Life as Improv

I am just letting the words fly with misspellings, lower case errors, run-on sentences, all sorts of mess.  I am not  a finished product, but one feeling her way along the path.  There is a tendency to only write in a I’ve figure this out sort of way for me at times, but what i find more interesting is what each moment may look like.  Here I am standing in a certain spot while taking steps, full of questions.  I am not pressed against the wall of decision making – I am staring back at my own naked face in the mirror of this rectangle wordpress box.

change is in the air.  We go from hot to cooler, overhead to slanting sunlight and I project this shift to my own shifting seasons, as a mother, as a person.  i’ve known no other way to be than a mother who merged with my children – not in a controlling way but in a borderless existence of OURS, not mine.  My room has been open all this time;  My clothes, my shoes, my jewelry, my bed, my skin, my nutrients,  all fair game.  My girls psychically curl up inside me even still;  it seems to me as if they remember the start of their journeys here inside my  body.  They push on me the way they push against themselves.  They look into my face, my words, my silences to reflect their existence.  And yet I can sense the change of seasons; as the morning light recedes,  they too are moving into their self-contained vessels; they move into darkness all their own, an inner seeding, toward a winter before a dawning of light and sprouting come spring.

as this season moves closer still , and these beings transcend each stage, my space is being returned  to me in micro increments, almost indiscernibly so until I stop and see where I am now compared to a year ago and a year before that – a sky as large as montana is brimming if I squint.  Here it comes but i do not know how to repurpose for this planet at this age in this body with this lowgrade fever of ambivalence I seem to stew myself in.  the joys i experience alone are so simple, so strange, so lonely – while I crave no one.  I wonder if i can sustain myself as a lone, wondering weirdo.   Have you seen any job ads for Lone Wandering Wondering Weirdo?  My resume reads:  I will walk in nature, clearing my mind, for the rest of humanity for a modest income.  🙂

i fantacize about walks in dense and hidden woods, chilly beaches, rocky cliffs.  I march into brambles and sticker bush zones for the novelty and for the solitary nature spots such as these provide.    I enjoy my interaction with strangers more than I do acquaintances.  the smile at the car repair shop or with the bag boy seem more poignant than with people I am supposed to know.  I do not fit any molded role anymore.  I am my own path and it is solo.  it seems to me that taking this solo path is always the path of eccentricity.  I no longer can rein in the outlying of my personality.     I have no role model, no clear expectation of what happens next.

My 5 year plan is to listen to the rain when it starts falling, to stop what I am doing and try to hear  who is talking to me, to welcome the visitor who appears in the costume of cat, tree branch trimmer, package delivery door bell.  The life as a stage art is  A Happening, a flow of unpredictability.  I am not intending anything but flow – I allow a softening of myself like Pooh bear – I hang my hat up on the simple rack – I sign up for the back seat  and trust the scriptwriter for the rest. And yet I still ask,  is this wrong?  Should I map it out, chart my course,  steer my ship?  Where does the balance lie between flow and directioning?

Charleston rivers are full of abandoned boats, pulled off their moors and washed up on the marshy shores; some of them have sunken to the bottom of channels, leaving danger for boats passing by.  Some have washed up together and form a jumble of wreck and loss for all to see.  I once kayaked over to a graveyard of boats and listened to the eerie creaking the wind and water played through abandonment.

Is emptying myself out of steering my own vessel the same as choosing to wash ashore?  Am I not taking responsibility for my journey?  Do I need to plan and trust both?  Or do I trust and know that whatever I could plan doesn’t match a fraction of what is possible?  But if I do not plan, how do I avoid getting washed up on shore?  Or steered by some other ship master who may jump aboard my ship?

I have ridden the edge of this particular wave of paradox for years.  I think it is a mind trick.  I think I am clued in when I trust the moment to present to me what i need.  To anticipate or project into the future is not of the moment, but of the mind.  But from here I often am not sure.   It seems that always the answer to paradox is an adjustment of the dial of distance.  From up close, it appears either/or.  From a step or two back, the paradox disappears and the millions of options appear in every grey scale between black and white.

Perhaps… I’ll let you know what I find from the bottom of the channel, or from the graveyard, or from the open sea – after all is over, and I am gone.  Perhaps there is a knowing on down the way – but by then, who cares?  the next horizon is so alluring and this world is but a dream barely remembered in the new dawning.

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Tags: detachment, Living in the Moment, paradox, parenting