Spring Musings
The last log on here is dated November. I had one more in January (which I deleted) and so, there’s not much of a record on here for the moment, but it has been a very deeply porous, clarifying time. I began something huge last fall—a culmination of my life’s work—and since winter have gone ‘under’ with my concept, needing to iron out serious kinks, and psychologically have been wrestling with the actual nature of my work in the real: how it affects those closest to me, what effect it has on audiences. These have been pressing, urgent questions as I bring my work into tangible form and present it to others. The winter doled out difficulties, blockages, wounded places, and I landslided into a deep well of self-doubt. Literally wanted to regress completely, turn back to gardening as a be all-end all for my life, working in silence with the plants, dumb to all else in my heart, or that rises up to my throat. Let me just unload myself to the plants who listen in silence, who do not validate me, but do not contradict me either. Yet whose colors and smells and attributes seem to offer me answers, symbols of who I am—what it all means. I think that is why I do it, why I write; it is a mystery I am hewing away at. My partner, however, who was completely wrapped up with me in these wound spaces, steadied me, despite himself:
“I think that ship where we gardened together has sailed. Don’t forget, I invested in you too….”
So, here I am now, in the spring, and more ‘out’ than I was in the holed up winter where I was never truly warm unless being bathed in the light of fire a foot away from me, or receiving a torrent of scorching shower water on my head, or buried in my bed. I like to embrace the cold and clearing breezes of spring, feel the blood rush to my cheeks, the wet of spring rain on my neck, over my eyes, even if I am not comfortable, or get shaken with chill. But then again, the sun meanders tantalizingly from behind the clouds, and heats me up so completely, while I lift my head: please, soak into me. Lilacs are just coming into bloom. We don’t have any on the acre we live on, but I see them on the sides of the road, before people’s houses. I’ve been telling my partner I need to creep at night to clip a little off from somewhere and bring a branch home to our table. Geese are having their babies. First you notice they are paired off, just putting around, and then fuzzy goslings the size of tennis balls appear. And in the back pond behind the yurt, orange fish are darting about.
Today I finish up the prototype for “Minor Key,” the fourth volume I will be releasing through Imum Press. This is after weeks of waiting and preparation of materials and the manuscript.
I seem to be meeting new people, and offering myself up to experiences that make my waters choppy and put me in uncomfortable places where I don’t feel good, where everything in me recoils. It becomes very clear to me why and how come for so long I have been such a recluse and not put out my work. But I am opening now to the agonizing, difficult process of cracking my shell and meeting my destiny, which I have been musing on with my head to the window panes of buses rolling down the highway since I was a teenager.
Little oak leaves have appeared on the oak tree which looms over, protects the yurt. The last to become visible, the last to react, the most deep-rooted—the only tree (aside from beech) whose winter leaves cling on till the very end, till even spring overlaps. Perhaps I am like the oak, my life takes that long to develop, to become visible.
And I tell myself this spring, after reading my work recently and not receiving the reaction I imagined I wanted, that what exactly it is I want to—or wanting is irrelevant—will receive in reaction to my work is not important. I definitely don’t need validation or praise, both make me feel wooden. I think—just—to know that I was brave enough to become visible, that I was not ashamed or hiding away, that my doors were open, that I am closer to—closer to—
…