#flowwriting

I’m thinking of a man. An old family friend. He lived by the bay and fished in its inky waters. A paraplegic, he made things that should be hard seem easy. I sat on his lap as he wheeled me around the landing. His trailer was alive with cats; they’d move, and jump, and slink. You would hear them like the creaking of breathing walls. He’d share with me the lures he used while fishing; the rubbery squid that became iridescent and glittered under water. They were homed in a shed under his trailer, a space too scary for me to enter, but he shimmied himself down and reemerged from the dark with the treasured lures.

I’m thinking of a frog. One that would often climb into the hot tub and stay under the lid; warm and wet in the winter. And when you took off the lid to get in, there was a frog, a surprise, a treasure.

I’m thinking of a rafting trip in Oregon when I was very young. As we went along in calmer water, the sun on ripples would cast reflective, eely shapes of light on the river bed. An older sister would tease and say they were snakes and if I touched the bottom they would bite me. All I wanted was to be in water.

What then? What am I supposed to do with these memories, and the metaphors I’ve made to connect them to how I am feeling? Why would my brain create such a puzzle? Wouldn’t you imagine as a soul controller and the root of all my feelings and desires it would err towards happiness and calm at all means necessary? There is good and evil in every cell that connects me to myself. Why am I still fighting in the dark? Why am I abandoned to fight internally eternally? Is this the only way to make heaven real or better than the corporeal? I will make this eternally mine. Would you live it again? Absolutely, over and over.

I am thinking of Becca. What happened? Where has she gone and to what dark place did she emerge? Where is that place, is it a hole that is scary but holds treasure that glitters in the deep, beneath the water? Our holes – it’s not about what we are missing, but the darkness we turn around and Spin to gold.

I am Spinning upside down into gold as the candlelight flickers past my eye lids and activates the cones and rods that hold a place in my brain for you.

Guilded webs, sparkle in the morning and through the austere, leafless branches I catch a glimpse of the honey that touched the height of the sky and falls each night. What a fortunate fall, as milky light brings back the web weaver to perfectly cast what art she can string together. What she has Spun is left to be seen only as she sleeps in the light. An over-correction at each thatched end.

The sea is still in my lungs. I try to cough it out but it is salty at each release. Maybe I need to swim in fresher waters. Who could say if that was safer?  I sleep in the tumbling embrace of a waterfall, and through the invisible bruises from falling water, I am washed with newness. Fuller transience and a sloppy life eventually lived in perfection, as I realize this is what I have. How do I tumble further and maybe softer, live beneath my breaths. Quieter, loftier, and with intent. A gentle breeze heaves and extends the room, and I shrink. Maybe Spinning upside down is falling into falling water, escaping what feels the same in the air and the space between the sky. Living in transience but slower.

Eddies of brilliant light flashed from leaf-litter and a diaphanous coat of the liquid-air interface. The perfect cast and the slip of the line underneath. The web, slipping under with effortless grace, glittered with bubbles, forever in water.

Eternally living this - it isn’t an answer to the questions that plague us, but a philosophy and a way to experience life. This life, as if you would live it over and over. To appreciate the suffering and joy as necessary on the path of what is. And if you collapse the aspect of time in your life into a single point, that is all you are. Orbiting and recurring, as seen in nature; in the day and the night, the repetition of seasons, the dream and wake state.

You Spin into your dream, awake. Time is meaningless and edges don’t exist - this is a part of that collapsed time, this is all of that collapsed time. This is the negative side some might say, but really, it is just the other side of The Spin. And if you can catch control of The Spin, meditate on nothing but Spinning and when the Spinning stops. And then, almost immediately, you are caught in the dream.

I am looking up from the dark behind me at the reflective ripples on the surface. I am falling and feeling quiet and heavy. A hand reaches out and I am lifted into cold air and shards of ice.

Did you notice who was under? What lurked or loved from beneath? And how the mumbled sentences under water are like talking into an empty bottle and hearing only the attempt at words.

You build up the courage to grab one of the luminous eels only to realize that the sand and rocks that you were able to surface want to fall away and give themselves to gravity. It all falls away and you are left with you - each side of you in The Spin. Let yourself get used to the side of you that you hate only because you aren’t used to looking at it. Familiarity is comfort not love, and I am being pushed away - or are we pushing each other away? Each side of The Spin, pushing the other?