I believe
That the voice who speaks in poetry
and half word meaning
Is the ghost who goes on breathing
When my body
Is long buried
I believe the whispers in the shadows of my mind
I tune in and find a pen to write to
From
Will be around when I am long gone
They were born before my fingers had unfurled
Before my mother gave birth to a girl
Before I was name
Body
A date on the calendar
On the grave
In some other century
We are more than we know
transitory
flow
Listening
To the voice
That belongs nowhere
lives somewhere else
Before and after
This place
Beyond time
Beyond self
And it will spin yarn into cloth that have nothing to do with the rules we follow so egregiously
just to go out in the world
This world that doesn’t exist
It spins on the head of a pin
Stitched into a moment of time
Which feels real because we label it “mine”
But in fact
We own nothing
Are nothing
And weren’t really here the whole time
Because we are prisoners
of a thinking mind
Rather than anchored
In the plane of reality
*I caught myself on the way to work the other day, thinking so hard about something else that I had arrived and was unlocking the door before I noticed the sunshine on my face and thought “whew, just stop, I’m here”.
I constantly have to anchor myself. Stitching big looping stitches through my day. The gaps between – trying to decrease the time my needle spends poised in the air, and then digging it in fiercely, and being aware of the moment lost sometimes several minutes apart.
I am improving. I look back on my life – the blurry times, that zoomed past. When the kids were little. When I was so busy that the needle just floated above.
I have these anchoring moments thankfully where every detail of my sons on that day, a particular hour, an event, stands out with chrystal clarity. My heart dug those stitches deeply.
I was there then, wholly there. I can smell, touch, feel that memory like it happened a few minutes ago. I hold those precious memories like fragile glass. Tuck them away in my mind.
And now, the last few years – so many are there to join in. Not because the memory is fresher, more recent. But because I’m here now, moving on the surface of my life, living it far more intensely. Here in reality, so it turns into memory.
I don’t know if anyone else experiences this but I do wonder if some of the plague of dementia is not a result so much of people forgetting, but rather, through busyness or distraction, not laying down memory in the first place.
Guess I’ll find out.
Header photo: The window Kalbari national park. Very well stitched memories of a trip up the western Australian coast with my husband a couple of years ago. Hiking and snorkelling and seeing amazing scenery.
