Remember those years of telling yourself stories in the shower. I used to hear a voice in my head, as the water washed over me, telling me about what next big thing was going to change my life forever…a play, a date, college, graduate school, a mate, marriage, a house, a move, kids, enlightenment(grin)…that voice stuck around for years.
Now in the shower usually it is just me and the water. I hear that same voice, the announcer voice of great change, but it is in a distant room and I can’t quite make out the words.
Even the small things have lost their gleam.
It is strange the way everything that I used to love and look forward to no longer holds much energy. My taste in food, activity, excitement, pleasure in the material transient stuff is muted, in the next town already on a high speed train to nowhere. Does another train pull in? What time is it due?
I am learning now that the trains that pull in and out are coming to me when I call them. I am not at the mercy of the transportation system in my life – I call the trains or stop the trains altogether. What power! Now, why do I sit here allowing trains to leave and not calling any more forth?
Life is good, right? Isn’t that what the tshirt tells us? What is here now feels so hollow; sometimes, I can’t quite figure out what all this spaciousness was created for. I made this big arena here of space. My embarrassing burp echoes round and round in this emptiness. Pardon me, I say, to whom?
I am wearing new clothes that sometimes feel like they don’t fit right. What fills in and what is carved out, by my command, I wonder.
When I rest back into this limbo state, rounding the corner to the frozen food aisle, I feel the whooshing in of the holy spirit, the nefesh, energy raw and pure, and I proceed to be drunk at the grocery store once again, dancing between pies and peas, feeling up the apples, grinning randomly enough to collect curious and concerned looks. I am trying to fit in, but my body is a buzzing. What is one to do?
There is a current flowing through, that never leaves. I just think sometimes I’m alone. I think I have climbed out of the stream and am wandering in a desert far from the babbling brook, but I am just dozing in the river still, dreaming of parched conditions. When a bird on a high branch shits upon my head, I awaken, clean myself off, and feel the flow that never left. The bird flies off, laughing.
Train stations, streams, public drunkenness, floating in a limbo soup – no boundaries or barriers between me and the matter. The stream and I decide nothing, yet all happens according to my plan.
Tell the men in the white coats I’m on aisle 11; they may want to join me for a dance.
Life as Improv 
Perhaps Limbo station is where we go to step outside of the healing space we created, to let loose, be wild, unsure, confused. Perhaps it’s ok to feel no fear of being there because we know, after all the work we’ve done for ourselves, that the space will welcome us again. And, our next visit there might be made a little more aware because we’ve danced crazy, and felt uncontrolled again. It’s all part of the ebb, flow, fight, flight wtf warrior training. You, Miss Marga, are doing just fine. xx
ah, good riminder – sometimes I forget that I signed up for the Ebb, Flow, Fight, Flight, WTF Warrior Training Class, Intense, isn’t it? Laying my nunchucks down for a bit for some gentle stretching!
Your musings are so precisely what I feel, I wonder if we share the same headspace. I would adore you as a room-mate. 🙂
I have just heard this poem read by its author, John O’Donohue (how I love to skip down the paths set by the lovely M’s). In his words, “a poem about finding a place to rest your head and bring your mind home”:
Thought Work
Off course from the frail music sought by words
And the path that always claims the journey,
In the pursuit of a more oblique rhythm
Creating mostly its own geography,
The mind is an old crow
Who knows only to gather dead twigs
Then take them back to vacancy
Between the branches of the parent tree,
And entwine them around the emptiness,
With silence and unfailing patience,
Until what has fallen, withered and lost
Is now set to fill with dreams as a nest.
Seemed to fit in somehow, here. Cheers to old crows and fresh hatchlings, and being both at once. xoxo-A
How wonderful and perfect, you! You offer me a tether back to me! M’s pointing always leads to such unique and true voices! John O’Donohue in particular never fails to touch the heart he has found his way to – amazing to me that words that we all use daily can be arranged in such ways to reflect such hard won produndity, beauty, grace and gateways! I hope all is flowing well wtih all the souls under your wings in your corner of the world! xoxoxoxo!!
The waiting game…I realize I am waiting and waiting for… ??? Nothing. Strange that feeling. Can’t quite get motivated. Can’t quite care. So interesting a state. Seems to me to be a close crazy making/feeling cousin of your limbo. LOVE this post. -x.M
Sigh – as in love and wishes for the collective comfort of cousins in the weirdness 🙂 xxoo!m
I have a year round park pass to this place you describe, and I don’t know if this is quite related, but some days it is hard for us (for me) to step away from the material mandates of this era, and be faced without a clear alternative. I watched the movie Lincoln this weekend for the first time, and loved the scene when he is asking two younger men working in the telegraph room if they believe we choose the times in which we live, if we are “cut for the age we live in” or something to that effect. If you believe Hollywood, he had a deep sense of purpose, of occupying place within history, and yet a distance from it at the same time.
I think, perhaps, we are living in an age of even swifter and greater change than Lincoln’s, only our changes are within. It is happening so deeply within us, our world’s refresh rate isn’t quite keeping up yet. We have some downtime to stare at the walls of our dwelling place, while inside of us heartfelt changes are restructuring Possibility. To be in Love, and unsure what this means as far as filling time or space, seems a symptom of devotion, the result of transitioning desires, the wobble of walking between worlds.
At least, this is what I tell myself when I find myself staring out through the window, occupied with the hum of a wordless feeling, accomplishing nothing and everything, allowing the stream to wash over me.
Michael
Michael,
Such great connections in your words – I find myself allowing the stream of these words wash over me. I find it deeply reassuring to “know” these few other souls who speak directly to the unspoken places I embody – such signs and validation of the realness of this road we have chosen as a deeper reality than the one that flashes and dances through the 5 senses. There is a longing in me or rather a missing of a reality I remember before being here – something truer and easy and flowy – that I see that you remember too! I fall back into trying to find it in the material plane now and again and feel as if I am stumbling about, touching sharp objects and hot ovens with my bare hands – confused that most others are walking about with open hearts and unconditional acceptance. I remember what it is like to flow with others with ease and love as a constant though that is not the reality I’ve chosen this time. I too, lingered over the scene in Lincoln that you re-enlivened for me, here. What a time of change we have chosen, and how odd it is. This now feels like we are “fix in’ to” rebuild the reality of the world just after we have shaken out the new set of blocks from its packaging. Seems right that we would allow a pause to take in all the new moving parts before we roll up our sleeves. Heart so full of gratitude that you take the time and attention to write, roll up, and attach a note to the tiny leg of a pigeon! He has been fed, allowed to rest, and sent back your way 🙂 Marga
I’m kind of amazed you got all that out of my note, as I felt as though I stumbled around while writing, and wasn’t quite able to get at what I was really trying to say. I echo the feeling of deep reassurance that comes from being “known”, and from “knowing.”
You describe so wonderfully that state of being here in this world, yet adrift in the memory of an experience without pain or suffering, without sharp edges or hot pans. I think, though, we have chosen something pretty amazing to experience. It is one thing to move at the speed of Light, another to know that one is moving at the speed of Light, but perhaps even yet another experience altogether to live through an acceleration from zero TO the speed of Light.
And to boot, this is occurring from within a realm of experience that seemingly has no idea- that is distracted in so many ways. I’m so grateful for the whispers sent back and forth via pigeon, from the pools of Silence where the turbulence of an accelerating world is not only felt, but taken in and embraced, and carried for everyone.
Michael
I love the positive turn around – the turning of the face toward the sunny side of how amazing it is really to be here now in a time of great change and experiences that (as you so rightly notice) move at increasing speeds that would blow our little minds to smithereens! You have mentioned in other places and in other ways this idea of carrying more than our singleton load – and this pings so true – and makes the momentary heaviness – or burnt fingertips – or little scratches – all feel better with the realization of orchestration! Thank you, my friend!
That was absolutely magical. So glad I found you or you found me rather. 🙂
So positively magical to find our kindred; it is!
I enjoy our liquidly languid state of limbo, offering us a gentle albeit transient reprieve from the world of form… before the return journey home. When in Rome… C’est la vie, and all. that. jazz. 🙂
This floating state used to be so womb-like until I heard all the other heart beats around me – so wonderful to journey home near the jazz rifting heart drum of Maddy 🙂