The breathing lessons of the times are changing towards the recovery found in the tumult of light. Day leaves her perspective in every excellent yoga posture.
They speak of the human being. The leaves, well they meditate. I think of the almost jubilant constellations. Of how generous and self-aware they are even in the width of a thread. I think of all the perfect intentions of my mother towards her daughters. How I have forgiven her for every newcomer translation. The day is like the mystery found in an ice cream milkshake, like the all the boring clouds. All is quiet.
All is still. Year’s end replanted in snow, in earth, in clay, in sand, in fallen kingdom at the end of the world. I think of my childhood. My childhood sea has become desolate now. I think of the namesake and his inheritance and I think of mercy great and magnificent and few and abundant as the miracles in wildflowers. How substantial they are as intelligence.
And you are always confidently wonderful in all that you do, in every field, every harvest that you have inherited. How to express happiness or even sadness, how to wait for an answer to prayer, the elegant solution. You are cool depth once in a lifetime, nuance found in straw and thread and hemline and article, style interwoven into the fabric of the stars. He is as calm as the ocean. He is my voyage into eternity to the stars and beyond, inside the music room, the hidden life in spontaneity. This is a letter to God. For what God has started in my life is this. To see the world. The cold bonds of snow has melted into water. Snow has witness, grief, sonnets and every kind of bold transition. Isn’t this God.
The circus of the alphabet grills me when I have a discussion with my mother.
What motivates me is God. Still in the matters and energies of the air. I think of how cold the world is sometimes. How aloof and standing on edge the mountains.
I think of the dust with admiration. It has lived for centuries. This dazzling admiration is built like a museum. Let me communicate what I think that God wants to communicate. That I am a writer without a competitive spirit. That it is in my very nature to be poet.
This is when she identified that the change happened. When she stopped writing poetry and discovered a second novel there on the page of a diary. She glimpsed her childhood.
She didn’t really want to ever see that part of herself again. All that regret. All her potential. The self-denying wilderness. The heartache, heartbreak and the angels that she found there. God gave her a father, gave her gold and an obsession to write. It was all she ever thought about. To write. There are some things you never forget.
A woman has a long memory for painful things, painful subject matter.
Where does this dance come from, she asked herself. Sometimes it seemed as if it came from deep within her, deep inside of her of her stomach and her lungs, drawing her to the energies and matter of women who lacked a kind of mother love for her. That was what she wanted.
A mother to tell her that she was proud of her. A mother to brush her hair. To cook and clean for her. A mother to listen to her. Take notice of her. All of these things were impossible for her own mother locked in her own battles and struggles, her own elegant depression.
She wanted to tell her mother, well, I’ve achieved, won’t you love me for that. If nothing else, love me for that. In return, her mother said, you don’t belong to me. You are not mine. I don’t want you. I don’t know how to love you. At this admission from all her mother’s actions the girl began to achieve for her father. But he was locked in his own adamant battles and struggles, his own elegant depression. She turned from the narcissistic mother to the sun of her father. Her mother’s sun was cold and aloof, indifferent to her.
Only woke at the distress signal and her cry of failure. Then her mother would turn around and say, See, I told you so. I told you that you couldn’t do it. You’re too intellectual, just like your father.
And the girl took those words and broke her heart, broke her spirit, broke the atlas of her world, destroyed and sabotaged herself until she found someone to love her and her sadness, self-doubt and insecurity and regret faded away into non-existence. The world shifted. She stopped listening to that critical inner voice. She became what she always wanted to be. A poet. And she discovered her mother had been a girl too with dreams and goals and plans and a vision to either be an actress or a tennis star.
And she began to weep for what they had both lost, mother and daughter, their battles and their struggles and their elegant depression. In her own way, the daughter realised the mother had only been protecting her from the wilderness. She became obsessed with her mother. You are never to write about me, daughter. That is an agreement set in stone. The daughter agreed to this halfheartedly never once forgetting the harm her father had perhaps done to her mother, the safety net he was to her when he chose her above his wife.
When his adoration turned to admiration not for her, his wife but for his daughter. His complex became his daughter’s complex as did his philosophy about life and his education.
And as his daughter’s intellect grew, she grew further away from her mother who didn’t know how to love someone who was so like herself.
She turned away from the universe that her mother offered her and held onto the particles and the dimensions of beauty and gratefulness that she acquired from her father to the light for all the daughter’s life.
She turned away from narcissism, but discovered that grandeur could be vulnerable too. When her mother became elderly, she forgave her mother because she finally understood her reasoning. Sometimes it was hard to let the tears fall, but she did and she took her mother’s hand, still beautiful and said to her, you light my path, lit all my paths like a searchlight.
