I Lose Track

Of days.

Of hours.

Time.

It slips past and suddenly.

I am here.

Again.

In front of this keyboard sorting out the effluvia of the day, the flotsam and jetsam, the dust and the gold, the indifferent, the libidinous, and the words that strike me in my heart.

I am in graduate school.

I am taking classes from morning til night.

I am not caught up on the reading, but I am a lot closer than I was a few days ago.

For despite wanting to check out into my own little home and nest and socialize with my things, I come home from class and I do more work.

The work.

It never stops.

I am at a place of contentment with this, not complacency or procrastination, just more a space of being alright with what I have done and where I have gotten to in this day, in this place, in this program.

I am doing alright.

I am neither greater than or less than anyone.

Everyone has their own story, their own place, and as I float through the day, sometimes tired, sometimes angry–really, another fucking lunch I cannot eat? I find space to let my hair down and moments to check messages and to take phone calls that seem miraculously placed.

I got to check in with one of my people during a tender time of self-reflection and see how the stress of financial insecurity tries to follow me.

Up the stairs, past the security guard at the desk, into my class room.

To sit on my shoulder.

Quoth the dark bird.

“Nevermore.”

Croaking out a kind of fear that is twisted, misogynistic, and misplaced.

I am alright.

I am ok.

The stress is self-created misery to stir up the bones of anxiety in my graduate school soup.

I am not the only one who is concerned with their finances and how to make it all go and no one, no mattered how privileged, comes without their own bag of problems to unpack during class, in the hallways, on the phone, quiet and desperate in the bathroom.

We all have insecurity.

It is what I decided to do with it that is important.

I acknowledged it today in my T-Group.

I allowed someone else the space to be authentic as well.

I got relief.

Funny that.

How sharing my troubles actually allows someone else to do the same and we become comrades, “brothers in arms,” a dear hearted friend shared today.

I like that analogy.

We are at a kind of war.

But not an ideological war, no, I could see it shaped like that, an incessant desire to wage a siege on ideology, politics, reform, to stratify and dissent.

No.

Rather.

I see this as a way to surrender to that ever illusive idea of love.

Where am I holding onto things that don’t work for me?

Where do I repress?

How does it come out, in my self, in my enactments with others, how do I self-sabotage, do I self-sabotage?

Of course I do.

Don’t be a silly rabbit.

And I am just as attached to these notions as anything else in my life.

What I am finding though, is that I am smarter than I let myself know or acknowledge.

I found myself on the edge of my seat in my last class of the day, keeping up with the professor, understanding the implications of desire and Psyche in Freud, and what the hell?

I’m keeping up, I am understanding it, I am enjoying it, and I am making rapid connections in my brain, despite not having finished the readings for the class.

I will.

There is no doubt that I will.

I am giving myself the time and the space to do so.

Despite other competing desires.

This forum allows me to see that.

I am grateful for my little blog, for my little insights, for the ability to open up and love and be rambling or discordant at times, but underneath it all there is a loveliness, a suturing song that sings to me, a dark wild place in my heart, the smell of wet cedar, the evergreen bloom in the deep black hollow of the night, the moist passionate smell of the ocean.

All my senses alive and here and attuned.

The bicycle ride, you may have surmised, home was good tonight.

I was not so distracted by the length of the day and just having gotten through a second day in the three-day weekend process brought me relief.

Two down.

One to go.

It won’t be easy.

But it also, the day tomorrow, won’t be as hard as today or yesterday.

There is already a sort of habit-forming for me and a way of managing the time and effort needed to get from here to there.

The getting from here to there is not so bad either.

I do feel the need to take care of some more things here on the home front, but I can get away from it for one more day.

The laundry got done today, the bed stripped, a shower taken, morning pages written, the bicycle ride to and from campus–13 miles, thank you very much legs, give or take a few feet, the blog is being taken care of, the reading, the most reading I can do, has been done, and the music is on, a winding down.

A loss of time.

A travel into the here and now.

The ephemeral light and music on my soul.

The reminder of love requisitioned and sought.

To be so busy that I swim in this constant sea of negotiating and time management that the present moment becomes a precious thing of great beauty.

Even when I find it fleeting.

Even when I lose track of it.

It stops there again.

At the door to my heart.

Knocks.

Pushes open.

Crosses the threshold.

And settles itself down by the fire.

A warm glow of love that I surround myself with.

A place of resting I created for myself.

A sound scape of love, desire, and action on the lunar face of my soul.

The plush kissed lip of Psyche on my psyche.

The wife of Eros.

And.

Of the divine.

And in the midst of this wide quietness

A rosy sanctuary will I dress

With the wreathed trellis of a working brain,

With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,

With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,

Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:

And there shall be for thee all soft delight

That shadowy thought can win,

A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,

To let the warm Love in!

Excerpt from “The Ode to Psyche”

John Keats