Wings? I was talking about them before...and there's more. A wingless bird in the woods.(Have you seen what those goshawks can do in dense woods? Amazing wings.) I'm writing this now because I'm lucky enough not to be still hiking in the woods in the dark, which will be tomorrow's story.
My time here is drawing toward its close and there are so many thoughts and impressions and reflections I really should be sharing. I should be giving a wise and thorough summation of my experience. That will come, promise. But I'm experiencing an odd lack of peripheral perspective, as if either I'm in a tunnel or I am myself an extruded tunnel shape through bunched-up time--a kind of worm.
A trip out of town this weekend,my friend took me to see some of the wonders. Waterfalls. Even more impressive than the cascading water were these sheer, impassive, straight rocks. They had such a feeling of permanence, solidity, unapologetic selfhood, that beside them I felt not just insignificant, not just unreal, but nonexistent--leaving no worm trail to a past, sending nothing forth to any future.
I'm soldiering on (soldier-tunnel-worm), not feeling despair--only perspective. Two things add to this "tunnel" feeling and those are two wings I have lost. Or maybe I'm a centipede after all and they're just two legs from a hundred. But they sure feel like two wings.
Have you ever been surprised by how much you hurt for another person? One of my missing wings is mostly healed, just an absence noted from time to time, a scar on visiting terms with the opened-up world. The other is a gaping conduit to the opened-up world, a hole that wants to be refilled.
One wing is Phil. There's no shadow of doubt that our mutual decision to remake the relationship from romantic full partnership to friendship was the right one. But now we no longer have each other for the regular common-or-garden companionship to which one becomes accustomed and which can make life smoother. Phil's felt its absence too, I know. I've been keeping up on his news and keeping him up on mine fairly well, and while that feels like good friendship maintenance, it reminds of the wing that was once there.
The other wing is my friend M. Or are we even friends anymore? It's two weeks now since I screwed up. Two weeks to focus on being here, to keep my head down and work really hard, some of my favorite kind of work, and let impressions of this place seep in, as I'm poked from the inside many times each day with recollection that I'm not sharing these impressions and stories with her, that I have no idea how she's doing. That I miss her, that I want to know how she's doing, hear her voice, which I replay in my head.
So perhaps I am capable of caring about people after all, something I've doubted about myself most of my life and worked hard to compensate for. I ask that the holes or scars or missing places where I'm so sad let the light in, send light back out, invite friend back. I don't even know how to think about it, but there are so many involuntary feelings and hurts.
I have a story about my venture into the woods today, involving the different ways of people with respect to kindness and a much longer hike than I had planned for on my barefoot-shoe-shod feet. Now that this post has gotten long, I'll save it for tomorrow. One thing I am learning through the work I've been doing here is the importance of having the entirety of a piece of writing in mind with every sentence you compose. And erring on the side of "short." So, more tomorrow, with love.
