uprooted

I want to give you something hopeful today, but I am not feeling hopeful at this moment. Sometimes it’s ok, isn’t it, not to paste on the mask and pretend like everything’s fine. Sometimes we’re not fine, we who have been through hard shit, we who work too much for too little, we who are aching and frightened and can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. There are days like that. Yes, there’s a light there, maybe we’ve lived long enough to know it must be somewhere down there, but right now we’re in the dank middle, and it sucks.

I am at a low point — there are low points that happen every month, low energy points when I am bleeding and releasing, and I find it frustrating that I have to keep on going like everything’s normal during this time in my months, like I’m not releasing a part of my body back to the earth.

And what else am I releasing? A home and a workspace — these spaces, watered, I’ll tell you, with blood and tears and laughter, and now I’m yanking up what tenuous roots had started feeling their way down through the rough calloused edges of me, had started to set, had started just barely to take up home. We’re taking them up again. God forbid there should be a solid grounded home. I don’t sit still long enough to let anything grow, pull up my roots again and again, up from everywhere. My dirt is dangling again and I am tired of always moving around, always running, always carrying my roots over one arm, saying that the next place will be somewhere I can set them to the soil, then running off again before we can truly find out.

I am tired of running. I have been running and running for almost 20 years, and I can’t even tell you exactly what I have been running from, just that something in me is holding its sides now and bent down and crawling, too exhausted to keep going.

What does it mean when that happens? When whatever circles we’ve been running in suddenly close up tight and we run smack into ourselves?

(In finding the image, I can push gently into the hopeful part, looking at that rich soil and humus around the tree’s roots: what life needs to be unearthed in order to have room to breathe and what new growth can emerge from the stuff we’ve been composting, the rich, fecund parts of ourselves we’ve tended even unconsciously?)

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An idea for a write: What do your (or your character’s) roots look like? Can you imagine them eminating from part of your body? Are they long or shallow, slender or thick, many or singular? Do they live in a particular place? Do you want them to live some particular place? How do they feed you? What do they feed you? Give yourself 10 minutes (or more, if you get going) to follow your writing wherever it seems to want you to go.

Thanks for being here and for reading Thank you for feeling and tending to the roots that are feeding you in preparation for the next part. Thank you for your words.