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The last time I talked to my dad he told me that he had been listening to books on tape. He said it with his natural concoction of pure pride laced with shame. The rumor was always that he couldn’t read- and I believed it because I struggled with dyslexia and adhd until I knew what they were. The best he could do as a kid was copy off of everyone else and hope to squeeze by. He had other talents like drumming and building something where there was nothing before.
We were never close in any sort of real way outside of the ways that I am naturally just like him- the drumming and the building something where there was nothing before. He sure did drag me along like maybe we could be close though- he just needed me to learn telepathy. I’d sit in the passenger seat of his pick up truck as he drove us into town to get supplies at the lumber yard. Always at the water tower, as we turned onto the highway, he’d get real serious and whisper: “Okay, now think of someone. Do you have them in mind?! Go!” For the longest time I didn’t get what he meant at all. Think of who? Why? I’d think of my friend whose house I’d rather be at right now or the fight I just had with my sister over the cereal box prize.
Some things are the flip of a switch and some things are the rewiring behind the switch and some things are a total upgrade to new hardware or deciding you can make do without whatever the switch is supposed to be operating.
I went to a poetry event at an art museum that was called Unpoetry. When I sat down in the cushy theater seating I felt relieved to be experiencing rather than performing. A woman and her friend approached and asked if they could sit next to me, asked if I was there alone. “Yes, I am here alone.” She asked me “Why?” and I said “I am a poet”. She said she and her friend were part of a group taking a writing class where the idea is to go to different art museums and then write a poem based on the experience. She named the places that she has gone with the group. Places that I go on my own. I said, “That sounds nice” as two more people asked if they could squeeze past us to sit on the other side of me. In this shifting, the woman turned to her friend and said: “Sorry, I got caught up talking to that weirdo”. Her friend said, “It is better to be weird than not weird!”. Ten minutes into the Unpoetry the woman’s watch rang like a phone and she excused herself. She missed most of the performance so I am left to wonder if she will include the part about having a fake nicety with a weirdo and missing most of the Unpoetry as part of her poem about her experience at the art museum.
I have been studying emotional body mapping. I have a major thing happening on my left shoulder. An unshouldering. So- I have been reading about both purging and receiving. To receive you have to attune meaning you have to Spring clean, basically.
In his truck, my dad had told me that I was a sender. That I just had to think of someone and they’d come rolling down the highway past us with a wave. Maybe he was wrong and I was supposed to be the one waving at someone thinking of me?
I learned that we actually hold space for lack within our cells. Space meant to be filled with what should have been met but isn’t. A tightness builds around the lack to protect the emptiness. Ache forms when we aren’t paying attention and most of us aren’t paying attention.
When I worked at a flower shop there was a customer who lived a few towns away but came into the city for a therapy session every other Friday. She always stopped to get herself flowers on her way back home. When I stepped into the back of the shop where the walk-in cooler was located, she told me not to mind her “uncoiling” happening meanwhile. She’d be in the front of the shop moving her body like a snake to kinetically release the mental overload of her therapy session. One time she was laying on the floor in cobra pose when I returned with her wrapped bouquet. She wasn’t worried about the boot dust across her clothing or rose thorns that might catch her in the palm. She was smiling. Receiving her flowers. Unwound.
I made a list of all of the people that I have known in my life who seem like they have grown into their full personhood. It’s a lot of people. They really embody what they are. Really seem like themselves. Most I have known as energy workers. Reiki practitioners. Massage therapists. Sound healers. The CRUD REMOVAL SERVICE experts that I have been lucky enough to cross paths with. Bless them.
Riq was the first person that I knew in this field and did not call himself by any specific title, was just known to be a healer by his tribe. I met him when I was sixteen and needing to escape my family. There was nothing creepy about it and I hate that we sort of have to clarify that now because so much of the world is creepy. Riq had me do a ritual where I would scoop the crud from atop my heart with my own hands and fling it at the wall. I would think of my mom and could hear the thud like a kick drum in my mind.
I am still trying to access what is behind my protected tension- my lack. My dad’s same learned sense of pure pride laced with shame? Surely, for starts. I know that I am supposed to be helping others heal but I can’t get past the part where I am in the passenger seat. The student anxious to be the practitioner without the full knowledge or tools and hell, maybe heading in the wrong direction altogether? What do I know? I know what it is like to be in the flow state of art through painting and writing. I am okay to be sitting alone because I know that the whole museum, theater, world is full of weirdos. Still, there is something more in there…
I went to a book talk by an author from Hawaii, Norma Wong. I had not read her work but the subject matter in the blurb at the book store intrigued me. She was there to talk about her latest book Who We Are Becoming Matters. I happened upon this event the week after I had written about my grandma- how I put her conch shell to my ear and how it was holy. Well, that shell was sitting before my eyes on the cover of this book… though probably pulled from the Pacific instead of the Atlantic.
When I arrived at my monthly massage appointment, I was given an exciting opportunity to experience sound healing via tuning forks. Ohm was held to my ear, just like the conch shell and so tears fell from my eyes. Deeper into the session, with my eyes closed towards the ceiling, I saw a swirling of green and purple light at my forehead. I wanted to catch the orb and hold it but all that I could do was smile. When the tuning forks were held over my heart space, where I house lack- which is grief and a tattoo that says ABRACADABRA for the reason of translation to “I create as I speak”, words are spells; I started shaking and sobbing.
In the days that followed, my cells were electrified and shifting…as if some were thinking of the others and the others were waving back.
In the limited edition book of short stories that I wrote last year, One Calls for Another, there is pivotal moment regarding Geezer Butler of Black Sabbath. In the story, I am also a passenger in a vehicle, this time being driven by my mother. I am in the back seat and being glared at through the rear-view mirror. All this to say, Geezer has held a special spot in my memories.
I downloaded an app that lets you check out books on tape from the local library. I tried a few different books but could’t pay attention because I didn’t like the sound of the readers voice or even if the voice was tolerable, I found myself spaced out and not listening. I ignored the app for a couple of months.
Yesterday, I remembered that a few years back I had done this grief routine about my dad already. I had downloaded this same app and listened to Acid For The Children written and read by Flea. It occurred to me to search for musicians who might also be reading their book; I found Geezer Butler’s book Into The Void sitting right at the top of the list. The voice telling its own story makes a difference. Plus, it turns out we both have a thing with the number seven and some uncoiling to do regarding The Sacred Heart.
Oh, what I wanted to remember to tell you about was when Norma Wong started her book talk, she asked everyone in the room to fold their hands in their lap.
Go on, do it, fold your hands in your lap…
Is your left thumb on top or your right thumb?
Norma had us raise our hands as she called out “left” or “right” and noted that the room was split pretty evenly.
It is said that if your left thumb is on top that you are a feeling person and if your right thumb is on top that you are a thinking person. Of course, we are all both but it is perhaps helpful to know which way you are naturally inclined. A left brain right brain sort of thing.
Try switching your fold with the other thumb on top and you will see how odd it feels!
The man sitting next to me had raised his hand for right/thinking and the woman he was with had raised hers for left/feeling.
At this realization, the man, concerned, whispered, “Oh no, we are different!”
To which the woman replied, “We are lucky to have each other”.
Right now, out of my window, there is a young person holding a ribbon attached to a giant sea turtle shaped helium balloon, bounding merrily down the sidewalk. I hope that they know: they are the art and the poem about the art and the undoing of every moment that came before. I hope that I can know it for myself.