I feel like I should go back to a practice that I was into when I first went crazy in 2006. That was the summer that I opened my eyes for the first time to personal responsibility, to pain, to worry, to becoming fully human. I am sure that i will talk about that time in my life many times after now. That practice is tallying the moods of my days in long scooping arcs above and below the neutral horizon. 9:00 am, line going up. 4:24 pm line going way down.
I want to start now, to see where my feelings take me because after the Lodge, I find myself unbuckling loop by loop.
On Monday, I had my first ceramics class. The class ended up with my sitting by the UCSB pool watching the violent kicking of children feet and professor feet, watching the colored triangle flags quiver over them. I had to leave class and sit alone on my lawn chair. The whole thing was overwhelming. I could have been blind the way I fumbled around the studio. I could have been handless the way the clay felt so foreign on my skin.
So I cried, putting up a steel hand to tell my love to disist from soothing me or helping me. I should have sniffed out the feeling that I would be so overwhelmed by taking this summer-for-fun class. Ceramics is Mariah's home. She did it through the dark period of her life, as a meditative reminder that she-no matter what- always molds her life. Her bowls and mugs make eating full of ritual, spirit, and magic. They are so natural it makes you feel as though God gave you palms, just to hold the line of her pottery. I have never really handled clay. I have never spent time in a studio, with clay spit all over my jeans, or watch my hands become unfortunate features of the human body (uncontrollable and unmotivated). I didn't know the landscape of the ceramic artist. I was completely new. The cement room could have been Mars.
It's true that I am still dehydrated. It's true that I am living in a one bedroom with four people. It's true that maybe I was negligent in tending to my shaken insides from the intensity of the Lodge. The whimpering prayers that may never truly be composted in these bones. But Still-
But still- the class was still too new. I had hoped, in my high expectations, that I would step into the hands of my soulmate by doing her art. I hoped that I would understand her better, and know her inside my own skin. I had hoped that I would build a community of willing adults that were brave enough to try things that are clumsy and awkward in the beginning. The class has exactly three students: Mariah, Me, And Wendy a sixty-something lady who has taken summers and summers of adult ed ceramics. I am a spectacle, a human with new legs.
What I am trying to get at here is that this class that made me sob next to a man in a speedo, is the perfect medicine after the Sweat. It was the universe was trying to show me again that everything will dissolve into something that I won't recognize anymore, and it will be new, I will be new. And I will have to reorient myself in a world I don't know.
For example. I have been afraid of the ocean's powerful force my whole life. Yesterday-I swam to the booey. I have always been afraid, deathly it seems, of closed black spaces. Today I sat in my own coffin. The more I do, the more I see, the less I can count on the world-or me to be the same. And yet I am constantly here. So its the here part that I want to get to know, the part of life that I want to invest in. NOT the successes or the failures. Not the references points of my false personality map. Just that I am here and I am here again and again, during times of complete disappointment or freedom.
So Dear Lodge, I grant you the will to unbuckle my latest reality. Because it will teach me that I am here.
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