"Énouement,"defined as “the bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.” A psychology of aging in the form of an eloquent dictionary entry.
The future never arrives. Always one breath behind – a window blowing open, then slamming shut over and over again. The future is always now, just as the past is always present.
Here I am walking down the street from my childhood. The weather functions as a kind of feeling signature that allows my body to track its similar weather thread throughout time. The sun, bright as a penny you just found for luck. The field, flooded as it always is in March – sometimes a boggy murk, sometimes with a thin veneer of ice, distorting the weeds and ephemera blown and now trapped beneath brackish water.
I walk the path between home and school, school and lunch, and back again. A suburban geometry that I have memorized from years of this pattern.
A pin-wheel spins on a fence. A slow swoosh of a car.
I have walked this path in dreams as well. It has shown me my face that does not exist in time. A different face I was able to remove, look at and see. This was not my true face either, but a message about how I might appear as an exacting morph of me and my cruel Japanese boss – even his strange freckles intact. I feel the next face under this one, but do not see it.
As I snap into place on the next sidewalk tile, and the next, a telephone pole looms in and then the lantern from Narnia that straddles the wood between the worlds.
Here under a familiar pine, needles creak beneath feet. Maybe a loamy patch.
The red brick houses curving suburban side streets have names that become characters in a story: Rockland Van Buren, Keith and Centralia Berwyn, Evangeline Warren. These are the street people, mantra born in 2017, reincarnated from 1967 middle American childhood neighborhood: bikes, bridges, fields, trees, streets. Tunnels, fences, swings, grass islands with shrubbed-up hiding places.
OM AH HUM.
Water is water is water. You immerse your whole body and all elements are purified by the power of cleansing attention. Entering the surface sparkle light on water, the feeling increases and transports into a womb-like void. All indeterminate, clear and dark.
A single finger can tip or balance you when floating the surface. I said it was weather but I meant the elements. Elements as reflected in weather and word: rain, ocean, pool, bath, snow, seawater, drinking fountain, vapor, clouds.
Now we are moving into the air of water. Each element carries memories in your body. An infinite mix – and here now is a recipe I know by heart – memorized, mesmerized. This cold wind singeing my cheek, water dropping out of eyes, floating my vision between collapsing time.
What do I say to you now girl?
A warmth I never knew lived right inside me. All this time out of time. It flushes up my center, the opposite of the way I used to go cold and narrow in my throat. It’s alive, living. A pulse of pure love. That’s all. That’s all. That’s everything in time and out. That’s all she ever needed, ever even was.
For everyone whose mouth is constantly dropping open in amazement at the flow of lies and seemingly no consequences coming from tRUmp and co: Hear now, this truth: So many lies have been told to us for so long – embedded in our most esteemed cultural institutions. Stitched to us in ways we never knew existed until we decided to look at why everything inside of us itches and cripples. This has been happening to ALL of us. And I am not leaving out the white man, as he has also been wounded and wrongly elevated as some kind of ideal to emulate. Many a white man also do not know how much these lies are killing them too. On a psychic level – there is the dominator mentality – the distancing from spontaneous feeling and the pressure to live up to some expectation of superiority. For all the rest of us who have swallowed this poison again and again – this is the time to RECOGNIZE how much our society has been lying to us. Take this moment as the liberator it actually is. Don’t waste your time with righteous indignation. See yourself in your truth and act from there. It is a miracle that this is happening. It doesn’t have to go down in war. We can overcome this very simply by standing in our own truth every single day, and not fearing the consequences. Simple – not easy. Take back your power.
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