Ebb and Flow

I’m feeling the tentative stirrings of my flow reemerging after it ran away and hid in terror of all that’s transpired of late.  It’s peeking its tiny misshapen head

out of the subconscious depths of my psyche where it’s been hidden away in a place to which I’m not granted full access.  I intuitively, or in desperation, set the stage for her return.  I stayed quiet, tried to keep calm, kept my process open, engaged the blank page every morning, created the space and time.  I think it feels safe to rejoin me now. 

All the tests are back, negative.  I have flow to my heart, there is no sign of an embolism.  It may or may not have occurred.  What exactly did occur is and will apparently always be a mystery.  

And, as is now the norm, “We’ll just keep an eye on it.”  That’s what I have to sustain me, to continue on.  That’s it.  So that will have to be enough.  I’ll find goodies to coax myself back out of the closet; that refuge where I go when I’m so scared, when there’s nothing I can do except hide in the safety of that self-made womb.

I’m hesitant.  I felt fine before after all.  I was full speed ahead, engaging every aspect of my life; scheming, laying tracks, planning routes.  I had already gone through the trauma, through the healing – it was over, my ticket was punched to continue on.  But I was blindsided by unknown forces, slammed to the side

of the road once again.  Is that how this is going to be for the rest of my life?  Will I always be looking over my shoulder, obsessively checking my rear view mirrors?  Will I take my inevitable analyses of these “signs” too far; come to a conclusion I’m not meant to embark at all?  What will I do?

Today I feel I’ll keep going.  The road is always unknown.  I just thought I would have more control, more of a choice as to what being on

that road would entail.  I thought the hardest thing was making the decision of which fork to take, that once the decision was made to begin and work along my chosen path, then the rest would just comprise the labor.  I didn’t foresee these types of obstacles.  But perhaps that’s perspective.  And maybe that perspective gives me balance that I’ll need to see this through for the entire journey – the long haul.

There may be – will be – more roadblocks, speed bumps, pile-ups, blow-outs.  There may be a crazy pedestrian who runs out

into the flow brandishing a semiautomatic rifle.  A piece from an airplane may fall in front of me or on me.  Somebody in the lane alongside me may get a blow-out and crash into me; or thoughtlessly text and drift smack into my path.  Maybe I’ll finally get car sick and pull over.  Or maybe my own engine will just be unable to engage anymore and my journey will be over.

I don’t know.  None of us know.  We take blind faith

with us every time we embark.  We just don’t consciously realize it, and that is as it should be. 

 
This type of introspection is impossible, counterproductive to voyaging.  Ridiculously so.  But there are times.  And I’ve had mine.  So today is what I have.  I’ll continue to write and learn and grow.  I’ll continue to seek the support I need to engage these choices.  Workshops and organizations for the community; groups for the work and growth.  My own time to use as I choose, my space to create as I need.  That’s what I decide for today.

I want to say “Here I go again.”  But it’s really not “again” – it’s “still”.  This is all a part of the whole.  A “writer’s life” is not compartmentalized, separate from

“life”.  This is all life.  And I get to use all of it in the writing.  It can’t be – shouldn’t be – disconnected.  

 

There is the ebb as an integral part of the flow.  I only knew that in theory, as rhetoric.  Today I can see it.  Tomorrow – who cares? 

The End of a Road

The trip is concluded.  I’m back and have to figure out how I want to proceed, live this new phase of my life.

The journey was beautiful, meaningful and full.  It went by in the blink of an eye, the insidious corn fields rushing by.  Reality upon return hit hard with

family and personal health scares, forcing me back into the slow lane and even off the road altogether while diagnostics are done to see if we can all get back on the road, proceed as we should.  It’s an interminable waiting game.  I’m being lapped by others moving on, passing me by and all I can do right now is wait it out.  Again.

I saw the country under construction.  Still, always, forever.  It is somehow validating. 

I’m not the only one with work still to do, maintenance still required.  It became part of the trip, tolerated.  You slowed down, got a better look around, learned how to merge, cooperate with others; practiced patience and acceptance.  I hope that those lessons will continue to help me now.

Destinations were achieved.  At the end of the day we always found refuge, savoring the rest, the newness of the place.  Some destinations were disappointing, some

unexpectedly awe-inspiring – magic.  We each had an episode of running into our own blind spots, almost running into an oncoming car.  We take our blind spots with us.  But we weren’t supposed to be looking back anymore – only ahead. 

We left from where we began; an immersion into the past to launch us into the future, from the very people present at his birth.  It was a wonderful feel of

completeness.  So many things had changed; so many things hadn’t.  We

found it fairly symbolic that we had a very difficult time getting out of the city.  We couldn’t find gas easily; no stations just off the freeway no place to find a quick lunch to go.

Santa Fe was inexplicably disappointing.  I was really looking forward to that excursion as I’d never been and it sounded so romantic, all art in the desert.   It was completely monotone and we couldn’t even park.  It was nice, but at the end of the day just a crowded tourist art town with a budget and good marketing.  Not that impressed.  Maybe I expected too much.

It was around the time we reached Colorado that my heart or something began

acting up.  Maybe it was the altitude or skipping my evening medication the first night on the road.  My doctor thought it was a pulmonary embolism from traveling; a not uncommon event.  But the CT scan came back negative, so back to the mystery that is my heart, and waiting, waiting for tests and results.

Colorado Springs was fabulous; the Rockies, Pike’s Peak.  We landed in The Garden of the Gods.  A mini Sedona Arizona you’re allowed to actually climb around in, climb the rocks,

scramble around to your heart’s content.  In Sedona, if you even want to pull over on the side of the road, you can only do so in designated areas, and to do so will cost you money.  There is no ability to meaningfully interact there.  In The Garden of the Gods, it didn’t cost a dime and you get to be a part of it.  You can climb and go wherever you want. 

There were many people scaling the deep red monoliths.  It was awesome.

The dull pain of Nebraska came next.  Unremitting corn, of course, and absolutely no modulation to the landscape whatsoever.

And then the toll roads hit.  Your journey comes at a price in the East.  Once

you enter New York, the common method of passing is to run right up on the bumper of the car in front of you, even if it is passing somebody too, or even if they’re in the right hand lane.  Literally – as soon as we hit the New York border it began.  There was no rancor, no rage like in Los Angeles, just very matter of fact.  That’s how they do.

Niagara Falls was where we chose to rest for a couple days, actually unpack and stand still a moment.  Here you can get right up close and personal.  In

California, it would be behind a glass wall, movie reels and surround sound to duplicate the experience in front of you.  But there, you could walk right up to the falls.  You could take the elevator down to the base of the falls, walk out

onto platforms built there, and scramble around, actually in the falls, the water rushing over you, hitting you while you hold on and screech.  You’re in it.  It was exciting, amazing.  We took water sloshed pictures of each other, grinning like the happy tourists we were in our park raincoats.

The unfortunate climax of our trip was driving in Boston.  It is impossible. 

There are few street signs, exits that don’t exist, directions that take you through people’s backyards; a secret maze that even Google maps can’t penetrate.  It tries valiantly and comes up with confounding information thrown back out, a different guess every time you try.  The city seemed designed to keep out strangers, like it evolved throughout its prodigious history back in upon itself.

The anxiety of driving there, being lost, was of course a perfect physical manifestation of the anxiety we both felt.  The feat of what we were really doing now

unavoidable.  He was staying in that foreign land; I was leaving him.  He would

walk through the door and live with strangers.  I would move on alone, abandoning him there. 

The pain of watching him walk away alone, utterly alone, was wrenching.  And then I had to pull away alone as well; a physical tearing apart between us.  I felt the same baffling emotion as when he started kindergarten and first grade – the tears were

primal, unexpected.  Ephemeral joy and sadness entwined my heart.

I’m still in a state of shock, adjusting.  I’m unable to fully move forward quite yet.  I’m still waiting.  A condition I suspect I’ll have to find a way to get used to in my new life.

It’s a Little Bit Corny – Travels and Travails

Three quarters of this country is corn.  Seriously.  In my drive cross-country with my son to his new university and home, this baffling realization hit fully somewhere around Nebraska.  The scenery had hit a plateau after Colorado, literally, and I soon realized I had seen nothing but corn for many states.  It isn’t “amber waves of grain” – it’s green impenetrable stalks of corn, forever, every damn state, for hundreds and hundreds of miles.  Corn has infiltrated.  It must be used for some secret and nefarious government plot.  I mean, that’s a lot of corn.  I'm convinced it's

pervaded our psyche subconsciously.  How many stories can you name with corn as theme?  It’s insidiously taking over.

From 1945 with Bette Davis in “The Corn is Green” to the horror of Stephen King’s “Children of the Corn” to “The Field of Dreams”, corn definitely is in our psyche and literally in our system.  I discovered I wasn’t far off in my road trip ruminations of conspiracy, induced by driving dozens of hours through unremitting corn field after corn field.  According to Michael

Pollan in his book “We’re Living on Corn!” how much our lives are indeed ruled by corn is just as outrageous or more so than any complicated science fiction tale.  It’s in everything we eat – even factory farmed carnivores are increasingly force fed corn.  A “chicken” nugget is in fact almost entirely corn.  In tracing the creation of this mainstay of the American diet Pollan finds … what chicken it contains consists of corn (because the chickens are corn-fed), as does the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter

that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget ‘fresh’ can all be derived from corn.  Corn shows up in a mind bogglingly array of non-edible products as well.  According to Pollan, So dominant has this giant grass become that of the 45,000-odd items in

American supermarkets, more than one quarter contain corn. Disposable diapers, trash bags, toothpaste, charcoal briquettes, matches, batteries, and even the shine on the covers of magazines all contain corn.  That’s over 11,000 separate items.
 
What fiction can hold a candle to that kind of reality?  It’s always amazing and slightly odd how my imagining the most extreme scenarios so often leads to the truth, the reality of the situation.  I think that must be

backwards.  Shouldn’t I be taking a nugget (sorry – must be the corn in my system!) of fact and transforming it into fiction, instead of imagining fantastical fictional things and finding they are imbedded firmly as fact?  Inevitably when I research some fantasy that has captured my interest, I’m dismayed to find “it” already exists in the real world and is in fact just as bizarre as or worse than I could have ever made it.  I’ll have to find a way to make that bafflingly bizarre process work for me. 

In the meantime, there must be more in this entire country to take inspiration from.  I’m not running away, but I am traveling again and this is inescapably an infusion of new stimuli, fresh ideas, and insight.  More from the road coming soon.  If I can ever escape the corn maze.