A Continuum of Pages

Morning Pages – 2,  6:59 am, 27/9/16

The zone between sleeping and waking is the most powerful space and one I like to hold on to and stretch for as long as I can, before I pass through to the other side of the veil. As I sat here and started to feel dozy again I realized that I was yearning to reconnect to my liminal self all over again. I started to understand my periodic overpowering desire to sleep. To sleep means to cross over and travel. To sleep also means to re awaken, and that means to experience that delicious brief transition. For reasons similar I favor autumn and spring. 

Every sleeping is a waking elsewhere but lately I've often felt that the least tempting place to wake up in, is the here and now.

I have been reflecting on yesterday’s post and looking over a few mails (and have felt impelled to answer them too,) before opening up this arena and starting to weave. And as I come back at 7:53 am after a whole lot of diversions and digressions I realize that this morning pages thingy is really really hard(didn't I call it easy last evening?) And it is a major reality check. Having come out of the liminus – yes coffee tends to do that except when consumed at 2 am, when it sends you back to dreamland if you’re lucky – the kind of writing I do, tends to change. I also understand now that ones best inspiration evaporates, and fitting into a routine or rhythm or discipline such as this would inevitably have its costs in terms of quality.

As I resume typing I smell the smoking guns* and that’s another interrupt to count, as I follow my nose like an animal and slam windows shut. It’s autumn and the wind direction changes by the second and I run around wildly in pursuit of the sinister smoke. I make a mental note for the zillionth time that I need to take this up with some of our cyber ranters who grumble about garbage and bins and what have you. The self styled activists/environmentalists who are also the self-styled guardians of heritage. A few such have been the lice in my hair since a few months. And when I complain people just don’t seem to get where I come from. 

It’s a bubble. How long will it last before a chance insect winging by, punctures it by sheer accident. Yes you need soap, or buttermilk or boiling water in your coffee filter to create those bubbles. As there is no smoke without fire. And way too much smoke when the stuff on fire is trash. I pause and think about the innuendo that has become second nature to me. I once accused (I was about to type I was once accused and I will tell you why in a moment) an old lover of talking in riddles to be told that’s the most convenient way to talk. I believe I am the one who thinks in riddles and those who are close to my heart get a taste of that stream of consciousness through veiled/loaded speech. And they only reflect that back to me in their own shaded, troubled, garbled, distorted OR crystal clear sparkling (yes Kim Raikes for one) mirrors. The mirror is the man, less often the woman. 

I think this exercise becomes productive – heck was that the purpose – only when one lets ones guard down and actually allows the stream to take over. At the risk of its becoming a babbling brook ☺, worse still a torrent. Earlier this week (ooops it is only TYuesday) – I was tearing a passion to tatters. Yes I am frustrated and resentful. Frustrated at not having enough of those I love because they are having too much of someone else. Resentful of the way people make books, enterprises, indeed successes out of nothing at all, while I keep gathering all those drops of precious sweat –  and bottling them to pour into my creative ventures. 

But to come back to being frustrated – if you’re happy I’m happy. But are you happy? What is happiness? Someone once advised me that the best way to happiness was to just BE happy. To just BE anything is the toughest part of all. So is it Let Go and Let Be? What’s the key, the password to that being? Is “being” a state of ennui for one, whereas it is a state of active participation for another? 

As I think of how the wind and weather are subtly changing I keep begging Maine to reclaim me. The autumn leaves and the sunset-to-sunrise magical scenario in the sacred presence of birch smoke. No birches were felled to produce that healing aroma. No – we gathered what had fallen. Did we have a right to gather this when we should have returned it to nature? Do we have a right to cremate when we should rightly bury and return to nature in nature’s own time. Wait – spontaneous fires are also part of nature aren’t they? There are times when the dry crackling birch twigs could auto combust? Are all fires in Maine man-made or do they have forest fires that start off on their own. As always one answer leads to a myriad questions.

I wonder what questions those adolescent Mainers will ask around the Hearthfire (the central "character" in the book). The Tabula Rasa is laid out as the centerpiece in the room. It will fill itself as the evening wears on and sinks into night. And the night will wear on and a group of us will create family and home that one time, in that blessed, blissful liminus. The veils will part and the energies flow. Maine will receive a part of India and India will carry away the bottled essence of Maine receiving India. And will sell it or maybe just give it away. Because people have money for everything except to buy that one book that could actually change their lives.

Because – here is the answer – people are afraid of change. Change has huge human costs. Think of all the brokenness and healing after Brokeback Mountain? 

I tell myself "Keep it Gentle, Girl." K.I.G.G. (not K.I.S.S.) Not a very friendly or pleasant word. There has to be a way of gently taking apart and allowing the coming together, the healing. 

Not every work of art gets as lucky as Brokeback Mountain. There can be only ONE Brokeback Mountain in its place and time. These things are not repeated, not simulated. But my own gentle book needs to be written. Because I need to write it. Because it is about my own affirmation.

Signed off 8:24 am

*"smoking guns" turn up frequently in my posts. They refer to the nasty practice of burning heaps of trash on the sides of roads*