Waking Up The Bones

Sometimes it takes losing your footing completely in order to find your way forward.  Sometimes you have to lose a lot of things to find out how much you have.  Sometimes you have to let go of everything, of all the strings you're keeping count of on your fingers and toes.  You have to stop pacing the floor or asking when you're going to get there.  You have to be willing to strip down to essentials and take what's coming.  Something's always coming.

It is incredible how much healing can come out of disasters, disappointments, and unintentional detours.  It's amazing how much color you can find in winter.  What you're looking for is probably right in front of you and you just stopped seeing.

This is a wonderfully tempestuous May.  There is such an intense purposefulness in the air and I am surprised to find myself returning to abandoned or forgotten parts of myself.  I didn't lose track of myself because of my marriage or my child.  I never lose myself for or in other people, my sense of self is much too rugged for that.  I lost track of parts of myself, old music, old hunger, old ambitions, because I lost faith in myself.

Today I cut some branches of my Japanese Snowball tree to arrange in vases and while I felt the color with my eyes and tasted it with my fingers I listened to Beethoven really loud on the stereo.  I folded laundry, did some dishes, and then I began to cook dinner for later.  I foraged dandelion greens for our pasta dinner.  I fed my hens scraps and then threw what wasn't good for them in the compost. 

It may sound unimportant to others.  This is hardly an exciting day.  Once I finished all that I put in six hours of work for my paying job and here I am at 11pm not having done anything particularly earth shattering yet it was a wonderful day for me.

It's the return of a daily rhythm that is restoring me to myself.  Doing activities that help reduce my panic.  Listening to music that helps me breath more deeply; music that I was passionate about when I was a child obsessed with Bach and Mozart.  A friend told me that I was going to need to do some deep healing in my life.  That very old pain might have to be dealt with in order to move on and find some peace.

I am seeing the truth in this.  Part of it is in the writing epiphanies I've been having in the last week- that it's time to work towards overcoming some big writing hurdles I have so that I can write whatever the hell it is I'm supposed to write.  I know I'm not yet good enough to do what I need to do.  I'm even beginning to see what that is.  It's all filmy shapes coming out of a great sleep, but every day it is becoming more clear.  The answers are beginning to lose their layers of camouflage.

It's all connected. 

Listening to classical music again has been making me hungry for more and more of it because  with each composer or piece I rediscover it's like digging the dead selves of my youth out of the nameless trenches where they were buried in desperation.  I am realizing that there are bones to give proper burials to and passions to be reclaimed. 

It started this week when I heard mention of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" and I suddenly had to hear it.  Right now.  I got myself a copy of Beethoven's greatest hits and listened to nothing but that one piece for three days.  Over and over and over and over.  It's intoxicating to me. 

Listening to it woke up the bones.

There is no easy or fast road.  At least not for me.  Today I felt healing coming through the fissures of the past.  So I've decided not to be afraid of what may be revealed because whatever comes up can be released into the ozone, like everything else.

It's a good month for coming back to the beginning and rewriting dreams.



I happened to read this old post which seems so much more poignant to me now and which proves that I am clairvoyant.  Or at least a little bit consistent:

What I Learned From Gertrude Stein