Knowledge is easily acquired. Facts and respected opinions slip from the tongue in quicksilver fashion.
But some things we can know, we do not fully understand until we have felt them. They must be experienced in order to dwell within us.
And so it was in the sleeping hours after midnight, I sat alone winnowing through the paper detritus that accumulates like swirling dust motes, building here and there on every flat surface.
I picture it. Standing bravely on the scrubby ground of a box-canyon floor. Nightgown flowing to my ankles. Leaning into a headlong wind, arms akimbo. Grasping as if to tie the passing moment down in mimeo, leaflet, post-it, double-spaced first-line indented memos. It is impossible. Scraps of paper, twists of news, glossy brochures cling, plastered to fabric, woken to hair, until I am a woman of words. Assaulted by the two dimensional gurgitations of the world around me.
Into the silent scream, I relentlessly doomed others' words to reincarnation via a brown grocery bag. The night was rent by a piercing scream. Fearing it was my beloved child I raced through the dark house. She slept on, unaware.
Outside I barreled, hyper-vigilant for a child in need, a person in distress or cat to rescue... The mundanity of the street was absolute. An Ansel Adams still life in blue white moonwash, sleep blanketed the quiet suburban landscape. Not even the masked bandits that sometimes socialize upon my stoop, clawing up to feast upon squab and egglets in the framing trees were present.
Mewing myself back up into the golden warmth of my lamp and coffee colored couch, I picked up the next piece of paper and then set it back down with disregard.
What if it was not a cry from life, this anguished gut-wrenching moan that spurred me from my task, but rather the collective protest of all that the action represents?
I will not be chased from this cleansing by ghosts in the paperwork! I thought. I am undeterred by the sticky fingers of habit, and slumberous embrace of sloth.
New beginnings have at the end of their arduous toil, the promise of peace and contentment. Resolute, I shook my fist at inertia.
"Howl all you like," I intoned, donning the mantle of making, "I am crafting this new way, and your hold on me is of little moment. A fallen leaf. A time passed. Howl on... And my cries shall surpass yours, drowning out your despair in the joy and terrible beauty of my emptiness in creation."
image: Lament by JugglinMike