Flying lessons
A journal lies open. You read the following... but only the page, for fear of leaving fingerprints...
I woke up today wanting to write something to capture the feeling of utter tenderness I am feeling for the world today, even when it feels like I’m stomping on all the delicate jungle flowers and slashing my way through the vines of subtlety that I really should bend and duck and dance around instead of pushing through—
If only there were a little less I and a little more ask, or more space for you, or more space in my heart to learn more about you without tying my own self in at every moment and every turn—
And by you I mean the world, I mean the people moving through it, I mean dust in sunbeams and stars, I mean the ones I hold closest to my heart and the ones I can’t help but push away—
Rattling the bars of my heart again — a recurring theme.
When will I learn to not cut myself off?
When will I learn to also not cut off others? To resist interrogation in honor of reflection, to— listen—
To capture something but not hold it prisoner, to hold myself lightly, to hold others with the care I really and truly feel for them—
Let’s try this again.
Yesterday we all took flying lessons, and there was a thunderstorm. We almost didn’t make it back to the ground. The wind whipped our clothes and soaked our hair, and the clouds were actually walls that howled and chased us. When you’re flying in a storm, you can almost forget which way is down, because the wind pushes against you like another gravity and you can’t see anything. You might think you’re skimming above an air current and try to slip under it to go lower, but then you realize the earth is above you and you’ve just been flipped around so much that you’re completely disoriented.
Have you ever been lost in three dimensions? To not only discover that East and South are important, but also Higher and Lower and Diagonally Downwards North-West?
If we were birds, we would have the language to describe such things, but since we are not, we must make do with our human-centric words.
Humans do not have intuitive flying language. We cobbled it together from the language of our ground-locked earthbound bodies.
What I mean to say is — we almost didn’t make it back from the storm, but we did. And when we landed, our sneakers slamming into mud, we fell on our backs and let the rain approach our bodies from only one direction finally and watched the lightning dance in the clouds we had just escaped and we felt grateful to be alive and also we realized all the questions we had for each other that we knew we must ask each other before we died.
Storms put things into perspective.
Have you ever been in the presence of a survivor?
When the fact becomes known, it fills the room to every corner — you think we would not be here in this room right now if you had not made it — you think this person is lucky to be alive — you think this person is probably used to it by now but I feel this new knowledge like an ache in my heart.
I learned that I was speaking to a survivor yesterday and I was so incredibly overpowered by it. She had made it. She seemed like a good person. I am so happy that she made it even if I didn’t even know her. Could it be that her spirit was entwined with the people I know who haven’t made it? Does a survivor feel the weight of every person who has not made it upon their shoulders when other people look at them? Could she feel the ghosts of my E and L and M and J and the others, all passed along, strangers to her but made present in that room by my thoughts, when she said she was a survivor? If I looked at her and saw their faces, would she feel that as weight or disrespect, or gratitude?
It’s not my choice who lives and dies, and it’s not my place to let mortality completely rule my life and choices, but I can’t help but feel the impossible weight of tenderness towards the whole world knowing that I and it will not be around forever. It’s low-flying existential anxiety. It will be focusing, not paralyzing.
Someone liked a song I showed them and my heart flew up into the sky and spread so thin that it embraced the whole world or at least the entire coast. Someone I love is far away and I can physically feel my heart tugging towards them. Somewhere there is a garden I remember smelling, and my heart wants to settle into the ground there and make friends with ants and worms, to grow roots and slow down, but I’m not ready for that, not yet. But one day.
My heart is being pulled in many directions. It can’t decide who or what to embrace first because it wants to embrace absolutely everything. And it feels all this with the acute knowledge that it has a limited time in which to embrace, and that it will have to choose which people and things to embrace and how before some cosmic chapter closes and embracing is no longer possible.
Ah, well. Euphoria passes. There will be a hangover for that, and then a cure for the hangover, too. My heart will learn to listen.
Anyway. That’s how I’m feeling today after flying lessons yesterday.