It seems to be a hard month, hard like a cold hard frost,
this January… but I like the coldly dispassionate end of the old so cleanly cut
on December 31st, such a clear finish to the insanity of the
celebration gone amuck. It is an empty
office space, an empty warehouse awaiting its potential bustle.
The maker of empty spaces is what I call myself in my
interior conversations, my interests lie in emptying out, throwing out. In my Depression-era heart, I pair this
constant purging with self-reliance, and pare, as well, down to the bone of
what is really necessity vs. desire. …
the ornaments away, the Nordic nature of the tree in the house during winter is
somehow brought bare. In imagining the
house, I almost always see it empty, clean, sparse… in natural light and
shadow. . .
It is a mostly unsuccessful attempt to add more value to my
life as a homemaker, to turn it all into a koan, a zenning of the
domicile. Never think, for a single
minute, that the house is a pristine collection of stones and well-placed
shui-ed wooden toys, because we don’t play that way here, all dreams aside. No
minimalism makes its stand here, the empty spaces are small gasps for breath in
the chaos that is a family life. Small.
Gasping.
But… when there is an empty space and a wardrobe door has
the room to creak, there are inner upon inner worlds available to me. My
mother-lifetime of resistance makes the value of those empty spaces glow, as
possibilities for self-acceptance, little tiny spark-lings whispering ‘truer
tasks’… ‘truer task’… as if I have some
‘thing’ out there towards which I am unwittingly directed.
Empty spaces, zenning domiciles, they aren’t the whole of
it- there aren’t any rhapsodies over laundry or happy scourings of the toilets…
but using the last of the frozen peas, getting the fingerprints off the door
for a whole six minutes, tossing the five scattered pieces of the marble run
left over from the last birthday? These
are mine victories…. Cleaning up my visions, letting the cold air flow in
stream.
This month, the early darkening holds the illusion of a
deepening, introspective time...illusion because the deeper is only within, not
without. Just because the setting tells
a story does not mean that is what goes on … it seems a trick to me sometimes
that all this burrowing does not bring about warmth. The realization that the true storm did not
arrive, that the snowfall was just delay, no substance, an early darkening of
the early darkening, it is a plucking, a
twanging of the nerves, a reminder of the inner world mismatching the
outer. It would be good to get more in
line, more plumb between the inner and outer.
If the natural light and shadow are inseparable, why is it
so hard to accept this as a possibility within?
Am I not of the same system?
It is all- is it all?- a gasp,
a grasp at something
bigger within the empty space?
2 comments:
oh wow, I love that imagery of an empty warehouse. you nailed it. I have spent the whole month de-Christmasing and de-2014ing.
Beautiful. xo
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