I lived in a house made largely of windows. A choice was made to do away with most of the curtains and blinds so that even under a canopy of leaves, bright sunlight filled each room. At night, the house was lit from within.
What do people call a house like this, a fishbowl? I was on the stage in a house full of windows. I showered more; I dressed for breakfast; I moved through the house, making entrances and exits, an actress playing a role.
Today, I am shrouded behind curtains, or so I think, here on my bed, lounging on a quilt full of giraffes and monkeys with a live napping cat. This is not a show house, but a house for the moment, full of comfort and warmth. My dishes are functional, my blankets warm and worn.
I think we are all creatures in a zoo, in boxes of every sort, observing and being observed. There are routines and patterns and a measuring to our days counted in such small, expansive joys; scripts move us daily to sweep, to wipe up, to turn appliances on, to purchase food, to wash our bodies, to answer our emails.
The keys out are metal and cartoonishly large – rattling around the waist of the guard. He is stopping by your cage now, peering in the back gate, seeing what you are up to…what are you up to? Are you counting your food pellets, or making your bed from the soft underbrush, or are you frozen in space staring?
I, too, am frozen at a window, but not the windows of yesterday. I am in a window full of condensation. I am faceless, standing still and staring out at rain.
What holds me here? Only my one job, to parent. It is a job so important I can hardly face it, yet it is a job on shifting sand.
I start some doing and stop and think about doing again, but instead, I sit here, drinking tea, looking at messes. I’m fixin’ to and startin’ to all day, turning on music, joy goes all the way down to my socked feet as the rain dots my roof just like my thousand, shivery goose pimples.
The only way out is up; there is no fence on the sky. The cage is comfortable, the food is adequate – but above is open. Swimming through miles of goosedown, I imagine the sun still there.
Life as Improv 
Such comparing and contrasting will help all of us to determine whether a particular moment is asking for comparison/contrast and then to generate a list of similarities and differences, decide which similarities and differences to focus on so that we can move to a new point that later we can once again compare and contrast. Such is the nature of living.
Such comparing and contrasting brings to mind a tendency for constant navel gazing which one can fall into – Oh, look at my belly button – I’m an innie, now I am an outie, now I am an innie again, but a misshapen one 🙂 I had to surgically tape down my knob like button when I was pregnant and walking down the aisle in a silk dress as a bride’s maid. Tocksin stands above the rabbit hole, laughing in his cheshire way at me falling and falling like alice! Nice to hear your voice!
Your words are like openings through which I want to peer, like a new chemistry dropped into my mind that cracks the ice of winter and releases spring’s questions.
“What holds me here?”
What part of me is secretly paying the guards to walk their rounds and keep up this display, even as the other part savors a vision of freedom in the distance? How did my Loving get knotted into a rope ladder and laid on the ground around me in a circle that defines my extents? I climb the rope ladder in circles on this plane.
“The only way out is up.”
Why is it that the guard– the imprisoner– is the same One who carries the keys to freedom? Why does my Love share a cell with my pain? I set something down once, and now I need it back. It keeps walking past in a jangly procession. Why does he look vaguely familiar? Ahem… “Guard! A word please!”
Michael
Michael,
When I first was exposed to absurdism in theatre, I felt the closeness of spirit and truth and a piercing deflation of the pseudo reality around me for the first time. As Vladimir and Estragon riffed on words, the nonsense felt intimate with my own confusion and longing. Beckett, Ionesco, Durang, and visually, DeKooning, Picasso,Basquiat – coltrane, davis, parker….Goodness, I sound like a pretentious name dropper, but I am unable to post a picture here for the way your response make me feel – these players remind me of you and the associative play with words, sound, color, space and time – boy, we can have some fun here can’t we if we just get into that mindset, look around for materials and get to it!
Oh, here is one, this is playing as the Guard walks over in an exaggerated manner, realizing you/I have realized his identity: Isn’t life fun, this Sunday morning?
Your reminders are wondrous, and the names spark recognitions of brilliant people, the experience of which is like the ping of prayer we once riffed on. These flowerings are samples of the richness of the soil in which we are rooted. Genius encourages all of us to drink up the nutrients, which is the inspiration I find here.
Michael
Ok so is this my life? Yes. Save swapping the cat for a furry little poodle. I recently sent this poem to another wise M, and today I think I will gift it to you, as you are well deserving. A little Hafiz to add to your day (I change his subject to the feminine):
Dropping Keys
The small woman
Builds cages for everyone
She
Knows.
While the sage,
Who has to duck her head
When the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners.
Perhaps, we should also swap the word prisoners for children. 🙂 xoxoxox!!!
What a wonderful gift, this poem! I love every word – and I can instantly feel myself as a cage builder, a moon duck(er), a key dropper, and a beautiful, rowdy prisoner. What a show. xo!(exponentially multiplied:) m
It is a misty morning at home playing catch up before hopping in the car for the I am finally at home errands. It is the marine layer that comes in visiting from the sea. Little moist hugging tendrils of water on the breeze come in to play with the land.
It will burn off as soon as the sun is up high enough to clear the mountains behind the house. I can see the light filtering over that mountain and through the fog right now, but it is a hazy, diffused light that takes the edges off everything. It makes me happy to think of another I love in the grey of a perfectly imperfect morning with a cup of tea.
Joy of joys Ms M….misty mountain in the way of light’s full freedom and majesty which will be out of the way in time. Now is part of that full freedom so is the light not also free now in the act of moving with time?
-x.M
Oh, such a treat when M touches down! I feel bathed in the moist, ocean tendrils as I take in your words. I love the time looping feeling of visits to the past and present and future of our selves on such mornings! Your words illuminate in fog, cloud-cover, shadow, and motion in the growing awareness of the freedom of everything. We share tea many a mornings and ponder silently in all conditions we have chosen – grateful for such a knowing of this! Joy to you in your errunding! xo! m