Unfinished – I know it is approaching greatness, on the road to wonderful, only when I see my writing as unfinished art.
Listening – We only hear in the rare moments when we are able to calm the instinct to control the bustle in our mind, and let the conversation run. Body: Photos over time – This is the story of me, a woman who sees my body pressed against a backdrop of age and time. I have a picture of myself when I was a slender seventeen. I am at the land trust community farm where my mother and I used to go and hike. My sister Dani shot that picture. She knew how to catch me when I was in a moment that I would stand the test of time, that would mean something to me later. I stand there under the porch of the hundred year old house, reaching out my fingertips to the rain that falls there. My mood was melancholy then. But pensive, hiking, feeling rain as it came down off the tin roof. I guess I heard the melody it makes there. I guess I saw the willow tree down there, with a similar beauty and sadness. In another image Dani took, I am sitting on a manmade sand dune near the ferry end of the island at Ocracoke. I have the same down feeling. But sometimes being glum is not a horrible thing. Recently, over Winter Break, I got up in the middle of the night, disrobed, and made raw outline sketch paintings of my raw naked body. A headless, legless, Venus of Willendorf type outline, almost resembling a smile. When I think of my body over my lifetime, almost 30 years, I see it has transformed with both a connection and simultaneous disconnectedness to my emotion.
There are lots of pictures of my eleven year old self, or earlier. This prepubescent girl is who I see when I think “inner child.” I see a power in that girl that I am just recovering. She does gymnastics like many young girls do. And like many, she started too late to be competitive. This is a good thing. Stretching and bending her body in numerous positions, she is a work of art. She arranges herself in a backbend, then folds on the grass of a neighbor’s back yard. She flips her feet over her head in a cart wheel. She is flexible as a clay doll. Her muscles aren’t strong enough to do all the moves her peers can do. But the important thing I remember about her then is in her pluck and confidence. She is a tom boy, having recently read of Tom and Huck in books she found on her parent’s shelves – she spits like her dad. Later I read To Kill a Mockingbird and see myself in Scout, the plucky, wide eyed heroine.
I want to get to be sixty and ninety. I want to carry all of these selves along the way. I want to be more and more spunky and alive until the day I die. In wit, in loving, embodied.