Attending To The Abstract

my heart said let me ride

This morning I had some good old fashioned journal time, taking a table in a sleepy cafe to write loopy cursive with my prized blue ink pen. I intended to make a To Do list—one of my absolute favorite things—but once I uncapped my pen, I knew I needed to get abstract. 

I can always satisfy a set of tasks, but certain feelings can only be approached from the periphery. I don’t want to lose my sideline sight, where energy moves beyond our physical bounds. Gravity tends to sway our attention towards the obvious. Tornadoes drag across the foreground every day. The result is mind shattering. This happens over and over—until there is a loosening, a shimmy, a release. A beckoning to the realm beyond.

It’s impossible to get all the answers from a lateral game, because the squares are already charted with every perceived outcome. You draw a green card, jump three spaces. Someone takes your bishop or you have to sell all your property to defeat the man with monocle and top hat. You can make all the right moves, climb every ladder and ride every chute, only to get knocked off the board with soulless Sorry! 

I’m not looking for predictable game play. I want to shred the old boards, cut the cards into confetti and start celebrating life like a divine mystery. We’re guests at this party, we haven’t met the host’s final form. Instead of picking each other apart for a hint at the unknown, we accept our mortal limitations. A first step in transcending the conditions that divide us. We toast to the answers, knowing there are some we share and some we don’t. We can listen beyond the words, we can hear the history and every emotion that pulses through the ages. We hold each other together in the now, now, now.  

We are three months into the year. We were lucky enough to have a leap day, which can mean nothing or absolutely everything. For me, this first bit of 2024 has been slowly revelatory. It is offering a shape that has yet to find words. There is pleasure in such an amorphous state. I take comfort in the space beyond description—that’s where the divine resides.

What I do know:

+ I turn 31 this month

+ I like the sound of 31 even more than 30

+ When I was younger, I used to see 31 as a big wheel of semi-soft cheese. It was self-contained, well into the ripening process but still tender. It could roll down a hill, it could be spread on a crust of bread, it could be paired with a crisp glass of orange wine. That’s what it must mean to be 31. You know? 

(If 31 is a wheel of cheese, I welcome that—I do love cheese. If 31 is a water bed, a set of pastel paints, a bunch of fresh radishes, I welcome that too.)

And here are a few things more things I know:

+ Feeling out of body confirms you are alive

+ You must always come back to the body

+ Everything is a practice 

+ The divine courses through all of it

---