After a week like cracked glass, where routine vanished along with quiet, I found myself unable to connect one thought or thing to another or write for longer than a paragraph about either. Here are my fragments.
Poetry
And here is Raymond Carver’s “Late Fragment.”
Journeying
I am attempting a regular QiGong1 practice to help with my energy levels and basement level blood pressure. For the last month, I’ve spent about fifteen minutes most mornings practicing “earth forms.” In Chinese medicine and philosophy, the year has five seasons, the additional one being the time of transition between summer and fall. The QiGong forms for this season are all about balance, moving from one way of being to another while maintaining equanimity. I particularly like the form called “holding rainbow.” When practicing this form, you can imagine holding a rainbow between your palms then dipping down to touch one end to the ground, then the other. But when I practice it, I think of the rainbow as shifting emotional currents and circumstance. As my right hand nears the floor, I think of happiness, delight, and then as my left hand takes its turn, I think of suffering, anxiety. To move from happiness to suffering and vice versa, I have to pass through a middle space. I inhale to stand upright and, for just a moment, the scales balance. I hold pain and joy in equal measure, before I exhale and begin to tip toward one end or the other. In order to move like this without losing my balance, my feet must be firmly rooted on the floor, weight equally distributed, strength rising up though my legs to my core. Then I can move like a tree in the wind with flexibility, acceptance, and grace.
At the local tire store, I talk to the owner, who determines we need four new tires before winter. I hand him the car key and shoulder the bag containing my computer, books, and knitting. Then I make the thirty-minute walk to the nearish coffee shop. Once inside, I choose a table in a corner, one near the back door, where I can see the beautifully landscaped courtyard that’s too cold to occupy this morning. As I plug in my computer and situate my other supplies, I notice again the weighted calm I have felt for the last several days. On my return walk to pick up my car, I speak these words quietly into my phone:
I didn't know that I existed inside a container. I thought the container was the world. But it was just a container. The container held me and all the things that kept me safe. It told me who I was. It told me what the world was and what other people were. But it was just a container. It's my container, but it isn't me. It's just a container.
When I crawl into bed at night, I lie flat on my back and pull the covers up to my chin. My arms rest on my chest, my hands gently curled like a child’s. The bedroom windows are open. When I close my eyes, I hear my neighbor who lives in the apartment across the street, talking on the phone while he smokes the day’s last cigarette. I listen to the hum of traffic, its low and high pitches, mixed with the song of late season cicadas. I smell the smoke from the burning yard waste in my next-door neighbor’s fire pit. Then my senses turn inward, and I imagine a couple of women, never more than three, dressed in white, attending to me. They wrap me up in the blankets and generally fuss over me as I lie there. Their faces are kind, and they don’t speak. They just care for me, after a long day and many years of exhaustion. Eventually, my arms relax by my sides. I begin to meditate. I meditate until I’m too sleepy to continue. Then I role over onto one side or the other, bringing blankets with me, and sleep.
Gardening and Making/Mending
We’re planning to move from Omaha to Iowa City next summer. My daughter will graduate from high school in the spring, and Iowa City is much closer to my partner’s job at a small liberal arts college in the eastern part of the state. I’m excited about the move. I’ve spent most of my life wandering, and a new place is always an invitation. But I am not happy about leaving my garden. I’m mourning. And I’m also preparing it and me for my leaving. This week, I cleaned up the front bed at our house, clearing out all of the volunteer plants that I let grow there every summer and preparing the shrubs, Pawnee Buttes sand cherry and aronia berry, as well as the witch hazel for mulching. Even as I make this space “presentable” for prospective buyers, I am aware that I’m also removing winter habitat for insects and animals. I comfort myself with the knowledge that this is the only garden bed that will not remain intact for the winter, and that I am caring for myself by doing this task now rather than waiting until warmer weather when I will be boxing belongings and finishing house repairs. This kind of preparation is a leave taking, a final act of devotion to a space created shovel-full by shovel-full and to which and with which I am deeply indebted and intertwined.
The shawl is progressing. I exchanged the mottled pink yarn for this “mandarine” as the third color in the shawl and am my knitting my daughter a pair of socks out of the pink instead. I seem to always need a sock “project.” I have yarn for a sweater for me, but I can’t find the right pattern. And I’m telling myself to be patient and wait. A sweater is a commitment, and then you have to wear it because you made it. I want to like the finished product. Our house and the Airbnb are also receiving some much needed mending this fall, a new set of steps, some fresh paint, a new ceiling fan. Like the garden, as I prepare these two spaces, I also prepare them and myself for change, something new.
Mimi Kuo-Deemer is an excellent resource for all things Qigong. The image is from her book QiGong and the TaiChi Axis.
I will miss you!
Love your visualisation for Painting the Rainbow qi gong exercise Emily, I always feel the balance in this when I do it but this is a beautiful acceptance of the joys and sorrows of life.