Cycles

As I pulled into my driveway this morning after running errands, I saw two impatiens blossoms, white and open as full as any jazz trumpet, waving in the morning breeze to greet me.  Add these gracious hosts to the still vibrant lilac blooms on the butterfly bush by my back gate and the lurid pink mouths of the sweetheart roses near the door, and no one would believe we were midway through October.

These flowers and their extravagant shocks of color woke me up this morning to an idea that's been tickling at my brainstem for awhile but wouldn't quite come into focus until now.  I've been thinking so much about timing lately, about seasons, about the cycles we follow by rote, the ones we follow blindly, the one we adhere to without even realizing they exist, and the ways those cycle dictate a life to us that may not be the one that is most authentic to us as individuals.

Katherine Anne Porter wrote: “There seems to be a kind of order in the universe, in the movement of the stars and the turning of the earth and the changing of the seasons, and even in the cycle of human life. But human life itself is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own rights and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.”  


If she is right--and my life over the last couple of years certainly dictates that she is--and we are all living lives of almost pure chaos, then our feigning rightness, order, and certainty must be a huge part of what contributes to humankind's general unhappiness.


I have many friends in the throes of crisis today, personal, professional, internal, external, tangible and intangible, and at the heart of all of that suffering--and at the heart of my own--lies an overwhelming need to do what we all feel we "should" as opposed to doing what we want.  I keep wondering what it is that has convinced us all that we don't deserve the joyous lives we envision for ourselves, what keeps us running around the track, chasing a mechanical bunny that never slows down, that always eludes us, that never ever ever satisfies.


And then, I think about my flowers.  The rose and butterfly bushes are perennial, meant to return each year, but they are both far past their blooming season, and by all practical calculation the impatiens, an annual flower I plant each spring because their bobbing blooms always seem like nature nodding yes to me whenever I want to scream no, should really be dead by now.  But they're not.  These flowers aren't adhering to any cycle that seeks to see them wilt, die out, shrivel, or go underground for another year.  These flowers are blooming--blooming!--right here by my door, reminding me that the only limits to my own blossoming are the ones I set for myself.  


Today, I choose color and life and beauty, joy and brightness and blooming.  I hope you, dear reader, do the same.

Information

"Play with the information you have and decide what it really means."--overheard in a meeting today

The information I have is written on my body, patterns of freckles and a birthmark that only appear when I've had sun.  When read by the perfect reader, it shows where I've been and who I am on my way to becoming.  My hair, graying at the temples--accelerated these last few months--a white reminder of fears ability to bleach away color, to remove what was once bright and flecked with gold and replace it with absence.  The deep blue ring around my irises that corrals the other colors, a circle of green bright as any late summer field at sunset, the burnished gold of wheat, a rich brown like river soaked soil, has gotten darker.  Today it is almost black in its attempt to keep the riot in, to stop all the light from seeping out.

The information I have won't do anyone any good just yet.  I know what I know and cannot make anyone else know it.  We, teachers, work with an unquantifiable entity everyday and are expected to assess it, nurture it, mold it, educate it, and even feel for it, but the variable no one likes to talk about is buy in.  If they don't buy in to their own right to knowledge, to their own right to power, to their own right to happiness, no amount of Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, or Hurston is going to make them do it.

The information I have about you clings to the soles of my feet. I plant the truth of you with every step, precisely seeding your stories in aerated ground, each raised instep holding a hundred secrets you're not ready to part with just yet, my five toes kissing the earth with words you love, my heels grinding your hurts and sorrows into a fine white dust that blows up and around me with each new gust of early September wind.  When you are ready to hear your own authentic voice again, I will have a grown a garden of you.  It will sing your life in whispered rushes, each new note more graceful than the last.

The information I have means I am a lighthouse, burning in the blackness above an endless crash of ocean sorrow.  Waves breaking like so many birds, silkily rustling up, flushed from their little sanctuary by a force unseen and unseeable.  This water, intent on destruction, will never reach my light so long as the ladder I climb each evening holds.  So, I find my footing and rise, ever vigilant, to prove the promise most of you are terrified may come true: that if you want it enough, if you are willing to brave the rocks, at the end of your journey there will always be light.

The information I have is made not of words but of water, of wind, of color, and of skin.