migrations between god & despair
“The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home. ”
[Evening thoughts from a guest room]
Day one
In between one life and another: this is where the poet loses herself. Where she unravels in that stretch of land that reveals to her who she truly is, and in which old ugly habits her safety lies.
So while poems fall into this emptied space, and truths finds room to reach this restless migrant, she buries herself in the chaos of searching, refusing to wait, refusing the uncertain air, refusing to surrender those maddening details of life, this forest of adulthood that loses her. The poems pass by unheard, unwritten. And truth finds another ear still enough to listen.
This too, is a story about god, about how he visits in those gaps of our lives where the leaving’s happened and the coming isn’t arriving soon enough. This is a story about what we do when we land in a place that promises a divine visit. And the impossibility of surrender for women who’ve been taught that God is the hand that pushes you off the ledge, and not the net that waits for the weight of you underneath,
And then, maybe God is both the one who pushes and the ones who saves. That feels closest to how I feel him. A firm hand guiding me away from familiar poisons, and a tender hand catching every fall, every foolish attempt to crawl back to my doom.
And if what we receive is what we feel worthy of, and what we feel worthy of is what we know, which is what we’ve received, how is the circle broken?
In the in between space that terrifies. So long as there is movement, my life arches and lusts for the circle it knows. But the in between is a camp in a desert where nothing can be done, no movement made, no agency exists. It is my only chance, and I’ve had many. To open in this gap between one migration and another, one lover and another, one attempt and another, to face my palms upwards and watch what lands. Only the old voice returns to me in the silence of waiting, begs me to move, even when there is no where to go. It wars with the stillness that may deliver something that could take its place. And so it lifts my body, makes it panic, makes the nothing feel like prison and the in between like failure, and so when something arrives, and something always does when you open your palms, it finds only the imprints of a body on the carpet, a half-page of uneasy thoughts abandoned beside a cup of cold coffee.
Day two
It’s past one in the evening and there’s not much left in me to write. Today was a day that asked of me to let go, and of so much. For the first time in five years, I no longer have my home on wheels and gone with it too are so much of the little things it held, precious reminders of moments I haven’t been able to let go of. I did it. I released it, and did it quickly before I could hesitate. And now, so late in the night, I want to sink into the void I created, into this small clearing in the middle of an untamed land that has been begging for my attention. But I can’t find much solace in the hard work it took to clear this acre. My eyes are weighing the mess of this farm, measuring the effort it’ll take to create many more acres of this. And besides it too is a strange fear. Suddenly this wild farm looks different, and there’s less of that familiar poison to crawl to. Now I stand between a possibility I opened, and the neck-tall weeds that kept that possibility safely out of sight. And the questions that spill into this emptied space. What is life without a home that can be carried off to another harbor at any moment?
And what about the raining poems?
Day four
Something has gone, and gone with it too is the memory of what it was. My prayers have been short, simple. To return to the river of life, to step in its stream. I’m tired of the banks, safe and dry as it is, I’m sick of it. My heart breaks for the life that passes while I stay safe. God, put me in the water. And when I run to the banks, and I will, put me back in, over and over, until I become water itself..
So god is a listener, and I haven’t done much talking. Guilt conquers my lips each time I’ve tried to speak. I’ve knocked on his door the same way a child does when it's done wrong, begging but hesitant, wanting an answer, a presence, even if it’s full of rage. Anything but the solitude of a little body by a closed door, holding a fear it wants hushed by an answer, any answer.
Tell me how bad it gets, how far I’ve gone to turn back down that road to a God I swore severance from. A god I hated, a god that broke my heart. Tell me, what kind of pain sends you back to those dirt-stained hands that wanted your ruin and in your ruin, delivered your salvation. What has life done for me to walk back willingly to the farm, to search for the tilted silhouette of a broken man, my father. God and daddy. God’s land and the farm. The impossibility of him, the curse of this land. And I, the daughter of both who’ve penned pain into a book that no amount of migrations can take me out of.
Day Six
I meant to write last evening. I had just returned from the ranch with a massive pain in my heart. I thought about it all through the night…what could have made me hurt so much? We were out with the horses…watching them come near the oud. They circled us, listened, nudged us for tenderness. The music was softening us all, opening something necessary that begged to be touch. And then, just at that moment when I should have released the camera and sunk in deeper, I was suddenly in a hurry to leave, and I can’t understand why. Why so many beautiful, tender moments in my life are cut through with this sudden, inexplainable urge to go… And it kills me. It leaves me wrestling between the desires that carry whispers of instruction (instructions that could deliver salvation), and the mind that hears only the screams of its own habits.
There is more, so much more. and I will return to this pain later. For now, life is not allowing me much of a chance to write…
Day…
Because life is vast…and you get lost everywhere.
I’m exhausted. The territory of my mind is a godless space that believes its ruin lies in letting go. Here, there is no possibility for surrender. Surrender into what? There is no divine net, no space for divine whisper. My mind is a dreary office space with overflowing cabinets of useless files and papers I should have thrown out a long time ago…
My life is in need of a burning, the way neglected land is burned for new life. No amount of weeding can fix this. But with what necessary fire do I burn my life with? And how long before the first blade of grass returns?
I am the lost farmer who both burns and seeds new life together. The burning hasn’t finished, and there’s no chance for the seed to take breath on this draft of a farm. Forever a draft. Forever unfinished. Little pieces of crumbling paper that I carry from harbor to harbor. Leaving it all unwritten. What a mess I’ve made.
Here I am, without anything to run with, without anything to return to, without even a small shed on this mess of a farm to look onto to say, That, I built with my own hands. Here there are only boxes of the past, stained with the color of regret and confusion. My entire life stands waiting for another cycle of dead-end migrations in boxes. There is the smell of rotting land, and a hill large enough to watch over the others passing, who carry what I’ve touched but never managed to hold onto for long enough…
And if the mind is a hopeless farm, then the body must be its fire. If that divine bus no longer stops at this station, then it’s time for a migration downwards, into a territory that does not pretend that life is written alone. But the body is a slow fire, and even if the job were finished, I don’t have any seeds prepared.
Day …
The journey home has been long, and I’ve never really been certain there’s a home waiting at the end of it. All I know is I’ve stopped walking . Somewhere along the way, I sat down to rest and never got back up. I sunk into guest rooms that promised impermanence. Into bodies with dead-end roads.
Where is she? Where has she gone? Forugh once wrote, “She who was me is gone… who was she?” Only I carry the feeling that I knew her. I knew her well. I felt her rising to life, drinking the air of places she was never allowed in, touching bodies barred from her with warnings of hell. Where is the woman who sat on the bridge at sunset, who stood still by a river listening to a musician in the evening, who ran from herself, and into herself, and with herself? Who is she now, this woman who can’t find breath to run again?
I need her. I need her badly. In this body there is no woman, nothing feminine in her mind. Inside, she is male and dying. Gone is the memory of what she was born with, this shameless sensuality that screamed in silence. I want her. Bring her to me, or else bring me to her.
I wish this search was as dirty, as loud, as wild as it needs to be. Instead, it happens in a little corner in the suburbs, disguised under many false names . In the hunger for mess, she eats too much, paces too much, works too much. She is searching with her hands, tapping on keyboards, begging the screen to deliver what only the wild can.
But I carry the memory of touch, of having felt an answer arriving before the question, years before it. They were seconds of life, moments I stood barefoot in a paragraph I would need to read later, much later. There are answers that comes when the question is nothing. Then, when the desire to know becomes everything, becomes all that holds you every hour of your life, it disappears. And only after years of begging on your knees does it suddenly come to you, in an ordinary moment, a tiny memory of you barefoot by the ferry, watching the others say goodbye from the only place you never desired escape.
Day…
The exile of the wild woman.
The exile of the part of you that wouldn’t have been able to allow this, whose eyes you would have had to answer to. I was walking the wrong road, and to walk it without insanity, I turned the wild woman in me away. I’ve been standing where I shouldn’t have been,; her scream would have made it a thousand times harder. But it’s there, in the wide opening of her eyes, that frightening yell, the return of the mother who looks around in horror. This is where the last possibility lives. But there is no way to bridge to cross this river. You have to submit to the muddy passage. There is no other way…
So here I am on this ground, asking her to return, and bracing myself for her rage, her instruction, her disgust with my submission. And maybe, the possibility of tenderness, of mercy. The anger spilling into an embrace I’ve waited for my whole life…
