Places Calling...

On a day like today, the world is in suspended animation. The seasons won’t separate into recognizable pieces. There are Farris wheels that stay suspended in time too. With some illnesses a person forgets what it was like to feel good. Maybe I could remember if the heat of the flu-ish burning would give me a moment. This headache is like a spatula scraping it all out from the inside, dull but thorough. The fresh winter-cold June air feels like a caress.
On such a day the rain and the sun take turns playing through the atmosphere. Today is too wet to be dry and too dry to be wet. Let’s meet in the garden. The foliage is thick and lush and it has begun to believe it is an arctic/tropical hybrid. It is undoubtedly schizophrenic now, and is just trying to do the best that it can. Great waves of lush growth combine with piteous, shivering tomato plants that clearly wonder why.
Within this piece of life I am at loose ends. I believe I am coming down with a virulent case of ADHD. I roam inside and out. For no apparent reason; one of the potting shelves gets a cleaning but not the rest. All of the cardboard flotsam from soft drink companies and clothes soap magnates gets thrown into the big outside garbage, but I may as well name the daddy-long-legs. Selective tidiness
I look up the symptoms of a certain disease, for no reason other than I read the word at the doctor’s office, and now it is stuck in my head. I sure hope I do not get it, it is not nice. I will know if I do though, as I will lose control of either my bladder or bowels, or possibly both. Some diseases are helpful that way. They are so clear cut.
Residing in this speck of time feels like walking in high heels through clay. Stiletto holes in the world and in my brain. The remedy would be to just slip off the shoes…would it feel happy like a child playing in the mud or completely uncomfortable like when girly-girls don’t want to get dirty?
Here is my bubble, my piece of time and space. It feels wasted and yet I can do no more. My brain seems to have rejected all the familiar things I do in the empty spaces. It chooses not to read or paint or play. A book at this moment would be fruitless. All the watercolors in the world swirling and blending would be just a kaleidoscope.  Possibly pushing through this moment will lead to another world. In that world I will be able to step up and do responsible, productive things. But pushing through this moment is like pushing through a tough membrane. My body is so tired and my mind agrees.
This is a meandering, disjointed day among the wet roses and the sidewalk cracks and struggling earthworms. Things I have never known call to me, which is weird. How can that happen if I have never known them? Maybe they know me….. Old kitchens with chipped enamel counters and wooden rolling pins, cobbled streets with graceful twisting trees and thick stone bridges that give passage over wide, gently flowing currents; postcards with elegant sepia words and valises and steamer ships and fat spring birds with powder blue heads, that come to you and sit in your palm.
Possibly the fatigue in my mind and my spirit will actually let me pass through to the places that call to me most strongly. What if this disjointed place of loose-ends is really a kind of portal? What if I could step through and the Farris wheel would begin to turn? All the places that are stuck would move freely and all of the suspended fragments would filter down into clarity, a zero-attention-span, flu-fog portal if you will.
On a day like today, choosing to believe that what the enemy means for evil, God means for good, I could sit at the top of the Ferris wheel, still and quiet and waiting. And all of the places that I do not know, but which call to me like old familiar friends, would move within the moment and reveal a place of discovery and grace. Tonya Willman ©2011