Slept in

I slept in. Rested. A meme told me recently something about when you go through the experience of releasing long held tensions you will find yourself in need of sleep. Lots of it. Does that explain the last (how many now?) years? A hummingbird was perched on a branch outside the slider watching and waiting for me to refill the feeders. It was very still and seemed to have been waiting long. The feeders were emptied a few days ago. Sugar water for them and spinach, mushrooms, tomatoes and eggs for me. They look good together in the frying pan. As I'm watching the eggs firm, I'm thinking of a friend far away, a still young and beautiful woman, who told me she's never spooned. The outside air feels cooler when I put the feeders out. The leaves on the oaks behind the house are thinner and tarnishing. I make a list of neglected tasks. Dry. Dull. As a younger man, you think, the two of you would melt together and sleep the quiet morning away, skin to skin, in a beautiful peace. 

Heart shaped

Open your heart, she said

And you thought you'd already done so

But she showed you there was one inside another,

inside another, inside another, inside another...

And even now they are still 

Opening 

Thanks for that, Subconscious

I was waiting on the sidewalk for the foreigners in the strange small car and colorful clothing to park along the curb. There was a man driving and he was backing up. I think it was on the campus of UMass Amherst. The car hit the curb and rolled over onto its side. Everyone in the vicinity just stared. I had the idea to try to tip the car back over onto it's wheels - it was small and light - but by the time I got there people were coming out through the space where the windshield had been. Dark skinned older women in colorful ethnic dress. My impulse was to help them. By the time I overcame the strange inertia I was feeling, the car had become a large van filled with kids. The back of the van was packed with pre-pubescent boys in soccer uniforms. Overfilled. The boys did not want to come out and just stared blankly out beyond me. People started lining up on both sides of the van to buy ice cream which was apparently being sold through side windows. 

Autumnal

Driving through the woods this morning I noticed it advancing in the shape of browning ferns and the first fallen colored leaves. I can feel you leaving me. The beginning of a gradual turning away. The edges of my own primordial wound started to ache. 

Autumn is a reminder of abandonment with its deep-in-the-marrow perpetual sorrow. You could say that it's my core trauma or the essential tear in my fabric. That which the scar tissue of my personality has formed over. 

It's the shadow cast over every relationship I've entered into and fallen out of. It's the sickness I've come to this world to heal.

Flat to fit

Thank you, depression, for getting up off my neck. The way you lifted was nearly imperceptible. I guess I realized you were gone one day when I noticed that I was three dimensional again after having been flat for so long. 

Affirmative

The second presentation went better than the first, but I still procrastinated right up until the day of to prepare. That is becoming less of a struggle as I progress. Affirmation.

Clearer

Yesterday was one of those days during which I did not accomplish the tasks I'd set out to do. I did get a lot of sleep however. I wondered why I was so tired and in so doing realized that I don't have that afternoon buzzy feeling in my head and sudden urgent need for sleep anymore. I called it brain fog back then and thought it was probably Covid related. It hung around for two or three years and then one day just stopped coming by. I hadn't even noticed. Thanks.

Allowing

Allow. That's a very good word. It's also a very good practice.

Cool night

An Autumn night arrives prematurely reminding me that heartbreak is wrapped up inside even my favorite season. The creamy center. I slept well under a sheet and the bedspread. No need for a fan. Fairly low humidity. I opened the slider and had to close it around 1 AM. The coolness of the sheets. And the ghost of a memory of firm warm softness beside me. There seems to always be something sharp-edged or pointed or barbed in here with me now instead. 

New

New, I said, and then stepped off unencumbered.

Home again a little altered

Portland is an interesting city and Maine was pretty good to me. I forgot to purchase one of those souvenir balsam pillows though. They've been a summer tourist staple for at least a hundred years and they smell like history to me. Maine was good, and therapy was therapeutic. My advice regarding therapy is this - no matter what your age, it's not too late to begin. Do it. 

Portland

Portland, Maine for a few days. Therapy of sorts. Better late than never.

Revisiting

Driving through the most forested area of Massachusetts to and from work each day. Yesterday I stopped  and walked down a trail through a research forest managed by Harvard University. So quiet and restorative. My relationship with the woods has deepened over the past year. It's not good for me to stay away too long.

A message came through. An update. Beautiful, happy, healthy children. A good life. Contentment. I'm getting better too. I felt only happiness. No envy or jealousy. No pit yawned opened inside of me. The dynamic remains the same though. One holds the cards close and the other lets the whole hand show. 

Sleeper

I woke to the sound of the fan and for a moment thought that the great rains had begun. There was a feeling of awe and inevitability. A minute later,  I was back in the ordinary world putting the kettle on for my coffee.

G is for

Guilt. I hadn't considered that, but they were all loaded with it. Most of it was imaginary or not even theirs to begin with. But the weight was theirs alone. We are victims of victims.

Monday

A hint of Fall in the air the last couple of nights. Leaves starting to turn on some sumacs and maples. I want to get out into the woods again. Somehow that practice slipped away. Yesterday, my hands trembled as I worked with channeling energy. Heal yourself to heal the world. I'm thinking of my youngest now roadtripping to Montreal with his pal since first grade. Me and Soren, he'd said. Writing songs and eating chives. And just a minute after I typed that last sentence he texted. They're just sitting down to dinner in Chinatown. 

Out

It took a while to untangle myself and get going yesterday but in the afternoon I went outside. I got some sun and listened to an audio book about intergenerational trauma. I spent time with my bare feet upon the grass and thought about a girl whose mother didn't smile much and how the last time I saw that girl she didn't smile much either. The book's author said we're carrying the trauma and stress of three generations epigenetically. I sat for twenty minutes in something like a meditator's pose thinking about the harshness of my language toward myself, the impatience there. Thoughts and words have great power. I'm trying to use them, or to refrain from using them, more consciously. 

By evening, I thought maybe I'd go out to sing a song. I went to the local restaurant my upcoming high school reunion is going to be held at in November. The parking lot was full. It turned out karaoke was last night, not tonight. I was annoyed with myself and noticed the harsh words inside. I decided I'd stay to eat. The waitress sat me in the dining room. Before I'd made it to the table, I recalled coming here two or three times in the past 20 years and always finding the place depressing. 

There's something faded about it but it's not only that. There's this lack of character or a generic quality to it. It feels almost like a blank space to me. It's located in a white suburban town I've always thought of as "stuck up". The town also has that blank feeling. People look at you expecting to recognize you and when they don't they stare too long and that look is ignorant and annoying to me. It's a townie's expression. It makes me question why I live here. Makes me want to leave this place. I see a small, flat-roofed, adobe house in the desert of West Texas in my mind's eye. The bar side of the restaurant is crowded and loud. I see alcoholism, obesity, stagnation, constipation. I feel the air being squeezed out of me and an inability to inhale.

My thoughts and words go dark. The food is only "mid" as my twenty-something son says. The waiter is young and he keeps calling me boss with a sort of unearned familiarity. I finish and leave as soon as possible. 

Outside, the quarter moon is shining in the dark sky. I inhale the cooling night air noticing the sound of crickets. I feel better instantly. These are the things I'm living here for. Not the human portion of the world. I decided I wasn't going to that reunion. 

Recording

Hey...

So, I'm further from shore now. I'm deeper into space. Coming back doesn't seem like something I'm going to do. I think I'm just going to continue on. No, I'm definitely continuing on but I wanted to leave you this message first. 

I still love you - even from way out here. When I look out at all the stars around me, I cannot distinguish the way I came or which star among them you are anymore. I release you. And you are all around me.

Out here it's easier to do, letting go and loving at the same time. I don't sink. I arch, lay back in surrender, and something holds me. When I'm like this, loving is the most natural thing to do. You can't really help but do it. It just kind of flows. I wish I could show you how it is here but most of our experience, I've learned, we can only have alone. The experience of connecting, though, we can share.

Anyway, thank you for being. Thank you for smiling at me in this strange place.

Consider

Shorter days now. I'm driving two hours a day through the woods which is not too bad a way to do it if you have to commute. I feel myself sliding into that old routine of work and sleep with precious little else going on though. But I'm not hating my job or feeling like I'm working for the devil like I did in the last place. Tonight I was home before 7 PM and just wanted to crawl into bed. I've got opportunities to do other things. I think I ought to do them.

Group

It's been awhile since I've run one. On top of that, I've been living for at least a year, possibly eight, in my head mostly and not interacting with others of my species. It went well, I think. We went outside, did some grounding, made use of our senses, tried to be aware of what was going on in mind and body, then we talked about it. We joked about meatloaf. We thought about making a TikTok dedicated to reviewing institutional and restaurant meatloaves. It was an hour well spent.

Photo bomb

There was a poster board with a series of family photographs spanning 100 years. In one of them, I was a baby held by a man I can no longer remember except in images I've seen captured in other photographs. He was my father. In another photograph, a pretty woman was holding a baby boy (my first born son). I was standing behind her. She was my wife, and we were smiling then. I can no longer remember that either.

Family

My mother and two of my young adult children braved a trip to Maine in a sedan without air conditioning on a hot and muggy August day with me for a maternal side family reunion. My mother is one of seven children from a French-Canadian family. One sibling has passed away, one lives in the western part of the country, and five were present today. They produced a total of twenty-six children. I am one of those. Close to twenty of us, my siblings and cousins, showed up today. They're all good people. We got reacquainted, told some old stories, looked at photographs, and silently marveled at how our cousins had become their parents. There's a lot the old ones don't remember anymore. 

I thought about a family with all of its important milestones, all the tragedies, all the triumphs, all the remarkable moments along the way. And I thought about how we end up sitting in a chair smiling blankly not knowing the significance of the other smiling people gathered around. Understanding only that they are significant. 

Chewing on something

So much time spent in miserable thought. 

That was the eulogy at my funeral. I was dressed in a blue suit. My brow was furrowed but my face appeared restful and relieved to be out of this world of ordeal. 

Was this the world I created?

Thoughts are material. Thoughts are generative. Thoughts create reality. 

Someone said, you yourself created your entire experience in this world, and I was ready to fight him. 

I'm not that ugly, I thought. 

Am I?

I'm ugly but not so ugly as to manufacture all this suffering of innocents. 

Big picture, there are social and political and economic forces at work. They were here crushing life long before I was. The few haves with the power and privilege and the many have nots with the surplus pain and lack. 

It's more than just a mind game, I answer. Fuck you. 

Energy. Vibration. Do these of others not affect you? 

They do. 

And what about yours? How will you use them now?

W

I was dreaming. There was a higher power or source of wisdom that I was posing a question to. 

Is there a woman for my soul? 

It doesn't work that way was the response. You're not asking the right question.

Back to the world

An e-mail arrives telling me to save the date for my 40th class reunion. What?, I say. The alarm clock wakes me for the third day in a row, and I immediately feel some measure (not that much) of anxiety and muscle tension take hold. I've noticed that I slip into combat mode almost imperceptibly on the roads during my commute. People I've been encountering are annoying and/or boring and they don't know when to stop talking and I can't just walk away from them anymore. My hair is almost entirely white now. Lately, I've been seeing Facebook photos of some of my contemporaries and they appear suddenly older which, of course, means so do I. 

I left the world for more than a year and am in the process of returning now. Re-entry has its challenges.