December 21, 2010

Where Water Takes Me.


It just so happens that when the sun shines the roads dry. And finally today the rains have stopped. While I speak literally, I wonder if it is more of a metaphor. The clouds have parted. And while the heavens have opened up and dropped all they have on us, leaving some of us wading, some of us washed away and some of us homeless, there are the few left untouched on high ground. Moral, or physical. I have rarely been on either, but I am neither floating away nor running for the hills. Slowly making my way to the sea.

Although I have always done this on my own, I have never been alone. No one ever really is. I fill my life with love in many forms and friends from all over. I wonder if there will ever be a river that leads me any where but where I have always been going. This is a river that flows as a stream past a cabin in the woods of my birth. It is the canyons of red stone where this river tumbled, carving away centuries. It is in the ponds I swam in as a child, stranded on a rock stalked by a snapping turtle. It is in the puddles I splashed in with my pink rubber boots and it is in the rain that fell so gently over me in last night's walk with my new best friend (my chocolate ice cream cone). How could that rain, so gentle and romantic rip away mountainsides, came crashing down on homes and wash away roads. It is the water in my life that guides me. When I think about the paths that I have chosen and the choices that I make, I imagine that I blaze these trails on my own. I walk these paths alone. And that I have some control over this river I am riding. Yet today, I wonder why I have taken each of these turns and why I continue to come back to some of the same streams and shores again and again.

Is it the sound the water make splashing over the rock, the way my toes are licked by the icy cold water, the silence in the dark pools under the trees where the stream bends. Or is it the sand that warms under the sun. Where ever there is water weaving and winding between soft shores, I feel at home. I was born next to a stream nearly 8 inches wide. I bathed in a river across the road, swam in ponds and looked out over a glimmering lake from the top of a hill for years. I lived along side the ocean and then by the bay. Then I ran from the mouth of the Yangtze river to follow a path that even I couldn't see. To where I now sit above a gorge that carries the rains from mountaintops to the valley below and then who knows where beyond that. It is there, in the unseen distance, around that next bend that my path lies... even if it keeps brining me back to the same places, the same places that I keep leaving.

December 20, 2010

Words on the Wind


With a hand-drawn butterfly net and leaping free from gravity the way only animation can permit I sweep and swat at nothing again and again depositing what I catch into a woven sack. With each gasp at nothingness I hold tighter the sack, for what does not exist in the wind has substance and weight in my hand.
Catching hold of what is not yet real and making it into something brings out the mother in me, inspires something that is not mine, but yet passes through me. These words on the wind, sometimes only a breeze and at others like a hurricane, wash over me, drip from my eyes and squirm down my face, tickling my cheeks. Dropping like tears for sorrows never felt and wounds never opened, when I let them, words splatter the page and run.
Capturing what is not mine, making it in my image and then releasing it into the universe with shape and form; this is the only thing that makes me feel weightless, untethered. But as I drift I am often pulled back, a tugging at my ankle, like a mythological hand from below. I am returned to my sedation. I am not sure what is more comforting, the weight of my flesh as it contacts the earth or the lightness of my breath when I slow down to breathe in the wind of the ages.

Suffocating in most moments unaware of my bulk, by power and everything, I slide from definition to definition, relation to relation, hour to hour and nothing changes while everything is stuck, but time is walking in circles around me, stalking my movements and my oblivion. Only when I breath does life really exist.
Like the butterflies in my bag, something out of nothing wrestles to be free. When my hand can no longer clench the cord that keeps them trapped safe inside, in a silent fluttering they return, invisible, to the wind where they belong, but now they are mine. Or I am theirs.
*Photo: Petra, Jordan 2010 Sierra Melcher

The Roads We ravel



Radio silence is largely due to a broken camera, because apparently I don't have anything meaningful to say without photographic evidence. Although much has happened on the logistic scale, somehow none of it seems to to really matter at this point. The choices and movements that got me to this point seem hardly worth mentioning now. What seems to be the most relevant at this moments is only the delicious and familiar sound of my fingers hitting keys. The feeling that flows through me and quiets all the internal noise as well as the constant chatter outside my window: the rushing river below and the jingle of a cat's collar that is the only thing that gives away her every movement.

With a breath, the first in months, I breathe into my every move and my every decision. The lessons of late have been unexpected which is perhaps what made each of them challenging and so rewarding in the end. Of course these are the lessons that never end.

The road of Colombia are washed out. As I prepare to travel and many of the people I love are on the move too, I wonder about the paths we travel, the choices we make and the things that really matter in making these lives of ours what they are. Each choice, each move and each risk. Even the little things are little chess moves that advance or limit our options. I have never been very good at chess, but I feel that I am making strides in this game.

May all the roads in front of you lead you safely to the next adventure and lesson. With luck we can see them for what they are and not get distracted by the things that they are not. Travel safe; love yourselves and others well.
*Not my photo (friend of a friend- cell phone pic when the buses no longer pass on roads in Colombia people are still determined to get to where they are going. And the rains keep coming.)