Sunday, November 27, 2011

rhythms

my life revolves around finding a beat that can pound me forward or hum me into peace.

my thoughts revolve around whether or not the rhythms i create are beats toward light, not a pulse that's making me numb.

and here i stand, 1 one-way flight and an outrageous adventure away from slaying all previous tempo & time from previous/current phases of life, about to create new rhythms and begin grooving to a new life, new perspective, new world.

i'm surprised by how restless i'm growing of my most recently released nannying/grocery shopping/grad school-applying beats. i'm surprised by how quickly i'm beginning to anticipate the unfamiliar, enticing beats of the world to the south. i'm excited to rock to the rhythms of harvesting/sowing/spanish-speaking, renewing the beats that i've grown with and remixing them to be fresh and life giving.

it'll be nice to stop worrying about the fruitfulness of familiar rhythms - now the only thing to do is start coming up with new ones.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

seasons

the longer i drag myself up at sunrise, i see the necessity and prevalence of cycles.

these cycles seem to travel in constant growth and regression, bringing out a perpetual balance of warmth and light, stemmed by the unfortunate harmony of cold and darkness. the waves of sentience are saturated by crests of life & bliss crushed by troughs of death & heartache held together by the in between steadily sinking days.

sometimes these cycles are in the literal sense driven by life and death. i am reminded of the bedsheets that claimed the breath of my lovely aunt these two years past, where she met her end somewhere between the rafters and the floor. those sheets trampled hopes of shared laughter and endless music and milestones for her most precious daughters, and laid forth a unending hole where mother, wife, and friend once stood.

sometimes, these cycles are driven instead by deep set love and heartache. so fine is the line that divides our greatest love and ugliest agony at the affliction of that same love; the swelling of overwhelming adoration can topple and exchange itself for desolate aloneness. that same mouth that once spoke words that filled us with a sea teeming of joy piercing your breast and stealing that same joy.

but death must adhere to the same laws mentioned above; troughs too must rise again to the height of a crest, with time at least. in the case of my aunt, her daughters were the counter to the agony left by her eternal departure; they are uniquely able to shed the light that their mother lavished on those around her. with their absurd dancer legs and ridiculous humor, no one can forget the force that was the lovely billy gentry brown.

and the same goes for the heartache we all know and dread so well. those mouths that stripped the effortless side of love can bandage all those tears and breaks and erase all the wounds carved by their sharp words. with time those stabs we take at one another can turn into ways of understanding your love in new light, or ways of seeing bits of us we need to strip of ourselves.

sometimes, it may just be the cycle of sun to moon, budding leaves to stark branches, browning shoulders to winter jackets. either way, what goes down must come back up.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

moments

those times that i have just myself and the night and that ceiling that's lingered as shelter these two and a half months...those are the moments when the sheets and the dark and the stillness of the day finally give my blown out brain a podium for speech.

a lot of times those speeches aren't ones i'm proud of; they tend more to be more of the times that i let my ugliness run unconstrained, rather than a glimmer of the beauty i hope to create. i realize then that there's this side of my so-called self that i hide so dearly for fear that its discovery will leave me so staggeringly alone that i'll never recover.

lately, i've started to take the reigns of those rampages and steer them into an avenue of life rather than death, and instead of speeches, they're more breaths of inhaling blessings and of exhaling thanks. instead of crushing my innards and outards and all, i'm working on soaking in the good and shutting out the bad by letting my head meditate on what i hold dear rather than what pesters.

freeing myself of the burden of myself is just what the doctor ordered: these shoulders of mine are already lookin up.