Categories
Brief Journal

Curiosity Searches for Signs of Life

I like rocks and trinkets as tangible moments. It feels like being an archaeologist of the future who got to travel back to the past they’ve pondered. When seeing a mother tying her child’s shoe at the grocery store feels as reverent as watching a mother stitch a shoe since found in excavation.
What was important to them then? = What is important to me now?

I haven’t picked up a rock in a good bit – how do you choose a stone when your feet feel ungrounded? What is tangible in a state of intangibility?
I don’t know

I guess I ought to go digging for more treasured moments even when the site feels barren, section by section with patience and determination – certainty that something is to be found even when unsure what I’m looking for.

A reminder: that I like this.

Categories
Brief Journal

The poem you don’t remember

Categories
Journal Shorts

Soft

There’s a poem in a notebook somewhere that asks what edgy means.

When words came down it was of being broken, shattered, that sharp wit cutting even the fingers that hold it.

I want to ride the tumble, be bathed in the salt and accumulation of you until we wash to shore together.

Bright in the sun, smooth for her edges, still the shape that makes me

made softer by you.

Categories
Journal Shorts

I had a daydream

that sat me in a room I want to be in. It showed me every sense, the shape and color of me, action that feels right to me.

I won’t tell it here because I’ll show you one day. But the important thing was that it ended with :

Everything I see is love + people + moments + things and I catch it all in curiosity.

Categories
Journal Shorts

Round up!

Call to orders, let’s be civil folks
What do you need beside the obvious,
The oblivious
The mindless and the meek

What are you doing!
Why aren’t you moving get going
Just to seek

(I wrote this some time ago, it matters to me now)

Categories
Journal Shorts

The Weight of a Footfall

What is it to feel the weight of your footfall? To feel gravity pulling at your legs. What does it mean?

It means good traction and steady strides. What does it mean to know that you’re here? It means to have such sensitivity down to your toes of the ground you’re walking on. Can feel the stones and the softness of grass, you can feel just as much as you can hear the pricks of bushes and twigs.

He said this is your map, unmarked. This is the mountain you’ll figure how to meet, how to get which way you’re going and what you want to see. This here is the path before you, tan and vague in the earth instead of red on paper. We pivot away from what we notate but always going some way, seeing something, feeling something and that’s pretty good. You can see your way around the bushes that your feet feel the twigs of beneath each time your foot falls. I am stuck to them, adhered to this place by the math of it all.

This is the spot where my foot falls. I am the only one to step in these places. Even when you step in the footprints of somebody else it’s still a little different. Different size, different texture slightly off kilter, a little to the left or forward. My stride is different than theirs. Repeated over and over. Even when I write with my same handwriting over and over and over and can trace it so well, it’s always a little different every time. Some days it’s languid some days stark. Sometimes it’s a slow carry, even a crawl. Sometimes my feet don’t move at all and I sit down. In the sunlight or the shade I don’t know, you’re always wanting the opposite of whatever there’s the most of. Some days quick pace some days long strides, long hauls. Long languid footprints scuff at the heel – I felt that. Weight on my toes I feel that.

I thank God I can see the path between bushes. I thank Her more I can feel it by the weight in my toes. I thank God for being able to let me trace my finger over a map and feet up a mountain.

I think that this is here in front of me. I think this is hard. I somehow don’t think it’s Her fault. The terrain was made for life, not just me. She gave me a map to help me navigate. This here is for me to see and feel and meet in whatever way I do and She hopes for me I survive and thrive amidst it all on the path I find, not one made. It is not mine to ask her to pave just for me so I don’t have to think about where my foot falls. But why? Would I really want that anyway? Why not step even if in brambles, for better views. I can build strength and stamina through the weight of each footfall.

Categories
Brief Journal

Snake Pants

Somewhere I shed that dry skin of inferiority
Realized I had fangs, a tail that moved me better than a body
I wonder if I’re to meet a bear
A beast of fur and size
Would I forget
I’m no longer bound by the skin I wore before

Over dirt between the boulders
I am cunning and I am sly
It is not feet on the ground or how many feet above
I tower in my means
My strength, if not my hands

Categories
Brief Journal

My Chrysalis + Me

Usually when the caterpillar pupates it leaves the chrysalis behind
But I kept it, thought it’d look cute as a mantle piece

Sometimes I crawl inside
snug and warm

Usually when the caterpillar pupates it leaves the chrysalis behind
I found a new use and old comfort in a new place and space

It looks good there in my new home
The chrysalis others leave behind

Categories
Brief Journal

Is this my diary?

Now, when I say I don’t want to be here, I mean
Here

When I say I don’t know the way out, I’m asking for
Help
Admitting there is a way, I just don’t know it
yet

When I’m spinning in circles I’m searching for a
door,
a ladder,
a window or a
whirlwind to catch me upwards

When I imagine my
escape
I picture friends in all
black
repelling down in the morning

My greatest adventures have been avoiding
the mortal peril
of moral anguish

Categories
Journal

George and I

There was a spider living on my trash can, I called him George. I didn’t move him because technically I was outside in his home and even at that this was his address before it was mine. So I left him. But today, 2 weeks+ in and I’ve been apologizing to a spider for the inconvenience every time I open the lid. So I’ve been trying to limit my trash consumption – for the environment, I say, but we both know it’s for George. And I’m not scared of him I swear even if I don’t like the feel of his tickley feet on my head I also know I’ll be fine. It’s just my aversion to tickling. I appreciate spiders really, since I learned their value rather than focusing on a body I find strange. They keep the bugs away. Centurions standing guard around the perimeter of my kingdom, but not assassins, just nature. And I am a part of it.

It was trash day today though; I missed the pickup because I didn’t want to disrupt George but really I was chicken. Now it was morning and time to clean up yesterday and start today and that meant taking out the trash. And the gardeners came this morning with their leaf blowers and did what I couldn’t get up the courage over whatever it was to yield my broom in the same fashion and tear down his home. But they did. So I took out the trash.

I wasn’t sure if he made the ride, I supposed it didn’t matter either way so I didn’t look. After the ants settled down and I knew I’d made the right choice to do the thing I didn’t want to I thanked myself for getting up today. If I can get up and do just one thing a day I am proud. Now whether that’s a method of productivity or just how I stay alive is as clear as the terms of my relationship with George. George was maybe the one hanging on to the bottom of the can when I brought it to the curbside where I left him. Because as courteous as I like to be I have learned the value in doing what you have to. So I evicted him.

It’s for the best really, he’ll get to see more of the world, so much more than he’s experienced before from his perch over my trash lid. He’s off on new adventures. Of course that’s not how spiders think, they just do what they have to to stay alive.

I like to think the bugs around the dumpster are ripe for the picking, he’ll have a feast, if that’s to his taste. Of course there’s the chance he gets run over, stepped on or moves into the garage of a neighbor who isn’t so accepting of squatters. Granted at that point he’s inside and he’s supposed to be out. Then again Tony lives beneath my toilet and has yet to be thrown out so who knows, it’s a wild world out there. We’re all just doing our best to get by.