Truths #1

I seek for my writing to remain as bare and clean  as this tree, without artifice, frippery, or disguise. Simple, plain truths written directly. But writing bubbles forth from a mysterious source and needs to be filtered and strained and directed or it floods and spills over all of its secrets.

When I examine these bare branches, I see how sturdy and muscular they are. They did not just spring up like catkins in the spring's warm showers, but grew slowly and deliberately - from good stock, some would say.  Each branch is hefty and strong, yet no one branch dominates at the sacrifice of another. The branches have individual strength but all remain dependent on the trunk and on each other. Only until they were of a good height and width did they branch out.  The tree is as graceful and balanced as any zen master and has prospered with the knowledge that  too much growth in any one direction could cause the branch to break and fall or cause the trunk to split, or the entire tree to uproot and topple.

Our lives are not as simple nor as steadfast as a tree's. We often feel that life's purpose it to cause  distractions that entice us to multiply and divide like weeds and grow hurried branches that are flexible enough to twist and turn and fool us into thinking we can do it all.  What we often take for strength and resiliency is really our out of control selves as parasitic as kudzu, covering every surface we come across, but in reality smothering everything in our paths. We speak about the sacred ordinary, but we rejoice as we tear away at the calendar of weeks, watching our lives pass in 5-day increments, rejoicing only  when we reach the end of each one.

I can blame the floors that need to be mopped, the dinners waiting to be cooked,  the food to be bought and the garbage to be taken to the curb. I can find fault in the stacks of paper on my desk needing envelopes and stamps and checks. I can focus on the overdue library books, the neglected relatives, the  forgotten friends, or the mittens to be returned to the box. I can lay blame to being able to click on our bank balance on my laptop at midnight and be awakened by the beep of a voice mail at 3:00 a.m.

In reality, it is all those things and none of them. It is my inability to not scatter seeds but to deliberately poke a row of orderly holes, feed and water daily, then forcibly weed out the weaker stock. I have never suffered from the inability to bloom; it is a pair of sharp secauturs that I need, not another dose of fertilizer. My head is as easily turned as the sunflower, following the warm rays of whomever asks me for my participation or offers praise. My writing folders are filled with half-chapters and unfinished poems and drafts upon drafts that seem to all relate the way a cottage garden does from passers-by on the street,  but when I get down on my hands and knees to weed and stake and prune, I am sit back on my haunches and decide to just mow it all down and begin again.

I've got to get these words out. These dreams are hardening into fossilized shells, buried under layer upon layer of love-rich sediment. Like thousand-year eggs, the dreams are very rich but they are beginning to moulder and smell of decay. There are choices to be made with a good, hard pruning of all the deadened winter growth. Burn it all in a pile, and throw some sweet-smelling sage onto the flames to purify it all.

These are the truths that I need to write on sticky notes and pin  onto my arms like branches sprouting leaves.   Time to turn my attention inward and allow the truths I spout to find a place to take root  just inside the soft spot of my heart.