it is beautiful to be able to sit naked on a sunday night with a cocktail and a favorite book. i haven't read poetry in so long it seems. it is a life-blood that returns to me. i flipped open Ariana Reines's THE COW and read the first poem that my eyes happened to find. of course, it is the perfect fit:
that last line, the refrain, is such a brutal chime. an ache that rings through me in a language i understand... a need i understand.
to be fully oneself. to be honest. to be unafraid of the ugly. to be unafraid of becoming ugly. to be afraid but to move forward anyway. to be lost and uncertain and choose to see it as Freedom. to be able to create a well of courage and move, finally, like a king.
it has been a week of sleeping on ice packs and trying my hardest not to let negativity take hold. finally, this afternoon i was able to pace slowly back and forth down my hallway without appearing feeble and deformed. my disk in finally slipping back in to place. i haven't taken pain meds in days and am finally on the mend. and i promise you, recovery cannot come speedily enough. cabin fever is a motherfucker. i loathe laying around in general and this week of being confined to bed nearly made me cry. i love solitude but only after exercising my love for being out in the world, in the surge and throng, in the heat of work and play and exploration. even boredom is better outdoors than when locked away in the room at the back of the house. it has been total agony in more ways than one. it's one thing to lay around out of sheer laziness or exhaustion; it's an entirely different thing to be confined to bed due to such severe physical pain. the pain itself makes one depressed. the fact that it seems unending. the fact that one can look back over the course of a week and still not be healed. the fact that one must sit and deal with the fact of the fragility of their own body... how easily it can be broken... how easily it can become a cage.
still, there is always a value. i've made a pile of yarn bombs to drop the second i can get out of the house and resume my artistic adventures. i long for the wide open expanse of dark city streets in the middle of the night. i long for the glow of street lamps and the headlights of cars cruising slowly by. it has been such a practice of patience and endurance to withstand this stillness, this degree of physical inability. it breeds compassion, that's for sure, as well as providing one with the somewhat uncomfortable opportunity to perform a deeper self-investigation than one might have undertaken otherwise. i haven't been able to run my fears away or burn my sadness down with work and excersize. i've been forced to sit here with them. i've been forced to sit and look at my ghosts. i've had no choice but to recognize when my feelings were dramatic and unwarranted, based purely in the pain of my situation, and when they were a normal, natural outcropping of a hurtful event. i have filled so many pages in my diary and am coming face to face with the core of my needs, the remainder of my naivety, the necessity to emerge from this site of safe repose (once able) and rush again toward the life that is waiting for me in the ecstatic hustle of art. i am newly aware of a bevy of mistakes i've made and i aim to repeat not a one.
i think of Simone Weil. i try to obey her. i try to not struggle against my suffering but to endure it passively, to let in polish me, to allow it to create a new beauty within me. it is a hard task. an exercise in endurance and the ability to tolerate anguish without becoming bitter.
i need to discover a new definition of the word LOVE.
i need to make room for the creation of a new face for GOD.
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