Wednesday, March 16, 2011

I was still in bed on Friday when the east coast started checking to see if we had been washed out to sea over here. My mom called first, and it took me a few minutes to muster up the courage to walk out of my bedroom and make sure the landscape was still intact. This is a fear of mine untethered to natural disasters, that one day I will miss the end of things and wake to find only devastation, the sea having turned our hills to islands. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

It's a treacherous thing, to think only in TS Eliot and shadow puppets, a grimace that in retrospect was a rictus of fear, all of the ways that all of everything can go wrong. Perhaps it's better to return to making living tissue from cotton candy, seeding the sweeter channels with possibility, since it's all going to end up the same way in whichever cases.

Maybe we just too seldom look past our Prufrocks and Wastelands to our Little Giddings, to the salvation in unity and the discovery in circles. Things get a little too Pentecostal in there, true enough, but there is also an uncommon peace in the rhythm. Of all the rabbit holes on offer, some are certainly more likely to be lined with spikes than others, but we'll have to go down one eventually.

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