the book of a thousand fragilities

sparks

I wish I could write the book of a thousand fragilities. Stories of permeable membranes, feathers involuntarily traveling across an ocean, holes in nets that let the salmon escape. Eggs cracking to let life continue to the next chapter. Beech leaves, dry and crinkled, holding on to their thin branches way beyond autumn, making music together, calling spring. Tender vocal chords of husky voices telling stories that sound so much more thrilling exactly because. Of rough textures allowing for fifteen different mosses to grow. Of the accidental watery blotch that mingles every color on the paper, letting them travel to unpredictable places. Of limping minds and fractured hearts that stop trying so painfully hard, starting to joyfully, slowly live into change always already presenting itself to our hungry imagination. Cracks in walls that look like veins that look like roots that look like lightning. And those creatures in the walls fearing collapse, dreaming of collapse.

blind spot.

I wish I could write about places that embraced me most warmly and tightly exactly when I had almost faded away. Wild places or never fully tamed places that have always been my home.

I wish I could write about my addiction to a broken heart, no, to my heart breaking. A circular journey of reaching out, of surrendering to longing. This moment of feeling so alive and paradoxically connected to the world. Maybe the rawness of a felt rejection? Falling and the mercy of the dark that had been calling out to me to notice it, embrace it. I do not want to be fixed, it whispers.

When you’re feeling small, feel it all until you can hold yourself in your own palm again.

A shadow is not fragile. Or is it?

Cracks in my mind letting dreams seep through it. Two hands, one on top of the other, lightly, moving slowly. Like a worm trying to wiggle itself back into the soil. And one entire being melting. I am sorry to be mean when I am hurting. One finger brushing the palm.

melody.

On a windy day I see a buzzard in the sky above me. I wonder, how much she is playing, how much training her strength? How can she be certain she will be stronger than the gusting wind? It sure seems like she is. Strong enough and knowing, I mean. If I observe her long enough my mind attunes to her rhythm of play. The way she defies the wind direction only to let herself be swept away as if her strong, feathered body had spontaneously reduced itself into a single fluffy feather, melting effortlessly into the air to join the other molecules. But no, there she is again, throwing herself against the wind.

Ray.

How fragile each moment is. How easily it can be cracked open, like some thick sugary crust. By what you ask? For me, a certain brightness of the morning sun, falling on my face, illuminating past and future. My mind melting into this moment, fragile yet ever expansive. And I am falling through time, reminded of one winter morning when I was getting water for the sheep. You, warm and golden, entered the yard through a small slid in the gate and landed on my nose. But I was busy so I just smiled back at you, greeting you like my mother just coming home from the bakery. I'll be right there!, I call out to you, my sun.

cells

I am lying in bed trying to meditate before sleep. If I listen closely, I am astonished that my heart just beats, my breath is flowing more or less evenly and my limbs are moving, taking me places. Strangely, I seem to plan everything and to work on autopilot at the same time. Like a twilight zone of biological self-sufficiency and conscious control. If I remember today, I wonder how often I have been surprised. How did I react? When did I respond? Do I notice the difference in experience at all? Taking the entirety of each of our existences I feel overwhelmed by all these moving universes ever expanding, full of memory, immediacy, conscious or unconscious longing. And yet, when I lie in bed looking at the wobbly wallpaper ceiling above me, to my numerous plants, to the lamp and the shadows it produces, my universe seems so incredibly small. All that I want to explore. All that I have explored and unfaithfully forgotten. Memories must be falling from my too tiny trouser pockets to the ground, to be trampled on, lost. Tomorrow I will try to be more careful, I think. Everything about me just feels too small to hold my own existence in its ordinary yet strange entirety. I wonder if I actually know how it feels to be human.

soul

I think I feel most human when I imagine to be something or someone else. When my mind reaches outside of itself to grasp the phenomena of this world. For I can only do so in occupying my body and senses completely. Then my imagination makes my skin tickle at the thought of being leaves in a tree or nutrients traveling through and underneath dented old bark. Oh to be a bird! Or a seal. Oh to be supple and strong and -

Breath

to be air, yes! I am air. I am O2, CO2, N2. I am already a symbiosis. And I am traveling, traveling, traveling. The sun moves me, literally, all the time. I stroke every surface I pass, inter-acting, changing, being changed. Remember how your sliced apples turn golden brown, yellow bronze? … I move up and down and up and down to eventually stroke the cheeks of a deer, the wings of a crow, to wrestle with humans by the shore. Or I linger on the surface of the vast ocean, waiting, swaying. If I have any enemies, if you want to call them that, then they are small like me, disrupting my innermost structure. Only if you build impenetrable walls around me will I cease to be. Some of my closest friends are green and brown and white and innumerable other colors. I call them friends because they tear me up, break me into pieces only to send me on a new journey across and through the atmosphere. I like to sneak into everything, you know. It is quite natural to me because no one can really see me. I am invisible.

Escape

Maybe I asked the wrong question. Maybe my question is: How does it feel to be alive? To be present in infinite, all-pervasive aliveness. I activate all my senses, all that I am in this moment, to perceive this aliveness underneath the pavement, between the forever malfunctioning wheels of an office chair, or sticking to the conveyor belt at the supermarket. I am torn between wanting to stop time and seeing everything erupt. Although, maybe they aren’t opposed at all. For really I wish to stop us; to let the roots underneath the pavement not just create some cracks but actually break through and reclaim the ground, letting soil resurface, reviving the land. I want to climb branches and hop from root to root. I want my feet to have long, complex and aimless conversations with the earth. I want my mind to engage in endless dialogues with the wind that is always present, having found its ways through concrete jungles since the beginnings of so called civilization. Teach me!, I call out to the wind. Teach me to be alive like you!