molding clay

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering. --Ben Okri

For today at least, I’ve determined an answer to a chicken/egg sort of self-observation… in some ways though, I know for certain, I am not alone in this ever-present evolution… this molding of clay.
As an over analyst by both craft and trade (HONK!), I spend a fair amount of time perplexed of my own accord.
I have dabbled in therapy.
Self-help healing.
Manuals on bettering and furthering.
I have aspired and inspired, relished and rehashed.
Often though, in retrospect, I might make myself barf. Instead.
Seriously.
What with the excess emotion—felt, anticipated, often expected, ridiculed…
What with it all?
Truly?
No. I will not blablabla. For although my life is a shared soliloquy of blablabla’s to whomever has not grown too tiresome from the listen, it is in the sorting—the turning of eggs and flipping of hotcakes, that true sourcing gleans-through–skimming to the top… surfacing, temporarily, sometimes stunningly…
And so to reflect a bit on dear Ben Okri… in my ‘capacity to create’
I do overcome.
I do endure.
I have transformed.
I do love and have been loved.
Am loved.
I do not suffer.
The countless experiences that have sculpted and shaped me are not dismal reminders of the negative… not painful scar-tissue-filled mounds… no.
They have left their stories on every inch of me.
They have changed my structure, my fibrous-being alters, unendingly.

Yet how is it, that in all the tedium of reconstruction; the seconds, minutes, hours, days, months; the YEARS of evolution—How is it exactly that at the tip-top, when I fancy that I too

walk like I'm on a mission
cuz that's the way I groove
[when in fact…]
I got more and more to do
I got less and less to prove
[and when I smack-myself-in-the-forehead…
wonderin’ why]
it took me too long to realize
that I don't take good pictures
cuz I have the kind of beauty that moves (Evolve, Ani diFranco)

And I get it, I just get it and I feel it in every last pore—in all the nooks and crannies, all the way to my toes, and the insecurities are dead-gone. Not just tucked away for the night under their handmade quilts, but gone from down-deep…
G O N E away…
How come then… the eureka moment of peace dissolves into a reality where it is neither tip or top?
Nadir it is neither, yet a blurred somewhere in between.

A boat, adrift unanchored, it’s anchored-rope severed.

How come then, with one terse word. With the fragment of one little memory, all the built-up-foundation of new construction—the new growth, strong in its fertile homeland.
How come then, must doubt seem to eradicate it all?
Crumble the sand castle into the sea?
How to desire motion, again, from whence it has ceased?
How to let the empty ache of pain subside?
Let the belly fill again with the humble renewal of laughter…let the heart, fill again its balloon of hope, full.
Splash again there, in the waves, build that sand-castle, knowing full-well the raindrops may reshape… the grains wash away again, into the sea…