Monthly Archives: April 2015

Unraveling. {Working with Emotions}

Posted in Wellness, Writing by

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Today, the threads are unraveling and I can’t keep it together.

But spring has announced herself and the flowers are blushing at the peak of their sensuality, all but spilling their scented secrets forth for the world to hear.

And the pigeons come to lounge next to me, even though I have nothing to feed them, satiated, eager and happy to be under this tree, in this spring air.

The threads are unraveling but as they come loose, they catch the luminous rays of sun, taking on hints of the sacred. When they sparkle like this, even my full effacement, looming sure and strong, isn’t a threat, but a truth pacified by the purity of day.

The threads are unraveling but imagine a bird at the moment of emergence, and how it is blinded and terrified as shafts of light angle in and its warm home starts to crack and fall away.

And then the tiny, fluffy bird discovers it can walk, and then fly.

To say nothing of the Monarch, that beauty queen of colour and shape that waits on the other side of collapse.

Today a dizzy awareness floods in—it’s porous and all-encompassing, first tinted and then overwhelmed by nostalgia, for sunny days like this, but on mountaintops, and in the thinnest, most dazzling air.

The sensation is so great, I fear I will drown in the waters of what was, of the all-that-has-been I’ve since spun into gold.

Nostalgia tries to patch me back together again, and because it never will, I am thrust back into here-and-now, and come face to face with the fabric coming undone and tumbling everywhere, and I find what my deepest heart tells me is the wisdom of pure potential, untarnished by any thought of what is supposed to be, of what I allegedly am.

But today, I can’t see into that space that takes me to emptiness and clear thought.

The sun doesn’t wash me back into wholeness.

Instead, my stomach, busy with the work of trying to digest a lifetime of things-shoved-down, cries out in alarm and keeps me rooted in a body that shakes and feels clingy and unsure.

My stomach, keeper of dim old memories, comes with me for a walk and watches the pigeons settle in around me, and accompanies me as I observe children learning how to play catch.

They throw and receive, shriek with joy, and fall and bounce back again.

And then I stop resisting this great undoing.

I watch the frayed edges catch the yellow light of the waning afternoon sun.

Leaves hang overhead, a green awning that would be a trusted cushion if I climbed up there.

I allow myself, at least for now, to be warmed.

*This article was first published in Some Talk of You and Me.