the material for which we don't yet have language
#17 - third dispatch from the summer residencies
this week was a flurry of activity. summer course kicked in and email correspondence increased. TA-ships begin next week.
this week some latent anxiety reared its head for no recognizable reason, lurking in the shadows of my everyday. i had some bad sleeps. eating was challenging. i stretched more often. i napped.
this week i received yet another manuscript rejection. i stopped counting a few emails back. i read it without much emotion, just the thought, “guess i’m waiting a little longer.”
when time folds like a falling deck of cards i don’t have a specific posture i feel committed to. so the thoughts change too. they flutter and flit, morphing into new postures as needed. the language is looser, rolling onto its back and belly as it sees fit.
these are not weeks for making. they are weeks for getting by and weeks for leaning into the living. i don’t think about creative. i feed myself. i stretch. i sleep.
excerpt from writing exercise from week #3 of Narrative Shifts: on permissions
2. what are you waiting for?
for the words to emerge and move through the world. the words already spoken. already on the page. already formatted. serif. size 12.
healing is its own story. witness is its own space. an other story. an other space. if this is true. then i’m not sure what i’m waiting for. maybe i want to find out. maybe i want to say them out loud to a room of people and watch the flowers bloom. maybe it is a different kind of honouring and i haven’t drawn the lines as cleanly as i’ve said. maybe it is desire for a goodbye, but on my terms. which is unfair. but also, declaratively, it was always about me. this life. even the goodbye. it was always about me.
the waiting is not static. life is moving. a rush in my lung i can’t properly describe. there is a part in me waiting. rushing and waiting. seed? root? verge. edge. line.
the freewrite feels like prophecy. like atmosphere. like rain. anticipatory. lingering. i think very little and feel in detachment. everything is necessary. the dishes. the laundry. combing out the tangles on my rabbits. long commutes. pollen.
i don’t hate it. i am learning to live life by reading the waves and making choices. i learned this in surfing class. when to duck and when to ride. that the right wave would give me a chance to press my toes and aspire to reach the shore. that walking back into the water would always be more exhausting than i imagined. that i could make it. that it might be different. that there might be lift. this excitement moved me. this action hurt my knees. that the salt in my hair reminded me of every other time the salt has been in my hair and of those times i have only good memories. i will live out this one too. as much as my knees can give. i can only work with what i know and hope for the landing. the days in between i call the sift.
People were nothing to that bird, hovering over
the creek. I was nothing to that bird, which wasn’t
concerned with history’s bloody battles or why
this creek was called Drowning Creek, a name
I love though it gives me shivers, because
it sounds like an order, a place where one
goes to drown. The bird doesn’t call the creek
that name. The bird doesn’t call it anything.
I’m almost certain, though I am certain
of nothing. There is a solitude in this world
I cannot pierce. I would die for it.
from “Drowning Creek”, by Ada Limón