morning pages
I am made of fire and water and these parts of me are ever at odds with one another
I've begun a process of going through my old “morning pages", those fragmented, drifting thoughts from an early morning mind. There’s something pure and raw in them I enjoy, perhaps you will too.
Today is March 11th. Last night I slept twelve hours and woke to pounding rain on the roof, again. It hasn’t stopped raining in nine days and there is no end in sight. I listen to Undone in Sorrow by Ola Belle Reed. I remind myself that everything is temporary. I drink coffee and smoke a joint and stare at the canvas, thumbing a chunk of charcoal, as I ponder what wants to be.
I am drowning in the rain, in the air as thick and humid as a slice of fresh sourdough bread, so thick I feel I am breathing in something solid and real and mammalian into my lungs. I remember being in the high country of New Mexico and how thin the air was, like I couldn’t ever gulp down enough of it that first night in the cabin, my sleep restless and fitful as I would drift off, then suddenly awake with a gasp as my brain adjusted to the lack of oxygen. Here, I am gluttonous. I may be poor in money but Gods, I am rich in oxygen. Gelatinous, heavy, salty sea air that penetrates so deeply if you cut me open you’d find brine in the marrow of my bones.
What is it about me that yearns for extremes? The razor’s edge of life where I stand on the margins, balancing the incomprehensible. What is it about me that pushes myself to know what I am capable of? I have fasted for days, just to know who Hunger was. I run, lungs gasping for air, and my mind says more. My lover wraps his strong hands around my throat and my eyes say more. My heart swings like a pendulum from the drowned depths of this godforsaken coastline to the high desert steppe with her dusty roads and cracked clay.
I wonder if I make the move permanent, how I will adjust. If I will mourn the sea or if she will become a part of my past just like some old lover that I can think fondly of but no longer miss. Will I make pilgrimages to bathe my soul in salt? Or will I assimilate to red dirt and nights so clear and vast I sprout wings out of my back and take to the skies?
I follow owl feathers and dreams and the prophecies made by my childhood self more than I trust the best laid plans others try to make for me. I am stubborn and strong but not unyielding, like a willow branch I like to think. I can bend and not break. I can carry the weight.
I am all fire and water and these parts of me are ever at odds with one another, each threatening to smother the other, the proverbial angel and devil on each of my bare freckled shoulders.
Out here, the water has her way with me. I sleep ten hours a night and dream like it’s my full time job. I wander the coastline and collect tendrils of seaweed and shells and make abstract driftwood sculptures. Under the moon, I pass through walls of mist as thick as castle walls as I drift along the sandy dunes. I live in this temperate rainforest that is so green and fecund that my boots are never not covered in mud that squelches under my feet.
This place is soft, like the ceaseless mat of lime green moss under my feet when I race barefoot beneath the snake barked spruce trees. This place is dark and dense, like you are always underwater even when you’re not. It will consume you if you let it, take you over, wrap your body in the roots of licorice fern and lichen until you are as unmoving as a cedar. I wonder how many of the trees behind my house, trunks burly and wide, were once two legged souls with ribcages and tendons until one day they laid down in the moss and never got back up. What kind of tree would sprout from my body? What kind of mycelium would take hold, threading in between my fascia and muscle? The longer I’m here the closer I feel I am to finding out. Days go by where I don’t leave my house, I don’t speak to another soul, I wander the forest in silence and wool and come home drenched and quiet and older.
I am fire and water and these parts of me are always at odds with one another. The part of me that is born of water is content to disappear. She does not want to be perceived. She is not of this world and thus her needs are different. She does not seek validation. Her primary value is in connection with the unseen, in the flow state that emerges within her when she is by a rushing river or the pounding sea. She is an old woman, a gnarled branch, timeless, eternal. Timeless, but not still. No, she is a current, flowing. The current does not concern itself with where it is going, and neither does she. She doesn’t need control, doesn’t need to have the answers, the movement alone is her medicine. This watery part is so deeply feminine, so comfortable in the darkness. She exists in the canal, in the cave, in the chasm. She understands the knowledge that comes from not knowing.
The part of me that is fire craves to be seen. She is lawless and untamed and chaotic like the winds rushing through the arroyo and the thundering hoofbeats of a herd of horses across an open plain. Sometimes, I think she lets herself be fenced in, just to taste the thrill of escape. Freedom is sweeter when earned.
She is the child in me, playful and pure and honest. She has so many ideas they swirl around her as she twirls like a dervish, laughing. She is the child who would swing higher and higher on the playground, close her eyes, and jump - just to imagine for a moment that she was flying. Sometimes she really believed she could, if she ran fast enough, if she jumped high enough. That is a currency she is never short of - Belief. I fucking love her for that.
My fire self is hungry, always, for more, because she knows it’s out there. She values freedom and expression above all else. She wants wide open spaces, clear skies, and a sun so strong it would kill a weaker man. She can take it. Lets it fill up her every atom with light until she’s burning as bright as a bonfire. If I let her, she’d burn herself up just to feel what it was like. Her favorite forms of pleasure have a lick of pain in them, just so she can feel that she’s really alive. She’ll throw the first punch. She’s not afraid to bleed. She’s a shot of whiskey, a howl, the raw blisters on my hands from hard work. She is a dare incarnate. Her existence is a love letter to life.
