Inside this simple flesh / Watching things grow

Here are two free-writes from this week. The prompts were lines from the poem “Innocence” by Linda Hogan, which you can read at the end of the post.

Inside this simple flesh (10 minutes)

Inside this simple flesh ripples waves of itchiness. No discernible pattern except that maybe it gathers in the areas I move the most: backs of shoulders, fronts of hips. Mapping the body (not in any sort of relief way!) as region by region it comes back online.

I think, in the wee hours between bouts of the deepest sleep of my life, that perhaps I am indeed atrophying, liquifying, and as the tissue falls gently apart it sends up flares of feeling that manifest as this itch. And so, I decide, before falling back down into the blessed dark, that I’ll take the old girl out for a spin in the morning. Start a slow, forceless process of resolidification.

I must be careful, of course: mindful of lung capacity, yes, but more than that, this of all re-formings has to be the most intentional. Itchiness notwithstanding, it is all so good right now. The world is not good, no, but I am. My world, inner and outer, is. Everywhere I look there is shine. Inside this simple flesh lives little but gratitude. It feels so damn precarious to get attached, to even enjoy it.

So if this is indeed the moment that this simple flesh embarks on a short-awaited reconstitution, the one thing I absolutely cannot do is rush, or blunder, or take eager but clumsy steps.

I stride up the hill with purpose and with pride. With wonder and yes, more gratitude. I am surprised by just how much stamina has endured, though I suppose I shouldn’t be all that surprised—is that not the very nature of stamina?

And I come home itchier than ever - thighs, knees, tops of feet. New territory being reclaimed in this strange and irritating way.

Still, I trust that inside this simple flesh a new story is being written. My only charge, it seems, is to follow its lead.

Watching things grow (8 minutes)

Better yet, watching them ripen. Thank you for that image, Eve—for naming and showing us the bowls of bounty in your sunroom slowly decaying, sweetening, cycling, ready to nourish us.

The surreal and stunning red of the sweet gum leaves on our block … how can that be decay? Be death? And if it’s true, if it is, how does that inevitable transformation bring only sadness? Well, those of us who have witnessed it know it does not—that there are dimensions to the ripening, the decay, the ultimate fall. Pockets of laughter, trapped like air bubbles in an iceberg, waiting to send impossible ripples of sun-reflected beauty outward to all it touches. There is amazement. Synchronicity. An inbound tide of love, usually, that reinforces what and who is still here in a way that is undeniable.

Watching things grow, in many ways, means watching them die too. The life we hold in our hands. The acorns. The old dried roses on the bush headed into winter. This very time of year, in fact: people make whole pilgrimages to places where all is dying. To marvel at the translucent beauty of it all. To take pictures of vast landscapes of all that is soon to be no more.

Let your heart be sad, of course. Yesterday we walked by a dead buck on the sidewalk. Young and fully formed, a shine still in its open eye. A life cut short, no doubt, by human mindlessness.

There is heartbreak. And inside the seed of a shattered heart, a cell of magic. Too small to see, but keep your eyes on it. Watch it grow, and know: you are witness to all that will ever be.

Innocence

Linda Hogan

There is nothing more innocent
than the still-unformed creature I find beneath soil,
neither of us knowing what it will become
in the abundance of the planet.
It makes a living only by remaining still
in its niche.
One day it may struggle out of its tender
pearl of blind skin
with a wing or with vision
leaving behind the transparent.

I cover it again, keep laboring,
hands in earth, myself a singular body.
Watching things grow,
wondering how
a cut blade of grass knows
how to turn sharp again at the end.

This same growing must be myself,
not aware yet of what I will become
in my own fullness
inside this simple flesh.