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