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.