Saturday, June 20, 2009

Happy Feet

Bruised knees
Bent back
Pounding Pulse
Brisk intake
High up the hill, the pace: pound, pound, pound

Round a bend
Then a dip, down, down, down
Stretched back
Sounds, brush, a flicka
Arms pumping the air

Ragweed, hung in the air
Mold on wet trees
Long grass
Splash, splash, mud on ankles
Deep breathes, breath, breath, breath

A grimace, a smile
Knees, ache
Feet, heels connecting to dirt
Pine needles, rocks, pebbles, gravel
Squish, Squish, Squish

Thursday, June 18, 2009

I chortle in my narrow bed

"Narrow the bed, wide the world. "

It's odd to me how loneliness works a magic in my mind. When I'm alone, as I am for a week while my husband's away, my thoughts often turn to existential questions: Why am I here? Am I happy? My thoughts make a mental exercise of wondering where I'd be if I was single and if this now narrow bed of mine was the totality of my existence.

Someone, who never married (and who at 45 was heading off on another trip to India), once told me the above quote: "Narrow the bed, wide the world." The quote then, and now, got me thinking about marriage, and how, while it offers solace and extinguishs loneliness, does narrow one's world a bit. When you're single and your bed is narrow, you're pretty much free to go wherever you please, whenever you please.

To a certain extent, marriage narrows one's world. I don't spend as much time thinking about art, science, and meaning as I once did. Now I've traded those thoughts for worries about my bank account, when we should move out of the city, and if we should have children. When I was single I dreamed about trips to exotic locations, study in marvelous, oak paneled rooms, and my generation's metaphysical longings. Nowadays my life feels like a series of re-enacted episodes to a boring sitcom.

Currently one of our single friends is living with us and I find myself often thinking about singleness vs. marriedness. I know she'd like to be married and yet I also know she wouldn't be able to travel as much if she was. She recently spent 3 weeks in South America and, while theoretically this is a trip a married couple could take, it would be fiscally irresponsible for us to do something like that now.

Yet, I don't want to shortchange being married. In spite of a perceived lack of deep philosophically considerations, I would say I have grown deeply in touch with my emotions as a result of being married. As a single person I often struggled with how to define my feelings. I walked through life never asking "how do I feel right now." And now, being married, I am much more in tune with how I feel. I think that is a result of having somebody strong to hold me when I cry. Marriage, for me, allows me to feel a little more open to being weepy at life. For me, marriage's deep, rich intimacy makes it possible to dive into those deep, piercing hurts of life, and then allow love and trust to draw them out, weep with them and then shore them up.

In the end, there isn't a clear winner or loser. Being married is just different than being single. I suppose its all just part of the journey we take in life and the milestones we touch along the way: marriage for some, a child for others, perhaps its a heart pounding trip to Machu Picchu. We're not all destined to mark all the milestones along the way, sometimes our paths skirt certain signposts and at other times we deftly reach out and touch their well-worned surface.

Friday, June 12, 2009

The Wild

Trees. Pine. Needles beneath feet that walk a forest path. The rough outline of a line mowed down by atvs driven by cheap beer, a trail trailblazed by boy scouts. Children in the khaki uniforms of the post-war fifties walking a path now strewn with fern and fur. The smell of pine, the sound of rushing water. The rush of stream, cutting through the forest. The water making its way, regardless of impediment, for its destiny, the ocean. And the ocean WIDE and welcoming. Headwaters, then stream, then river, straining to be welcomed by the great water, the ocean. And the ocean, so gentle, pushing back, gently with the tide.

That is water; this is wild, the dank smell and the rushing noise. The same water that comes streaming from the tap and gently covers us in ours bath. The water we drink and in which we swim, gently paddling, weightless and surrounded.

The beauty of a place like the United States is that there are still places where you can drive an hour from a city and find yourself in this wooded place: a mile from an empty, abandoned campground, 5 miles up an empty dirt road, surrounded, engulfed in wildness. Sometimes I feel like this is the BEST part of living in America, this wildness.

I don't think about being in America much, which is probably really an American thing to think. In fact because of an unfortunate thing, most people think I'm not American to begin with. So I've grown up unattached to America (which is also probably really American). I'm not nationalistic or patriotic. I don't like America any better than other countries and to be truthful I have never felt very "American."

But when in I'm in the woods, in the wild, and I can still feel faintly the fog of a former people, tracking through this land as they hunted or the sound of wind in the trees with no people at all, that's when I think most of the idea of America. That love for the wild things; the love for adventure that drove people to embrace this wide, wild country. I know, out in the woods, that in my heart runs the blood of those people, who stretched out their hands to a new land, and then another, stretching, out of curiousity and fear, for the wild.