood and remind myself of all the ways that beauty can save us.
Today’s write arrived after this prompt:
The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
My new publishing schedule will keep me guessing.
