Into the Dark and Through

The end of this year seems to have crept up on me quietly with the semester speeding by. This is coupled with the surreality of the year turning into 2010 and being able to remember it becoming 2000 and all of that associated chaos. Because I'm a 1990 child, this was an important decade, one in which the things I remember from the beginning are from my childhood, but the later parts are animated with the experience of actually living them.

I looked at a few top 100 songs of the 2000s lists and the songs from early in the decade seem so far back to the point of parody. All of them are part of some ridiculous youth that is barely comprehensible now. Things begin to get shady in the middle. The line between childhood and young adulthood is vague and hard to comprehend and things like the years attached to songs are not necessarily reflective of their engagement with my consciousness. Still, around 2005 it becomes hard to tell. My sister was born in 2006 and I still remember the songs I sang to her when she came home from the hospital, Death Cab For Cutie and other songs that caught in my chest as I rocked her on the porch. Those songs are part of my living and feeling.

So now it's almost the end of the year. I'm still at school, still sorting out the last few days before I hop a train back for a few weeks, spend a few days in the bed which does not feel like mine anymore, see my arts group friends, catch up with a world that is overfull and busy and I no longer have a real space in. And then I'll come back here. To snow so cold my face turns pale and pink at once, and love and warmth that illuminates me from my core.

I try to remember. Try to be aware of how and when things change, when, as my adviser says, I found the last piece of the puzzle, understood the answer that was there all along. I try to notice and remember so that I can keep changing and growing, keep singing and looking out at the sun.

It's not always easy, but usually I can sing even when the sky goes gray for months.

Swinging With Your Eyes Closed

I am sitting on the floor of the dance studio, my body limp in the arms of a friend. As she moves my arms to the side, my head flops over. My legs move gently, not of my accord or her direct intent, but they do.

She moves me again. Again, my body moves, not just the parts she touches. All my muscle tension is released and she is supporting my weight. I've even begun to learn to release my core. And suddenly, here it is. Movement.

Today, I realized that my body is a unit, a whole and that what happens to one area of it affects other areas. I am connected and complete, even when I don't feel it.

My friend pushes me to sitting and then lifts me upward. Over a half foot taller than I am, she easily pulls me to my feet and proceeds to guide me around the room, sweeping motions, suddenly running. Suddenly, I am a child on the swings, my eyes closed, the world falling away. I feel a breeze in the closed up classroom. The tiny room is suddenly spacious, without walls, a flat-grounded field. Scared, I know there are walls and I don't know where they are or what direction we're moving in, but I trust anyway. My body is now a whole unit with hers, for this time.

We swing through the studio, stop as others cross our paths, all this of her accord. I move my feet without direction and take her cues. To lose control in trust is a new space. The day was warm and afterward I walked through campus with friends, laughing at the way we crept through the space as a group, the small dangers, the comfort. We climbed the hill away from the crew house, past the pond and I kept the sense of swinging, of light, alive inside me as long as I could, sensing the difference in the moment.

Seasons

A few hours of morning sun, watching rugby on the pitch this morning, clapping and yelling, and I feel brighter. The trees rise so high above everything around us that the bodies on the field are even harder to track, lost against the green. Except the green is changing and things are turning orange and red, glowing, and I hope that my light is coming back. After a week and a half of struggling through the days, today I feel like smiling. The sun was hot on my back even though it was only 50 degrees outside and I warmed my way into the day.

A snack, a nap, a little bit of reading, and I am feeling like myself. Above that, in articulating the truth of who I am, of who we were and are, I am less sad. I have lost nothing. I have gained the vast openness of artistic companionship, of wonder for wonder's sake. Maybe this is the best I could ask for. I am writing poems that know the Spring is coming, even though we are on the brink of Fall. Spring is inside of me.

Maps

How do we learn to navigate our spaces? I am learning that in the space of hurt, there is so much more than hurt, and not necessarily only bad. Even in the spaces of hurt, there is love. Because only when we care, when we love, can we be hurt; only when we care do we realize the impact of how we are able to hurt. Everything tied up.

Today was grey and cold and I didn't sit on the dock, but I rolled down the hill by the boat house with classmates, laughing dizzily. Contact improvisation is all about giving - of self, of weight, of so much and the people in it are kind and funny. I have a great appreciation for the work we do there and how it is building on itself.

Can I navigate my spaces in my spinning head-space, in dizzy laughter? Is that the space I exist in, which needs grounding or can I fly through it, supported by the weight of other hands, but always knowing my own center? I think CI might be a large metaphor. I grow and dance and write metaphor and revel in a space navigated as much through similarity as difference.

Purposes

Today is a morning for sitting on the dock. I wonder if these mornings will still be like that when it gets cold and the water is frosted over in the morning when I leave for dance class. But for today, it is still warm enough and it is a morning for sitting on the dock, watching the ducks, the ripples rising, listening.

The dock is one of those peaceful places on campus that is so easy to miss. It's something that is overlooked because of the pond as a whole, or because you only show up at the wrong time of day - on weekends or mid-afternoons when people are laughing noisily, when the campus is bustling. But in the morning, only people who have classes are in motion, on their way to settling down again. In the Crew House next to the dock, a dance class continues on. Music drifts down. Everything is still here. Nothing is still. The pond isn't a pond. It's part of a river rushing onward at other points, but pooling here. Appreciate the pause. Be part of it. There is a reason for its rest.

Come to your spaces and be in them for what they are. Touch the water and know that it is cold and full of life. I found the docks in a louder peace, picnicking with friends on a half deserted campus one afternoon during a power outage. I return to it now, with life everywhere around it, and sit by myself, without their songs and laughter, with a different kind of song, a different kind of laughter.

Songs for Daylight, Rain, and Other Occasions

I am full of music. My little sister had taken my guitar for a few months of lessons, at the end of which she was able to play Old McDonald Had A Farm with moderate success. It has now been returned and I can play enough chords to play some songs. Playing reminds me that all I really want to do is sing. I love to sing, am filled by the notes, even if they are not all on key.

Ingrid Michaelson's "A Bird's Song" has been a favorite of mine today, and then, tonight as I searched for more, The Weepies "Painting By Chagall" and The Lucksmiths "Guess How Much I Love You."

"It's a mean town, but I don't care. Try to steal this. Can't steal happiness."
That's from Happiness, also by The Weepies, and so much how I'm feeling. In this cluttered place, flipping itself over in its determination to figure out if it is safe or hostile, I am feeling really happy for the first time in a long time. Making plans for my return to school, to friends. Leaving this behind.

I would stay up all night singing if I could, walk the streets, sing out my window. Music may be all the space I need for myself right now. Recordings of the rain that fell so heavily today, drowned out by Tegan and Sara and air conditioners. A spider wove a web outside my window in the downpour, beneath the ledge of roof, a wall of rain closing him in. I watched the spider skirt its way seemingly through midair. Everywhere around me are springing up silken safety nets. If I fall - and I will - those will be my landing place.

Good morning, evening.

Good morning, evening. I drift sleepily through my days with the sticky hands of childhood, the gloss of glue and ice cream. On the edge of my second year of college, things are changing. I am changing in some strange forward-backwards process. I see an old self inside of a new self, a laughing girl inside of a confident young woman, but even more, a twirling ballerina inside of a determined writer, a wonder-eyed child inside of an analytical, metaphorical growing self.

I am glad to move into this new writing space, even as I work determinedly to fill notebooks by hand. The Sunrise Blog is a place for noticing, for being alive. It is a place for asking questions. I read that if you can ask a question, you can also answer it. This does not demand accuracy, but rather the willingness to let you mind imagine a possibility to fill that blank. I also read this quote this summer, from Robin Hemley's memoir Nola:

"... not knowing is an answer, just as much as knowing is an answer, the way we say the words of a prayer, and sometimes we don't understand the words of the prayer of its true meaning, but we know what to say at the end of the prayer. We say amen."

And we do. Over and over we say amen, agree, call out in reply to the world that whispers the words to that prayer in our ears.

Good morning, evening. It's time to settle into night and tomorrow I can watch the world change again, like the sky turning itself a shock of gray this afternoon, gusting, but clear in spots, and suddenly opening into rain. I am opening into these days with the patience of Job, which is perhaps not patience at all, but the willingness to remain faithful in my impatience.