The Words As They Travel A Hero’s Journey To My Lips.
These words aren’t coming easily right now.
They seem caught in a tide pool between the ocean of everything and the land-lock of is, somehow paralyzed in these fingers right below the knuckle.
Press on, I tell them, and from the weight and gravity of bent joints like crab legs fingering salty rocks, the words will come. They have no choice. Still, it’s been far too long since I inhabited myself and the world in this way. It’s as though I were dropped off into the Amazon after spending a month in a deprivation tank, but opposite.
Because the world that feels so striking as it pumps through these collapsed veins is the mirror reflection of stillness cast against the shadow of life’s carnival.
Lights and sounds rebound from my center and travel upwards. My lungs siphoning them millimeter by millimeter, each movement builds them a little fuller with air and light and they grow. These things, these word-lets, are alive you know, latent — kinetic.
Then these words pass through the heart, but this phase will take more than the line I can allow it now. This phase happens instantaneously but with the prescience and precision of lifetimes. This phase will take my life to traverse the inlets of and will be the single source that brings my fingers to this keyboard in hope of Morse-coding my soul into the future.
There is a suspension bridge, I believe, that hangs on the symbols of speech, attaching soul to time.
And then to the throat, where most of this gets stuck. Song helps, it forces these, one balloon at a time upwards, higher. Most of us don’t know the more we shove down our throat the less room we give these to rise. Most don’t know the less truth we speak, the more the muscles atrophy, and momentum is lost in the dankness that caves create.
Listening is a lost language that we must relearn in order to expand. We must allow the osmosis of space and silence to permeate our constructs.
The words that make it this far — they do something curious. There is this strong river that picks up with current from the top of the throat and up to the mind. Once a part of the water, they get mixed up and agitated, breaking bonds, separating solute from solvent.
That is why a sharp mind is so important. Its all about reconstitution, really. They are arranged into a symphony of color and light that the eyes bring in. They smell and taste of all things poignant. And here they bake in the sunlight for sometime until perfectly golden and then pass once more, this time more like descending a spiral stairway, from the mind to the lips.
Sometimes, a slide can be created, but it is best used with caution, before descending these so quickly. There is a seasonality to their spiral descent and the journey should be regarded each step.
Now, they reach the lips. And press up against them, sometimes all clustered and clamoring to get out, one golden bubble at a time.
There is a hidden lever here, one that is controlled by something both within us and without. One that cannot be named, one that lives in the unspace of Faith. It is this that pulls the lever and allows each out. A single note at a time.
Building and expanding in the space around the face like a cloud of dandelion, and in a moment is both gone and here forever.
*****
Scarlet Garn is a mom, a lover of health and truth, and bender of all things — rules, status quo, and our own beliefs. She writes to know, and ultimately fall in love with life more fully. She shares in hopes it will serve as a synapse between others and their own true selves. After all, we are all in this together.