Quietly as a butterfly, as a breeze that barely moves through the grass, perceptible, subtle, not trying to announce its presence but rather just being a presence.
I do not socialize.
Not as a rule, but as an unfolding. I open, tension leaves my body, nightmares go spiraling off into the dark to be transformed into the dragons and angels of the psyche, and the crew that might surround me still has not appeared. In the past, I would take this as a sign of some spiritual blockage. This time, I don’t go looking for it.
I am not lonely.
I went south. Because I was born there, because it was a place to go. I have been here listening to the messages passed between the cicadas ever since. Theirs is a convivial atmosphere. Always a last hurrah before shedding some skin, before dying. No one knows how to get down like an insect with a short time on earth.
The city had made me both a complacent child and sacrifice. It ate me as it fed me. In this way, I was kept. I got used to the sensation, happy to be both meal and recipient of knowledge. This is why I needed to leave. Growth had become impossible. It takes a certain kind of discipline to live in a city like that. A person has to keep from being consumed, and not to receive too much.
I took to the road like a body regenerating and stopped when I arrived at the surge of the sea where I was born.
I think I am edging closer to the part of me that is a plant. A time of stasis in the ground, the beauty and chaos of release from the seed, the press through the maternal earth, emerging bright and soft and vulnerable to the sun and rain and the animals who walk the earth. The celebration of flower, the bending to seed, the cycles. I find myself losing touch with extreme emotion as I take in the sun. I find myself listening to quieter languages. I find myself thinking less about myself. “Don’t think about yourself; be yourself.”
My dreams are getting brighter. I find friends in those curves of the brain and the spirit. I say what I mean and feel my feet on the ephemeral ground. There are layers that I am beginning to uncover.
In this town, I speak to the cashiers, the drivers, the oaks, the harbor and the ancestors. I do not need the assurance of knowing what phase I am in during my constant becoming. I know that I am hanging in between and this in between is a ground I can stand on, for now.
How am I? A question I appreciate but don’t have the words to answer.
There is no description; words fall short to tell of the inner actions, the ripples they create in the world.