Heart Rhythms and Sawdust Memories

In a room filled with sawdust,
each fragrant inhale is a pleasant reminder
of something being created.
If the light shines
in the right spot,
it can be hard
not to get dizzy
from the way the dust rides the air,
the way each particle
adds texture to the moment:
everything's blurry,
slightly out of focus.
The colors blend a little,
painted by
the settling sawdust,
and the balance of hues
creates an imbalance in heart rhythm –
an intoxicating moment of peace.

I could fall asleep.
The safeness I feel,
here in this room,
smelling the textured air
now painted with memory as well as debris,
it's never been quite so easy to slip
into my dreams.
The walls were never so welcoming,
the details never so unimportant.
(My yesterday had a flickering light,
reflecting off of and back into the room.
Maybe that spot is covered now
with the film of
those pieces of things we broke in frantic creation,
maybe all the new details
 have diverted attention,
but it doesn't bother me now.)
 

Carved Boxes and Open Palms

I'm dealing with an absence of things to say, things to think, as though my life has stored its meaning in a carved wooden lockbox because the beauty of it seemed to rest on some complementary frequency but thoughtlessly misplaced the key, leaving the two of us, my life and me, to sit and stare at this work of art wordlessly, afraid to speak lest it be something inane and offensive.  We'd like to actively hope for a means to access the meaning it holds within itself, but more frequently the delicate woodwork and the stained iron of the lock leaves us in a state of hypnosis.  (Keys do not walk themselves to open palms, yet here we sit with our wrists askew, waiting for a weight to fall into our fingers).

We tell a story  – or I do anyway, as my life nods along – of someone who knows where and who to be, of someone who might have lost a key but broke the hinges or manipulated a paper clip because meaning was all too important to be left stagnant in cedar.  This someone is as oblivious to what the future holds as we are, as afraid, as happy to sit and wait for something to come to her, but she is also certain that there is more, some undiscovered fulfillment in the pursuit of dreams and the wild pull of ambition. She sweats when only breath is demanded and bleeds when they call for sweat.

In moments of disenchantment, she grabs onto shards of broken hope and turns them into prisms, which then turn her the temporary relief of her moments of optimism into a mesmerizing splendor – dreams of dancing with green and purple to watch them envelop her in yellow, blue and red instead.

The words of her flow out of me and into the air to settle in the intricate carvings of the box, which now balances atop a bench beneath the readied swing of hammer, the beauty ready to be traded for meaning though not without intent to find beauty in the aftermath.

Rocks and Dreams

When you’re little, the future's far way; the dreams are vague, unspecific. You don’t know what you want because you don’t know what it looks like, what it tastes like. You want a future, but you don't know which combination of things it will be.

From there, it's trial and error. It's going into a thick forest and checking under every rock, every log, and every bed of flowers that could be hiding that little thing that makes the forest worth it, moments of fleeting happiness like scents guiding you to the prize.

Then you get older, and the hunt gets more frenzied: what if you don't find it, happiness? What if it's not there? Because you start turning over rocks and not liking what you find, or liking it but needing more or, worse, getting a peek of something you like underneath a rock that’s excruciatingly difficult to move, and the effort just wears you out until you sit down, defeated, broken.

But it's not all digging and breaking down and digging again, seeing the scrapes on your knuckles and the dirt under your fingernails. Sometimes it's looking at the rock and just knowing that it's there, holding onto something wonderful like it's saving it just for you, and then stopping. Breathing. Stretching. Reaching up for the skies and letting the leaves turn the wind into music.