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diaryland
the darkest times call for the most tender touch
29 April 2008 - 21:43
Newfound resolve led me out on the streets of Portland for my first evening run tonight. Ever since I started last year, I have always run in the morning: running seems like something you do to begin. Sunrise motions, early birdsong. Tonight the streets were almost empty, the air was cool, the sky seemed about to blossom into rainbows. I understand now that it's more than a sunrise maneuver, more and simpler: running is something to do to feel the wind on your face.
I am getting to the point where I can stop running for weeks at a time and resume almost where I left off. My body remembers. That idea applies to more than running.
I never told you about the struggle it took to get to where I am now. For years I barely told anybody, and that almost killed me. But whether my life brought me the most violent emotional tumult or the most terrifying blankness, I always have to type "almost" in front of "killed me." Because that's the extent of what my experiences have been able to do to me. What I can do to myself.
I can't believe how good I've felt this year. And yet, there are days. Days of loneliness, yearning, questioning, doubting, despairing, taking measurements and noting mercilessly all the places where I fall short. Days of feeling like I'm submerged in a black ocean where I don't even know which way is up.
Yesterday on the bus I saw a girl wearing an outfit I might have worn and thought wasn't good enough (those ridculous standards!). And despite being engulfed in fathomless ocean depths, I instantly loved her. Looking at her I felt intuitively that anything I could wear -- any shape I could sculpt my body into and any way I could adorn it -- would be completely acceptable.
The thought that comforts me when I bob about in my dark ocean is that even though all my efforts to represent what I see inside myself will (and must) fail, those efforts comprise an offering to the universe. As waves throw me onto the shore again and again, I hold a small lightning whelk humbly in thin fingers shrunk to prunes by lack of oxygen. The size and condition of my seashell, my heart, means nothing. But the act of trying to bring it to the shore -- the act of sincerely and purely giving myself -- means everything.
And all that I've got
And all that I need
I tie in a knot
And I lay at your feet
-- Joanna Newsom, "Sadie"