I pace
Back and forth
Around
I’ve learned the perimeter
The parameters of my cage
The responsibilities
The expectations
People I love, the look upon their face
When I disappoint
Confuse
Fail
We are born from womb
To box
And then like Russian dolls
We move
Through a series of ever shrinking coffins until one day
We find just the right size
To be buried in
But unlike the lion
We cannot see the bars
The grills
They are invisible
Perhaps they were too him as well
We get used to what we are living in
Last night I watched a ten minute bite of a show while my husbands steak cooked.
It was about a zoo in Arknasaw in the 70’s. The animals lived in small cages their entire lives. Including a lion. One day someone left the gate to the lions pen open, and he quietly slipped away.
The area around the zoo is wild, mountains and forests. Very beautiful. While people lost their minds over the fact that there was a lion on the loose, he stayed away out there in the wild for two weeks.
Then one day just as quietly as he had left, he returned, he was hungry. Walking back into his own awful pen, as docile as a house cat that wanted to be fed, he sat down and his keepers ran to get him food.
And assure the rest of the town, they were safe again.
Comfort is a cage. Known is a cage. Responsibilities and regard are cages. Energetic cages, of our own making, behind which we live every day.
The bindings and responsibilities may be restrictive and uncomfortable, yet they are familiar.
That lion from Arkansaw has troubled me deeply. I couldn’t sleep last night. Now I’m sitting with a coffee at 3am.
Thinking
One life, where are my bars, my containers? How large or small is my cage? What’s it made of? Who or what feeds me?
Yesterday afternoon at around 12pm, I saw a young man with all of his possessions in a shopping trolley. I’ve seen him around town, he has a dog that follows him as faithfully as a shadow. I hadn’t seen him with all his possessions before though. He must be homeless now. Easily understood in a town that has almost nothing to rent. I should have asked him if he was okay. But he was on the other side of the road. And I was busy about my business on this side. I noticed him though. It’s not an excuse but I was very busy.
Yesterday afternoon I received a jarring phone call about 2pm. A Government auditors department that wants a variety of documents of evidence for a project we finished last year. Provided within 10 days. Out of the thin blue air, right on the end of the financial year, my one person office, me, must provide this and this and this and extract all of this hoopla from subbies and provide it immediately, yesterday.
Nothing like an authoritative phone call to get the heart pumping. I’m a line toer, good girl when it comes to that sort of thing. I hustle. I worry that I will get things just right. Do the right thing. Years of boarding school and facilities training. Years in the industry that is full of red tape and documentation. I jump when a bell rings. Even though my soul resents it.
Unlike Pavlov’s dogs however, it is not saliva I excrete. It is anxiety. And it is getting worse as I grow older and the years of stress take its toll.
Cortisol sweat has a different smell to perspiration that is expressed during exercise or on the run. One soaks and drains and cleans, the other is like taking a bath in acid from the inside out.
Is it freedom to have nothing, no one but a dog. Or is it just sheer poverty and its own set of problems?
Its all in our perspective, how we frame it. What we tolerate, love, take for granted or find gratitude within.
So, I guess I’ll work on that, and stop thinking about that lion, from Arkansaw, who gave up the trees and the earth and the wild, for a concrete cage he could barely walk around in, because he was hungry.
Photos mine, snapped on my morning runs where the dawn slowly develops like a Polaroid and I get to watch it in awe. Every day, awe and wonder. That to me is a cage I can live within very happily.
beautiful photo Kate, I am a lover of early dawn sunlights and dusk compositions.
this is a wonderfully deep post, the type that demands a mental rigor many don’t want to face. I guess the only thing I could say is that there are some cages where I’m comfortable because it’s self-imposed, some cages that I desperately need to get out of, and some cages that I have to live with as its function is beyond my total grasp.
it’s a morbid reference I know but I remember a scene from one of the Exorcist movies where two people were discussing how this person’s room was full of religious artifacts – wall to wall. And the one person made the observation that “it’s as if he wasn’t trying to lock himself in, rather he was trying to keep something out”.
I hope your project issue is being squared away and will be settled by Friday night. I hope the rest of your week is peaceful. Thank you for this post! Mike
Thanks Mike. It will be fine, it always is. I find comfort in untangling all the edges of my thoughts is all. Thanks for your long and thoughtful reply.
great photo , Kate, and great ruminations about cages; yes, I am in one too, but mostly happy there;the only times I felt truly ‘locked in’ was during the worst of the covid lockdown and the few times when the thick heavy clouds blanket the skies for days and I feel truly claustrophobic — but what can one do: board a plane and flyaway ?
I’m a sunshine girl John. Too many days in the grey skies depress me terribly. I hope for sunshine for you 😊
thank you: that would be good 🙂
You may have lost some sleep, but some gorgeous and thought-provoking writing spilled out of you during that time! 👏🏻 Thank you for sharing the lion story and for your poem and photography, of course!
Thanks Michelle – that’s so kind of you to say. I often write best very early in the morning. But by now 1.30 in the afternoon, it feels like a different day, different planet!
Your comment made me laugh last night, I was just too tired to respond. 😄 I understand completely.
And I understand the “too tired to respond” hope you slept well X
Thank you and yes, I did. 😌 X
Geeze, Kate. I feel this so profoundly. The lion, shit. Was that by any chance in “Arkansas”? Pronounced as you spelled it? The different spelling makes it seem like a fairy tale land. So much crap here I can’t get my head around. But never mind, you’ve expressed it beautifully. And the comparison with the homeless man, the wild spirit yearning, yet hungry enough to live on “our” periphery. I feel myself in that. 💗
Camilla it’s a true story about the lion but yes I have probably got that wrong whoops sorry – but I agree – I like it spelled as it sounds. A poet can take poetic licence 😂
Glad you liked it and it resonated – I couldn’t stop thinking about that poor lion but my husband did not want to hear all my metaphorical thinking early this morning so I got up to write instead.
Horrible about the lion. His metaphor is indeed powerful. And the page is often a better outlet for such thoughts than the hub! That made me laugh! 💗
I really enjoyed your insightful, thought provoking post 💙. Yes…most of us have become the lion to varying degrees. I used to encounter many homeless people when I worked as a Social Worker; most of whom had not chosen their homelessness. However, every now and then a free spirit would cross my path, completely disentangled from all that entangles us. I used to wonder though…..were they really free or just running from connection.
T
Your perspective is appreciated and welcome Mairi. I have read a few books on people who gave up normal societal trappings and lived without money – they were really interesting but not something I would be able to or rather, want to do.
Decades ago, I read about people who leave their lives and choose to become homeless, without attachments. And it’s interesting to consider whether the stress of not knowing where their sustenance will come from outweighs the freedom of escaping the cages you speak of. I guess if you can find a balance you can live with – like the cage you end with – that’s about the best we can do.
Yes Yacoob I think the main thing is to know it would all be okay anyway – that’s the freedom – recognising it