i know i'm being less than regular with this blogging thing of late. somehow it seems harder to make the time to do it at this time of year - the earth warming up, birds clearing their vocal chords, summer breezes.
i've been out back, clearing the yard of a truckload of overgrown "native plants" (aka weeds). so far i've taken out almost 10 yard bags worth of stuff and 2 (diseased) trees. it makes a body feel good to shake off the evidence of neglect in such a tangible way. the problem i'm having, though, is that it's decidedly harder to weed the stuff inside. my own emotional backyard is proving rockier ground to till.
it started, i suppose, with the waitlist thing i posted on a couple of weeks back. the public side of not making good (and god knows the need to achieve is a thing i've struggled with for most of my life and that battle shows no sign of resolving itself anytime soon. the irony is that in waiting to resolve it, i seem to be achieving exactly nothing). then there was the family visit. my dad and sister in town for the may long weekend. the old patterns re-enacted: more of the same desire to make good, only desperately so. more failure, only less public. there's the pressing issue of the plan B. now that plan A seems less and less a possibility, what to make of the Future? in the park today, jane and mary making commiserating noises about the feeling of not knowing. the transience of the feeling-good-today, the blindsiding force of the not-so-much-now.
and it troubles me, too, that on some days, my plan B seems to reside in a notion of children. what would it be like to have kids? would that bestow some purpose to this rather bleak landscape i've been contemplating? and isn't that exactly the wrong reason to bring new life into the world? i've always said it was. god forbid that i should trip into that now.
35 is a funny age. it's a bit of a threshold really - biological clock winding down, approaching the time when more than half of your life has likely been lived. living up to one's potential starts to become a bit of a joke, and deferral seems just downright stupid. and yet. what to do when you've been stuck in the notion of potential too long? i remember having a brief conversation with my cog sci buddy wendy about this right before the exam last month. there was a time when it seemed principled to reject the conventional trappings of ambition and success. when rejecting expectations seemed a valiant thing to do. i can't remember why that was anymore, and what i thought was so bloody noble about that position. and i'm hoping it's not too late to turn some of that around.
i weeded the backyard wholesale, with a spade. efficient as it was, there's something kind of violent about ripping away so mercilessly at all those roots. it's a shame that planting new growth involves so much death.
dave matthews band - digging a ditch
6 comments:
sounds like progress to me.
Something holy is buried deep under our lives but we have to do the demolition necessary to dig it out. Allah says, "I was a hidden treasure, and I desired to be known." As a commentary on that passage, Rumi writes this poem called "The Pickaxe."
tear down this house. A hundred thousand new houses
can be built from the transparent yellow carnelian
buried beneath it, and the only way to get to that
is to do the work of demolishing and then
digging under the foundations. With that value
in hand all the new construction will be done
without effort. And anyway, sooner or later this house
will fall on its own. The jewel treasure will be
uncovered, but it won't be yours then. The buried
wealth is your pay for doing the demolition,
the pick and shovel work. If you wait and just
let it happen, you'd bite your hand and say,
"I didn't do as I knew I should have." This
is a rented house. You don't own the deed.
You have a lease, and you've set up a little shop,
where you barely make a living sewing patches
on torn clothing. Yet only a few feet underneath
are two veins, pure red and bright gold carnelian.
Quick! Take the pickaxe and pry the foundation.
You've got to quit this seamstress work.
What does the patch-sewing mean, you ask. Eating
and drinking. The heavy cloak of the body
is always getting torn. You patch it with food,
and other restless ego-satisfactions. Rip up
one board from the shop floor and look into
the basement. You'll see two glints in the dirt. (113-14)
it's hard to disagree with Rumi. ;). I concur!
So, I too was weeding today, with my brand new toy from Canadian Tire: a Fiskar's dandelion puller. It's very addictive. I must've pulled a couple of hundred dandelions from a 4 foot square patch of lawn. And then at some point I thought, "why don't we just dig out all the grass in this patch and plant a garden?" So that's what we're going to do. All by way of saying that maybe sometimes you've got to do a lot of digging before Future possibilities can emerge. Keep going, say I.
Not that Rumi didn't say it better.
still digging?
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