the most beautiful thing: polishing stone sort of day

Caught in a dance of beautiful friction, I step into my morning. The floor is cold, the sun trying to be warm, the face under the shower still cool to the touch and one foot in front of the other is a little bit hard. It’s a grind. What did they mean? We are thrown into the press chunky and thrown and throwing about, we are pulverized. It is a soft pulver. I frictitious shining. A beautiful friction, yes.

It is from here that I often run. When the mornings become heavy with thinking, the logging on heavy with dread, the saying good morning heavy with reservation. It is from here that exit plans flood in, flooding in to the space where the pumicing leaves chinks in the armor of an otherwise sweet life I am living. From the outside, it is so very perfect I suspect. From the inside, the grinding is never ending, especially now.

Staying put is not really an option. Staying put in this lead-heavy booted gloom of southern hemisphere autumn, of wood stoves fickle with flames and embers, of waves crashing a little ways off but too cold to dance in, of promises that are broken before the breath of them has cooled, of the nothing given without consequence/no consequence certain, of just not wanting to do it anymore. In this one right here, staying put is not an option. The exit plans, they are the suspects though.

Where to? Where from? Shift the address? Shift the partners? Shift the weight from one foot to the other in downward dog? Shift this, that, the other, that I can touch? Or shift something bigger, something grander, something surprisingly easier (some say)? Maybe the only mountain I can move is here behind the eyes, not out in front of it. And maybe there is nothing there to shift but the seeing, the where of the looking, the who of the meaning. Well, maybe.

You see, I am feeling a little ground to bits, my edges red and taught with the friction, my every mile of sinew and cell chains burning a little. And I think if I stay put, if I just keep on with it, grinding may give way to a gleaming sweet shine, a polished, radiant, luminous reflection of the rightness of every moment. Contrived as it may sound in the context of all this philosophical mumbo jumbo, I think maybe, just maybe it’s true, because maybe it already has. Maybe it was shining, most beautiful before I ever felt the grind. Maybe it’s always been the most beautiful thing. Maybe what’s being ground to bits is the seeing of it, or rather, the not.

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Photo, detail of Winged Figure of the Republic, found here, credit given to Andre Costantini.

~ by HeatherArtLife on April 22, 2013.