So I just went through another period of senescence. Creative abstinence might be a more correct term, though it doesn't encompass the withering shoots going from green to yellow and souring fruit wrinkling and turning hard and sad. I am sometimes a cantankerous old maid, and let my worries keep me in my rocker on the front porch wagging my finger at the world. How much power fear can hold over us! It take a tremendous effort to lift that all off my shoulders vertically, but I've understood the intellectual concept behind melting my fear away. I just need to know it in myself and put it into practice.
I walked around in a mind-dance, wrapped in myself, living in a place that I couldn't explain beyond the pages of books, between the covers. It was fine and I did not know my loss and my loneliness until a man saw me today, and talked directly to the thing in my heart living in the minds of long-dead writers. He stood on a rock and the black-eyed susan he held in his teeth stared straight through me, and I was pinned to myself by his questions, and the manner in which he addressed me. A genuine address to my sleeping self. He held out the flicker or thread on whose tension my whole life is held taut. I am convinced he was an unwitting prophet for just that one moment when he was God talking to me.
What could I do? I stammered, I stuttered, but I was me, after all. And I had never wanted to wake up so much. When my mind is not on fire, it is only damp logs. The sparks hurt too badly if it takes them a while to catch, and disappointment is an acrid smoke of failure clutching at my throat. I feel the layers of swaddling and fight against them. How much more painful still to know that if I were to wake, I would only feel that good as often as a person such as this came into my life, or simply crossed my path as today. A torn soul I fled, not flew, from that brightly shining being. God doesn't want me to give him the middle finger, but reality is too rare and too beautiful to bear on a day like this.
