Stagnation. Am I right to say anything that stagnates completely festers. Life reduces down to maybe nothing at all.
I am this way. Possibly, we are this way.
And it is in opposition to what I thought, what I understood from my early absorption of this world.
But the truth fills me casting thin and shining ties to my center, to Earth. I lower deeper into the truth of my being.
I dream and want in peaks and climaxes. I see myself in the future, in my imagination, at a point. A place set and complete. Accomplished, resolved, and full. A point after the work, the bits that I am embarrassed by because there is shame still living in me. Imperfect, unfinished is only ok because one day I will be free from it. Safe in my place of dreams coming true and actualized.
This, I think, is our world. A culture of idolization. People become faultless because they for a time hold answers or entertainment or relief for us. But they do have faults. What is a peak turns to stagnation over time.
No, the gifts and glory of living is the flow. Forward or back or in any direction but moving, resting, moving again.
My gifts of truth and wisdom, those given to me, those I share with others, they need oxygenated water to keep alive, to live and become more. They can’t be extracted and discarded or placed on a shelf to complete my perfect place. They live and die and live again but new and different and the same. Transforming, growing, expanding, contracting, dormant and unseen until they spring forth better for the time aslumber.
All inside me seems to buzz and dance at this truth. There is no promise land to save me. Life is never done. Death is the final and greatest expression of this truth I will likely know. Crumpling into myself and releasing all I am to many millions of others I come alive again. Not me. But this me is only the puzzle not the pieces. The specific collection of other life dissolved into me. I too will be broken up and reformed.
The practice of release, recent and large in my life, entering through the act of giving birth, an expulsion of another being, a loss, a gift, makes me curious about death, my final release.
But here and now I am captivated by the fluidity of my being. I feel life coursing through me. To be content always in creation, never fully formed feels possible, accessible. I can turn now towards what I am. Always I have been running from what I am because there I also find what I lack. Impossible and painful I flee to who I could be, I might be, I must be, I am not. Today, I rotate all the way around and peer into me, to the craters between my knowledge and the half formed piles of a million things. But I smile, what do I know. What do I have. No more skipping, ignoring, covering up what I don’t have. I will ask, I will accept, I will admit, and maybe I won’t need it. Grateful for what I collect and accepting of what I don’t, I am living this day and this life and this body and the world scares me a little less. Because I know, this truly is my dream. Not life forever or life peaceful or life safe but to be here while I am here. Eyes all the way open, ears forever present, marveling and creating and living just like everyone else, just for as long as I can. I don’t want to, I won’t, I am not wasting my turn.
-El An Gilman-