Thursday, June 2, 2011

Settle In/Down

So, being sober for the better part of a year, I feel that I'm just at the beginning of settling in to my life, you know, being comfortable with who. i. am.  Whatever that actually means analytically (because there's a significant part of my mind that jumps up and down and wrestles itself into a frothy frenzy when it hears non-discrete items and can try to break them into constituent parts BECAUSE, the brain says, it must be obvious that if we break down everything into small little bits, then, we'll live a greater life, be a greater person, know stuff that other people don't know).  See, part of this whole settling thing is learning to relax.  And I'm a kid again learning to walk, except that, as an adult, I know what it means not to walk, and I want to walk, now.  It isn't learning because I am in a development stage of physical prowess... it is learning because I can "get" what I need to get conceptually, but cannot simply will myself into existing in the sphere that I can plainly see, or, rather, that I can understand exists outside of myself.

Sounds pretty esoteric, huh?  Well, pull up a seat to the fire, and feel how it warms your face and hands, and how the meat sizzles in the orange tinted embers, and listen as your compatriots laugh when marshmallow flows down their cheeks; all the while cold air lingers behind you, hovering in off of the creek, makes you feel bright near the flame, alive, flickering, even, and you smile, and you eat, and pass me a pork wiener, and steam me in a facebook feed and send my image out to the moon, and kill all the bugs with an electronic neon blue bug zapper that was proudly picked up from home depot in a fit of self-improvement (bug free living, get it!), and let your feet stink, and find a way into a nook of sleep for a time before the next branch thins out and fades, because we'll be riding that train together, us strangers, into and out of whatever it is that we need to find, and we won't always be able to share it with a knowing look, or a satisfied smile, and we won't always be able to sit still, either, except that, when we can huddle by the fire on a cold night in the late spring on the cusp of a cabin, and taste a little bit of the most localized morsel, we can forget about all of the big stuff that plagues us and just sit, and settle, and sit some more.

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