I’m trying a new thing where I do all my writing on the same day I publish, in the hope that I will feel less pressure to have a month’s worth of drafts ready to go at any given time.
Usually at this point of a project, I quit…but I’m not going to this time.
However, I did decide to write something REALLY AMBITIOUS the same day I was planning to publish it and it took too long…so I’m a day late, and this is less polished than perhaps it should be.
I hope you will forgive me, and I hope you enjoy.
-A
Synchronize Watches
I know exactly what I’m looking for when I open the music app on my phone, but the album is never easy to find—the Algorithm is still trying to get me to branch out, but it’s not my real dad and (even if it was) I don’t care what it thinks. So I spend a few minutes cursing and scrolling, before typing into the search bar S-L-E-E—autofill does the rest. Ah…here it is.
I never play the album in order, it’s always on shuffle, so every listening experience preserves a little sliver of that original anticipation—what song comes first? what song comes next?
For Your benefit, though, this time I have chosen.
If the song is new to You, I invite You to listen to it once on your own first.
Then play it again as You read the rest of this entry. I’ve made an effort to time it with the music, though it obviously won’t be perfect.
Beginning.
As the music gets going, I stand.
I unzip the bag that holds my yoga mat and remove the loose bundle.
I unfurl the cerulean foam, flattening it to the floor with my foot, and I begin to move.
Slowly at first, allowing my body to take on the loose and spacious feeling of day-break. I sway and my limbs move with the chimes, as if we were carried by the same current. I hear the birds chatter, as if I were the late riser at a childhood sleep-over and they were my friends, conversing with low excitement in a failed attempt at conscientiousness.
I dream in phosphorescence…
As the lyrics begin, I circle my shoulders backward, my muscles crackle, and I sink deeper into that feeling of childhood. I think of how bright everything was. Every experience was shiny and new and vibrant, even the dark ones. Every occurrence was a mystery or a miracle to me, and I aspired to the knowledge and conversation seemingly shared among those god-like beings known as adults. They always knew where to go, who to talk to, what things meant. But I often felt out of sync, like the adults had forgotten to tell me something important. Or worse, that they were keeping it from me.
I shift my weight, circling my shoulders forward now as relaxation begins to set in and I think of a dear friend, who just became a mom earlier this month. I think of how young my parents were when I was born, and of my frazzled experiences of adulthood and I realize—again—that adults have no idea what they’re doing, that no one is actually in charge, and they never have been.
But we pretend, and I realize that was the secret the adults were keeping from me as a child.
They were all pretending.
The music shifts slightly; lyrical foot steps, underscored by ethereal echos. Standing on my yoga mat, I become suddenly conscious of my breath, my heart, and how they propel my movements. I stretch my arms up to the sky, then sweep them down to the ground, momentum carrying my torso in its wake until I am hanging upside-down.
I know my parents did their best; they pretended their hardest, so I would have no reason to fear. They were not the gods that they seemed to me to be. They were tired, and they were scared, just like all adults are. And just like all adults are, they were more powerful than they knew, and my teeth are sharpened in their image.
Take me back to Eden.
The music surges. I am reminded of the sheer physicality of childhood rage, the dizzying fierceness of a hurricane whirling around its own center, the wrenching ache of homesickness, and the violence of longing for what you do not know.
Take me back to Eden.
It’s intense.
And subsiding.
I spit blood when I wake up…
The music shifts again, it’s urban and sardonic.
Still upside-down, I plant my hands on the mat and walk them forward as blood rushes to my head. Yoga-folks call this pose ‘downward dog’ and (for some reason) I imagine a mangy mutt begging for scraps on a hot New York City sidewalk. I’ve never been to New York. I imagine it’s kind of terrible, but honest with itself, and I respect that.
The lyrics here are evocative, aggressive, defensive. They float and snap and burn and plead. I can relate. As I now know, this is what adulthood feels like when you’re pretending.
There’s a particular lyric that hits me like a sucker-punch:
Godmother, rise up, I need you to see me for what I have become.
The music moves me to stand and flail about (not technically a yoga move), and I think of how we humans often call for our earthly mothers when our bodies are helpless—whom do we call for when our spirits are imperiled? When one’s being has been shaped by a lifetime of permission from others, to whom can one go for permission to be one’s Self?
I imagine Nature’s patient violence simmering inside me, as it simmers inside every living thing, and the images of the proverbial Godmother and of Mother Nature begin to merge in my mind. Whose weapons are my teeth? Who decides what I use them for?
The music softens—I stand still and outstretched.
I can weirdly, sort-of detect a fierce and fecund feeling deep inside me…existing, stirring; a part of me that, at some point, had to go to sleep to ensure the rest of me could survive in the world.
Is it waking up?
I take a moment to breathe.
I guess it goes to show, does it not, that we’ve no idea what we’ve got until we lose it…
With my arms spread wide, I remember the person I was as a child; as a teenager; as a young adult. I remember who I was a year ago, and who I am now; how devastatingly different each of those people are, and how no amount of love anyone ever had for any version of me was ever enough to keep me from changing.
And whenever I changed, I sensed that I had lost any right to the love I had earned—they loved who I had been, not who I was then—until each new instance of Becoming felt like death, until I stopped trying to Become at all.
I toss my head back. My arms drop, but my body holds its tension as if suspended from a wire. My face contorts, my fists clench, I shake and shudder and I can’t tell whether I’m doing it on purpose. I imagine I am a wolf, gnawing off my own leg to escape a trap. How much rage, and fear, and pain is required for survival? I imagine dragging myself back to the scene of the crime night after night, intending to rip the throat out of a trap-laying villain, but the trap had been long abandoned, and, either way, I have three legs now.
I stand tall, stretch myself, taking up as much space as I can with my body and as much space as I can with my spirit—a rolling bass drum, like a skipped heart beat, triggers a musical crisis. I arch my body every-which-way, a wacky-waving-inflatable-tube-lady filled with viscera and feeling.
And I remember that I’ve survived every hard time I’ve ever had. So have we all who still breathe. I realize that life just doesn’t (and probably shouldn’t) ever get easier—the hardest times of all are still ahead of me, and in all likelihood I will survive them too.
I think about how every trial has ultimately increased me, and about how much increasing I have left to do.
I think about how much I have yet to Become.
And about how much it will hurt.
And about all the things that make hurting bearable.
I will travel far beyond the path of reason. Take me back to Eden. Take me back to Eden.
The song ends violently, as it should.
Life is a violent process. To think otherwise is delusion.
Life, and the pain that goes with it, is the price of Apotheosis. You will pay it, whether or not you claim the reward—but Apotheosis is also the way back to Eden.