Vent The Winds
Written November 10th, 2008.
This is a powerful feeling. Full of too many thoughts and all sorts of potential. I know what I want. I made the choice to be who I am. I'm ripping-tearing-scrubbing away everything that isn't me and mine. It's a clean-raw sensation, like washing your hands until your skin is red and you can feel your pulse throbbing through.
There, that's it. That's the rhythm of the keys beneath my fingertips. That's the familiar tattoo, the cadence of my thoughts taking shape, form, life on paper. I'm part of the internet age, but I wasn't raised on the computer. I am some strange kind of bridge who grew up in the woods and mountains and a little house, my toes in a pond and my fingers on a keyboard and my head in the stars.
I have little sacred pieces of life scattered around. Music and books from the people I love. Brief joyful-making exchanges of words that make me feel like I did right, like I matter, like I help. Tiny souvenirs from other places and times and lives I've lived. I have dozens of treasures, because they store my memories. I touch them and remember where I've been, who I've known, what we've done and said. Every single thing has a story.
I'm writing because if I do, I can try to clear out the sandstorm in my head. I can vent the winds (français pun!) and figure out where all the dunes have shifted to. I'm digging through my psyche with curl-fingered hands coated in potting soil and woman's blood, pulling up and pulling out and tearing up down and sideways. I know where I am and I know where I want to be, and I've always been good at figuring out how to make things work. It's a mess, but I like the visceral feeling of getting my hands dirty, even when it's my own innards I'm exploring like I don't know which serpent is attached to which coil. (What, you've never compared your digestive system to a plump wicker basket full of snakes? It's okay, I haven't either until just now.) Look at it like that, and suddenly your throat is the snake's gaping mouth. Forked tongue flick-flicking like your voice alternates with silence, passing communication like your breath, in - out - in - out - in...
There's something to be said for smearing words across the screen like fingerpaint, for offering these images and these feelings without bothering to censor them.
I can find beauty and wisdom in anything. Give me a song and I'll pull meaning out of it that maybe no one heard or intended to hear or ever wanted to put into it. I feel and experience, then I take a stab at translating this life-living into words, because words are a way of communication and I like doing that. Words, and music, and touch, and art. I write and I sing because I can't not. My fingers are plucking awkwardly, reverently, eagerly at the guitar strings because I'm finally willing to listen to its voice, rather than the humans who write beginner's books. My hands find more shapes and sounds in drumming on my own body than they do on my djembe, but that's okay, because my body has its own voice too. That's why I dance, and why I practice martial arts, and why I stretch out to touch the rocks and the water - because action is how my body speaks, how it sings. Doing the things I love makes my entire being thrum, like a purr, like a strumming chord, like a voice raised wordless just because there's music and how could you not join in?
This is me in an animal mood, thinking feeling talking because it feels good. It's nothing specific, just me, talking, in my voice with my messy pawprints made out of twenty-six different letters and a few punctuation marks. There's good music on, and it's the rough-textured rock'n'roll that isn't screaming but isn't soft, and it's a good background for my head right now.
The headspace is clearing more now. It's nice to write without a point, without structure, without constraints...