And Sometimes The Yearnings Come

I spent all day yesterday reading about mindfulness (I keep thinking it's mindlessness) and psychology and you'd think I'd have a clear understanding by now what the whole thing is about but no, I don't. So much of the mind is not understood by anyone and don't let anyone tell you that's not true. There are so many kinds of therapies and schools of thought on how to help people and their contrary minds. Mindfulness somehow incorporates Buddhism and all of its philosophy which, you know, is about suffering and how that's our lot in life. Period. The End. Don't call the pope.
Well. I don't know.
I don't know shit.

I filled out all the little bubbles and sent in my answer sheet and we'll see, we'll see. I don't know why it was offered as a nursing course in that nursing wasn't mentioned once. It was for working psychologists and therapists and that's all there is to it but so what?
I'm not really a nurse anyway.

Owen spent the day and I tried all day to practice mindfulness (be here now, thank-you Ram Dass, I think sums it about up) and that's not too hard when you're with a little one. Now I am playing with this boy on my lap and I hold his hands and they are warm and alive and now I am giving him a piece of apple and he is chewing it up and he is happy and now I am changing his diaper and kissing his tummy and so on and so forth. Mindful of what I was doing but at the same time, not really mindful at all. But when thoughts or feelings came, I did as instructed and let them come and examined them with equanimity and not judging them or getting too involved with them and then let them go and tried to come back to what I was doing, where I was.
Whatever.

Then I took Owen to Publix to meet his mama when she got off work and on the way I put in Devils and Dust by Bruce Springsteen and it was one of those things where it was perfect, that music. The sky was dark as a bruise and a white cow-egret flew across the darkness like foam on a pewter sea and my heart wanted to fly too, I don't know where. Or why.
Just one of those days, one of those things.
I had the image of me in a car alone, just driving over the rain-dark roads with Bruce weep-singing his sobsongs from his throat and the mouth harp wailing and the Hammond B3 throbbing and the guitars slash-flashing and the bass and drums pounding it like the heart and just going. Going. Gone.

I did not avoid that feeling or tell myself it was stupid for a woman of my age to think like that. Like a nineteen year old boy might feel, really, but so can women of my age. Believe me. No matter how centered we are in our home, no matter how much we love it there and we love our babies and our men and our grandbabies and our chickens we sometimes want to flee by flight, drive into the night, listening to music wailing too damn loud.

I'm just tired. And my nerves are fired and sure, everyone wants to escape sometimes but maybe it's not escape. Maybe it's just getting tired of destinations and wishing for a black-top journey, a screaming into the windshield-wiper-whipped space. I don't know.

We all get tired.

And I knew I wasn't going anywhere, just to the store and then back here, home again and so that's what I did, playing Bruce again, all the way. He never disappoints with his words or his music. Not me, anyway. He says things like, "The sun bloodied the sky," and I sort of want to cry and he says, "I reach 'neath your shirt/lay my hands across your belly/and feel another one kickin' inside. I ain't gonna fuck it up this time." And I do cry. I do. I cry for all the yearning and the pain and the suffering and the joy too. I cry for the times I flew and the many, many times I sat silent in one place, this place and so many others.
I cry for the loves I've had and lost and the one I've found and plan on never letting go, no matter what and I cry for the dark, bruised sky and I cry for the sun I know is behind it somewhere.
Sometimes it's better not to see it, the sun. Sometimes it's better. Wildness can sometimes be felt more sharply when the sun is hidden and the sky closes over like a black cave of hiding.
The sun comes out and reminds us of redemption and maybe we don't feel like being redeemed or maybe we don't feel like we've spent enough wildness to ask for it yet.

Even at this age. Even now.

Well. I bought purple gladiolas at the store, dark as the darkest amethysts because my friend Lynn always said that when you see purple gladiolas you should buy them and bring them home, even if you don't have enough money. I had enough money. I bought them and put them in a vase and I put up the groceries and cleaned the kitchen and started the laundry and picked up toys and cleaned up dogshit and pee and even still, even now as the sun is coming out, I feel that dark wildness but hell, I'm too tired to do anything about it. I barely have enough in me to finish the laundry, make the supper and that's how you get tamed, that's how you settle down. That's why you're alive.

But I can close my eyes and see that white bird flying across that black sky and I think of what it would be like to be that bird, flying across the coming storm, great wings spread and I think about dancing, I think about driving, I think about flying.

Well. It is something that I can sit here and write about it all. Pour it out of my chest, these yearnings that come about sometimes in the least expected moments, triggered by a coming storm, a bird, a song. I don't know how mindful I'm being but I'm not judging myself. I'm just letting it fly, the words, the yearning, the feeling and it's not suffering and it's not joy.

It just is.