Air is gone so suddenly and your lungs are shriveled and small.

You thought that it would change things, clinging to the railing and refusing to leave the unfeeling but homey steel frame.  You thought they would give up, go out themselves, leave you to be unchanged.  You do not matter to other people.  Your choices are not significant to them.  You wanted to unchoose, and they should let you.  

"Committment," they mumble (or shout).  They wear their white suits unnaturally; yours is stained with strawberry ice cream.  You hid in the freezer room, and they found the meat and ordered you out.  

"The moon really does have no air," you gasp.  The surface shines brighter than the atmosphere.  You tumble: stars burn below you, and the weightless rocks pile around your head.

photo via

The forest is where you breathe.  Finding broken branches, crumpled needles, your clay crumbles in the natural dirt.  You decompose with the rings of the trees; water and air melt everything into calm agreement.  Standing, you see this: that the trees stand where they always will.  Friends have uprooted, but the trees will stay until their soil gives way and they tip.

The sky above you remembers and goes with you too.

photo via

Sometimes the sky opens up;

heavy and lidded, wind pops through,

lifts it off.

Your eyes open wider or

the sky peels back;

looking inward, you've found you have done fear in the face,

and found the hazy sunshine peering through the hole.

photo via

There are days when light is not out of the corner of your eye, blazing, but straight down your middle,  a burning solid. You have felt this before:

When you walk into a room, and you have always been there without being there.
When you meet a stranger's eyes, and you have found who you are without finding it.
When you say, "I don't know," and you know that you don't, gladly.
When you are afraid, and you stumble out of your cave, squinting.
When you towered up a vertical mountain, and you couldn't have if you tried.
When you are quiet, and you could have said a million words.

photo via

You mumble when the words are giant on your tongue.  You mean more than you say and say less than you mean.  You stand in the hollow of a burnt out whale and hunch your shoulders.  You understand the height of a tree, the need for it.  You find the fact of a hollow stump foreign; when the spark flared, smoldered, and went out, you were not there.  You are seeing the sky, smelling the spice of dry wood rot and needles.  You are wondering as your eyes adjust to the light, to the trunk of the decaying tree.  You do not know what you are wondering.  You sit down, cross-legged in the floor of the hollow, absently poking pine needles into your knees.

photo via

Place has a pull for you.  Your feet feel firmer on some grounds.  Wandering down paths and sleeping under different groves each night, your senses are keen to it.  There is a scent to a home-place, not a comfort, but mist on the ground, a form in the distance.  

"Be where you are," the mothers at their clotheslines whisper to you.  But you hold a precious anger; it stomps out in your feet, dust spindles and dead spiders.  So you move again, squinting at shabby houses with aprons and porches. Rights and privileges ruined when your house fell down.  

In a field as evening settles, you cover one eye and look.  Cover the other eye and look.  Stalks of grain jump.  Trees roll back and forth.  You unroll your blanket.  The place folds down around you, and you hear an owl flap her wings.  

photo via

You're walking, and your pack is falling apart, your tins and ropes tumbling down the rocks and wrapping around your ankles.  And you're gathering it up, but everything keeps falling, and you're walking because you have this goal, but you can't keep your shit together, and everything around you is so beautiful and you are simultaneously in awe and hunched over, grabbing all your crap that keeps rolling away.

For seven miles, you're carrying on like this, waking the mountains from the dead with all the racket your stuff is causing, slipping away and you re-gathering it with every fifth step.  And you have this insurmountable precipice at the forefront of your mind, and it's really all you want to get to, all you want to ascend, and you're eyes are totally fixed on it--whenever you look up again from grabbing after the flashlight or the frying pan that rolled away.  These things are necessary, they're in your backpackers handbook, so you got to keep them in your pack or you could die at night on the mountain.  This knowledge, and the joy of getting to the top of that peak in the distance are together in your mind.

So.

photo via

You sometimes glimpse it, the further dimension.  When you drove through a cloud for the first time as a girl, on the brightest, bluest day, over the road to Oregon, you beheld it.  You sensed the fog of a realer world overlaying ours.  Did you?  You knew that it was.  You had always felt there were other worlds, and inside that cloud for four seconds, your conviction grew solid in your chest.

Late at night, when you are driving with few cars, and taillights vanish into a haze, your anticipation grows quickly, with the clack of tires on the highway.  A cloud crosses the road, and you are in the midst of a world intersecting ours.  Too real, too true to be seen clearly by our minds.  

Wide open, keep those eyes.  Those glorious, cloudy intersections.

photo via

It comes from your hands when you brush your hair back,

and you felt it for a moment, the power in your hands

rushing into you from outside the mountains,

from the path that you are taking down into the valley, 

deep, where the wind does not blow easy but fierce and calm--

and in your feet, 

pounding the pebbles into dust, 

billowing behind you as you rush on, fast with inertia and frenetic movement

as the deer bounds with you down,

both inhaling the white air and the timber green feeling

of being yours,

and belonging to your earth.

photo via.

feel so much

Today the blue hit your shoes, and they were very soaked when you looked down and realized just then you hadn't felt your toes for a good fifteen minutes.  The turtle gliding alongside you was even shivering inside his shell--and that shouldn't be possible.  So you huddled up in a dry(ish) spot a bit inland, built an orange fire, but even the fire felt slightly blue.  And the invisible organisms nibbling at your feet related well to the unseen flies prickling at your eyes: what good is seeing when you feel so much?

photo via.

It's an uncertain breath you take after the burrowing.  Your head is covered in ground.  Your eyes are pinched shut: even in the cool shadows you can't see without squinting.  Your notice your hands, creased in dirt, and realize that they're trembling.  After being underneath for so long, you've forgotten what breathing true air is like.  Gulp it in, eyes closed, head shaking in disbelief.  The sunlight.  The freedom.  

Then a gust of salty ocean air blows you backwards.  You're grabbing the ground, grasping for the dirt that you know so well.  The depth of the blue is so big, you think, and your heart stops a little.  Glancing down at the hole after a lifetime of burrowing, you wonder, is it worth it?  The risk?  The vast, undulating blue mystery?  

Your foot is sinking back in, finding the comfort in warm soil--when a white gull flashes its wings, dives out and down.  Your heart dives with it, and out you go, down into the undulating blue mystery.  The wind rushes in your ears, and you breathe and breathe and...

Submerged, you're watching the dirt get free from you, floating separate--separate, and free.

photo by silvia mogni.

Special things follow you special places.  To all your places, they come.  To rainbow days and rain-pour days and days the vast blue oppresses you with its greatness.  Special things tiptoe after you like children, fingers on lips, peering around your hips, hoping to surprise you with their quietness.  

A special thing sleeps by her bed, wings folded, tucked away for nighttime--exhausted from the specialness of his new self.  The joyous flutterings are calm now, heartbeats slow.  When she turns around tomorrow--MEOW WHACK BAM--another special thing will make for her a special place.

Sometimes sunlight, 

and sometimes rain.  

And sometimes rivers 

are walkways 

that you miss.

Your footprint will always be 

somewhere, 

an indentation of what you

left behind.

And impressed upon your person

will always be

that place,

that river,

that path

that cut into you,

that poked holes like stars,

for the swans to swim out.

photo by Julie Frederikke.

The sky pulls the clouds and the sea.  Out.  Away.  With force that leaves you feeling weak, and tired.

The matter drains out of you--is pulled away by the moon or the sun.  Whichever.  A force greater than yourself, acting on you, in you.

Stand your ground.  Dig in your toes.  Fight with your soul.  

Fight with your soul.

photo by my sister emily.

You are from this place.  Running your hand along the steel counter, you are apart.  You are not from this place.  How could you be?  

I am not from this place, you shout, veins bulging.  I am gone.  No one knows.  I am disappearing!  See?  No trace! I leave nothing behind.  Do not remember me.

The pans clatter into the sink.  You are flipping the world over.  The world is tumbling you through space and you catch a glimpse.  Dusty sun filtering through the window.  You stand at the metal sink, washing your hands.

photo by Joe Coleman.

Today sitting outweighs standing.  Tomorrow breathing will outweigh moving.  Gliding is important.  Floating on the wind, mere air sustaining your being.  Feel the wind pushing back your face, forcing your eyes open.  Only breathe.  Warm joy seeps through the fear.  Quiet peace flows over the pain.

music by Brave Timbers.

It is all too much.

The spindly boughs turn to birds of prey, scraping for your skin.  The leaves grow mutinous and shower down like knives.  The golden sun turns to haze and betrays you.

You were innocent.  You were explorers, conquering new lives.  Did you even have a chance?

photo by Kelley Smith.

Slowly, it washes over you, like a wave crawling to shore: Growing up is actually heartbreaking.  No one ever tells you this when you're little.  They're all making plans.  She's going to be a concert pianist!  He's going to be a lawyer!  Watch her walk.  Look at her little fingers.  My, how big he's getting!

So you start to buy into it.  You crane your neck, try to see over the wall.  It must be exciting.  Everyone's looking!  There's love over there, and babies and a career!  Just think!  All the things you could be.

You grow taller.  You count the inches on the wall.  You cling to your teddy bear.  "Just wait, Teddy!  We're almost big enough now!"

Thirteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one, more.  You don't know when it happened.  Suddenly, your head pokes above the wall.  You see that big flat world of possibilities.

And you crumple against it and wish you never knew.

photo by Aimee Ketsdever.

It's the haze that does you in. You troop through a glorious, jagged canyon, marveling at the red red rocks and the firmness of the packed sand. You run your fingers along the side, shaving off sprinkles of rock. Tiny pieces all pressed on top of each other to make a mountain.

Then the haze settles in. Where did you come from, you ask it politely. It offers no response, just swishes by. It's not a wet haze--a mere dizziness--a cloud. Everything goes purpley around you, and you sit down on a green boulder.

It's not a bad haze really. You stand up and trek along. The sprinkles of rock still shave off, like a snow cone. You would like a snow cone. You would like a nap.

So, you curl up on the purple canyon floor, with the salamanders and the status flowers. You close your eyes on the purpley haze. One morning, you will wake up and see the mountain again. But the purpley haze has its pretty features.

photo by Dominique Saks.

Five more minutes

Eyes groggy, full of the heavy, restless darkness. The darkness that is still present in the space around you. The space that is quivering with the expectation of the day. The day, the day, the day. It meets you, greets you, licks you on the face--and you must get up. Up, push your body into reluctant motion. Resist, resist the gravity that pulls you back down, under covers, into safety. Safety--quietness, the still restlessness of your own dreams. Even restless, they are yours only. And the pillow is the friend, the only one who understands you.

Convince yourself away from these sweet, delicious dreams. Push up, push out. Get free of those sheets, those blankets wrapping themselves around your legs again. Make the sun make you open your eyes.
Even
if
you
don't wanna:
wake up.

video by Jonsi - "Stars on still water".