If You Quit Thinking for One Hour
It’s a dangerously compelling notion—that something greater is within reach...
If you quit thinking for one hour, what will happen? … You came down from the heavens. The high angel adores you and still, you feel like a poor wretch. If you remember who you are, what will you become? By Rumi, from Gold, Tr. Haleh Liza Gafori. (With gratitude to Suleika Jaouad, The Isolation Journals.)
Remember who you are… This charge to remember, instead of turning my gaze back, unearths, instead, a longing for what might be. Like it’s time to rise up from the Poor Wretch Bench and fight my way through all the things that are holding me back: Once I get new knees, once I’m done with this class, once I retire… then I’ll be able to… What, exactly?
Sit on the Poor Wretch Bench smarter, more agile and with all the time in the world?
For most of my life, my default mode was STRIVE. In the past few years, I’ve begun exploring what other gears I might use to move through the world. My old striving gear feels like walking around and around a building, and inside of it is the life that I imagine for myself, that I long for. I just need find the way in.
But there is no door. No gate. Not even a motion sensor light. Just high blank walls under a lowering sun in a part of town that may or may not be deserted
.
It’s a dangerously compelling notion—that something greater is within reach, if only I would get off my ass. The self-help industry puts this to profitable use. And I’m their sucker.
But today, instead of walking in circles, treading the beaten path of longing, I decide to go for a walk in my own (perfectly fine) neighborhood. It’s my first day out of bed after a case of influenza that walloped me in the middle of my dad’s health scare.
I walk, ruminating on Rumi’s question: If you remember who you are, what will you become?
I walk, looking at winter’s ravages, winter’s revelations.
I walk and remember: I am a gardener. “Remember” because it’s a relatively new identity. So as soon as I get home I put these first bits of newfound energy and strength into pulling down mildewy sunflower stalks and dahlia stems, brittle goldenrod and aster. Pulling up dandelion, thistle and the many incarnations of clover. The sodden ground releases them easily. I rest and drink water between short stints of work. Pull some. Sit some.
And then I see it: Winter beauty abounds in our little front yard. It had only been hidden by dead things.
Now: yellow mock orange, red stems of blueberry, purple heather, bright mugo pine, scarlet other kind of heather, and the thin branches of laceleaf Japanese maples—one mature and crimson, the other young and green. Three forsythia branches arch exuberantly three times further than all the rest of its branches. Fragrant salvia. Trailing rosemary. The softness of wooly thyme.
For maybe the first time ever, I want winter to last and last. This quiet, dormant time, undistracted by leaves and petals and berries and pods, when you can see the bones of things.
Back inside, I light a candle, strip down to skin and submerge in a tub of cedar scented Epsom salts. Over me a landscape of suds crackles quietly. I remember a poem that I wrote one morning several years ago:
Revelator Watching mist climb mountainsides or stepping under the shade of old oaks, eye settles on the deeper structures: branching trunk, spine of the world. [First published in Blueline Magazine, Vol. 38.]
It is, indeed, @Pamela Carter! In addition to who I’ve been in younger years and what awaits in the future, i’m interested in listening for inner self/selves that rarely get to see the light of day.
memory and what current self is--a fascinating investigation