riding the waves and letting go

from Baubo in the kitchen (2)

“Let it go.”  That’s what she was telling herself, “Let it go.”  If it returns like that love that needs freedom, all the better.  If it doesn’t?  Another boomerang lost in the outback.  But this could be misleading.  She wasn’t so casual about her feelings.  When grief overtook her, well grief has its own domain.  As do some memories, some that bring pain and some that bring gratitude for the living they once were, for the beauty that absence brings.  So strange, she recognized that she was rocking between grief and desire.  She always rocked between salt and sugar, not preferring one over the other but just moving toward both with equal intent.  How the scales we ride change with our changes. She sensed sexual longing and yet was distant from it.  The longing seemed further away than ever.  She used to love that feeling of being pulled by something from far away. 

~

     There was a report on the public radio station about Morse code no longer being taught.  Languages, trees, entire forests, and now her fire gone without a burning.   She was driving down the highway yesterday and tried like hell to hold onto everything she saw.  Everything, every car, shadow and space seemed like an eternity she wanted to capture.  But the road was so long.  She remembered a patch of clouds that she could see off to the right, over the highway divider.  They were spaced like I Ching lines. Little pouches of clouds, dashes and sets and nobody to read the message.’ The I Ching wasn’t Barry’s thing, but who knows.

~

     She stopped at the end of her driveway and walked down the paper path to the small stream. She thought she was the only one that knew about this forgotten spit of water.  Then along came a great blue heron, swooped down and snatched a vole from the rim of the riverbed.  She thought, ‘That’s where desire went.  Some great bird swooped down and swallowed it whole and entire.’   She checked out the lines in the water then noticed how the water was bouncing up and down like her mother’s belly in the bath.  Whoopee cushions of water.  It all flows.  It all flows.   That morning the news was full of Mount Etna stories.  Pyrotechnics, rivers of hot molten lava.  Its mythic proportion something the Italians live with like people in Jersey saying they get the best and the worst weather.  People commented to the reporters.  Some were used to it.  Others scared.  Tourists broke out the chairs and just watched.  Can stare at the ocean all day long why not a volcano erupting? One man told the news agency, “We live in fire, that’s our land, so we can’t be impressed by this latest activity.  Whoever is afraid is lost.”  

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf