Ruh-roh raggy! This was no longer just venting or anything remotely like it. It was plain old story telling. Writers are particularly prone to do this. Occupational hazard. It's one thing to tell a story as a writer. This is something else entirely. It's about garnering sympathy or excusing a foul mood or whatever. And with each telling the details become more real, more true and more immoveable in my head. I become more fixed, more emotionally vested in the story itself, more distant from objectivity. (Science nerd girl shakes her head at that last one).
This particular story was about my life and how there's no time in it, how everything is hard right now blahblahblah. You know the kind I'm talking about. Bo-ring! As Judy begins the massage it hurts. Every point feels too deep, causes flinching and pain. There is no muscular release. That is the very real effect that this particular story had on my body - tightness, restriction, inflexibility, pain. Judy is trying to get out of my why I am like that tonight. Four hours later, I finally have the answer. I am stuck in a story about those very things.
I have to ask myself why the FUCK am I hanging on to this story? I would never write anything so pathetic. So, why should I give it any energy at all? Exactly. What I should have told Judy was that I needed a different kind of massage tonight, one that was more gentle, one that coaxed me to let it all go. What I should have requested was to be loved. Because at the heart of it, that is the piece that I think I have been missing in my life. Not the hearts and flowers love, but the kind that comes from true connection, from allowing vulnerability, from letting down the guard. Maybe the flow of love has been a little one-sided and I am feeling emptied. Maybe that's just another story. See how it all works.
I tell myself over and over how there's not enough time, that I am too busy. And guess what? I find that I AM too busy. So how about I tell myself there's "world enough and time" this week and watch as my schedule opens up to reveal enough time for whatever I dream.
And now to class it up a bit - a poem. No, not one of mine. A classic.
To his Coy Mistress
by Andrew Marvell
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
I struggle with a similar self-induced perspective - that of scarcity instead of abundance. It causes a lot of problems, not the least of which is that I miss out on stuff because it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Excellent poem; I had never read the whole thing before.
ReplyDelete