Tuesday, May 11, 2010
I write so little about or in Spring, it sometimes seems. Perhaps, because I am so often so busy with the business of Spring--the growing and changing and thinking and flowering and walking up to the park for italian ice and going on excursions in the sunshine because it's just so damn nice out and why waste the day-ness of it all that I sometimes miss the part where thinking about it is involved.
Thinking, and giving thanks, once more, for where I am now, and from where I have come. And for what is creeping up on the horizon, waiting to surprise me with yet more newness. I keep being asked 'how are you?' as I find myself reconnecting with people I haven't seen in too long. Dear friends, and old acquaintances whose return to my orbit is in itself a gift. And how am I?
I am itchy with excitement, with ideas and projects and so many things to do and so many opportunities I can almost not handle it. Let's talk about that abundance thing for a minute, shall we? La Abundancia, as one of those dear friends new returned to my orbit says. Let's reflect while Mercury finally slips out of retrograde today, and carry that forward.
I'm moving to California this summer, to go and get my MFA, in a program that accepts two people a year. I may even have found housing. I have incredible friends who I will miss like fire and who I know will miss me, and the assured blessing of couches to sleep on when my feet (and airplanes) bring me inevitably back to this incredible city I have suddenly discovered myself calling Home. I have Brooklyn, and on a sunny day filled with people I love? That is more than enough. I have new Tarot cards, and my old Tarot cards, and the gift of words and a fire at Beltane. I have constant discoveries of amazing things to do -- and then doing them. Projects bubbling in the back of my mind in so many media. Poetry trickling back into me in tangible, holdable ways. The work of my heart and the work of my hands.
I have above all things incredible, wonderful people whom I have found, and who have found me, and whom I am helping find one another. I am astonished, clean floored by the unmitigated beauty of the people I know. Just the chance, sometimes, to sit back and watch folk-I-know become folk-who-know-each-other is enough to sit me speechless with a smile. Real hearers and hearteners of the work stuff, it's heady.
I am working, as you see, on writing about it. Returning to writing. On being grateful for it. On knowing that, though I am leaving, I am leaving nothing behind me -- just pulling the strings Westward for a while. Dragged with halting footsteps toward the light, as I wrote recently.
(A story: I had this relationship with Poetry once. And we dated with feverish, mad intensity that came from what seemed like the nowhere-magic-place, and then I wrote it all down--pinned and wriggling on the wall as my old buddy Eliot would say--and Poetry and I were splitsville. She left me on the side of the road in Massachusetts with no idea what my major was going to be Now She'd Gone. We didn't talk, and it hurt like a stubbed toe to think on her, off gallivanting with other folks. And then I met this new kid, called Costumes, and oh, we've been going steady for a while. And he's super cute, and dresses up in so many neat ideas. But you know what? It's good to have a friend back in the picture, especially one you haven't seen for a while. So Poetry and I are talking again; and while it's not as mystical or passionate, I think our connection's a bit more solid, more real this time. And for that, I'm also thankful)
Everything that's stressful, everything that's worrisome, everything that I may bitch about, darlings? It's totally tangential. I am some delirious kind of happy, and giving myself the chance, finally, to breathe, and stretch, and love, and revel in the dizzy new chances I am given in the now. And I'm trying to be patient, and not rush the ones to come.
Some thoughts on it from my new poetry crush, Rebecca Elson:
Evolution
We are survivors of immeasurable events,
Flung upon some reach of land,
Small, wet miracles without instructions,
Only the imperative of change.