Lake
You are a young girl playing on a log with your brother and dog The water in the lake clear and cold and deep, the rocks warm on the bank, little cottonwoods grow on the edge, in the distance: Mountains near enough to cast their shape on the waters surface. The water blue and green some rocks white, moved there in glacial time. One day you will be a woman Living in a city apartment And you will go down to a corner bar And you will meet a man, with curling dark hair And apricot eyes And you will tell him About the pink bathing suit you wore that day About how you called your dog giggles, but his name was Oliver How you tried to get him to float on the log About how warm the sun, and cold the water was About the moment your uncle and giggles fell off the log and shrieked About how your brother died that summer And you'd run down a winding road With the wind blowing in one ear, The grass cicadas drone in the other You’ll be shocked to feel so young Yet so far from something long ago Be alarmed and excited at the warm hand of this once stranger Holding your arm as your memories surge And you cry, and are held
Recording Transcript
I'm sitting under a stand of aspens, you can hear the leaves and the wind, at the bottom of a mountain range, in a canyon, it's getting into late summer, and everything is slowing down
Sometimes I come here, and I walk and check out every corner of this canyon for hours, and one day I walked straight to these aspens and sat down, and I read this poem that I wrote yesterday at the lake
And a question that just came to me, is this where I stop and reflect? Is this where I sit and look back at everything that's happened since last summer? Is this when I decide the value of my decisions? Is this when I understand everything that's happened? I want to, but I know I never will, but I can still love the life that I have, and try to understand it as best I can
I may not make all the right decisions, I may not have the wisdom I wish I did, I know my path is imperfect, but I also know what feels true, and I try and remember that
But it's strange, because as life goes on, people change
As Heraclitus said, you can never step in the same stream twice because the water has flown by, and we have too
I've been reflecting a lot on control, and pain, and suffering, and beauty, and freedom
I've been trying to do these reflections through a lens of gentleness, gentleness for myself and for others, acceptance, and flexibility, pliancy, dynamism
I've been trying to really understand what I'm truly afraid of in life, and why I feel a need to try and control that
My friend Mattau recently told me that when he switched from being a pessimist to an optimist, he realized that everything he'd been trying to control in life because he thought it was going to be bad, ended up being good
So really, that kind of thinking comes from a place of fear, that in some ways is somewhat destructive
And I'm looking at the next three years of my life, moving to a foreign country for school in the next couple weeks, and I know that all of my idiosyncrasies and downsides will be tested, but I think I'm ready, and I think I know I believe in myself
I've been digging into Ram Dass recently, of course I read his book, heard about him twenty years ago, a couple of my friends have turned me on to him again recently, and he's got a simple way of putting all this, be in truth and follow your heart
Be in truth and follow your heart
Be in truth and follow your heart
Thank you for listening to the wind and the bees and the leaves of the aspen trees.
Be in truth and follow your heart
I just wanted to share one more thing
I was washing out a mason jar in the sink a couple days ago
It was a jar that my friend gave me
It was full of rose petals
I dropped it as I was washing it and it shattered in the bottom of the sink before I could catch it
But as I was reaching down, I touched it at the moment it broke, and it cut my finger right on the well point where the heart is
Heart number nine
Heart point number nine
The tip of the pinky finger on the inside corner
So I was sitting there thinking, this feels like an omen
This feels strange
And I was thinking of how the person who gave it to me is pregnant
And I was thinking about how it was a vessel that they had offered me and that it was broken
And I thought to myself, there's a quality to this omen that feels negative
And I don't know where it came from, but I had this thought that came from somewhere and it said, not if you do something about it
And it wasn't really my voice or my thought
Maybe it's this thing I've been working on about being more optimistic and hopeful
Feeling like I have agency in the world
Which is something people who are abused often feel like they don't have on a very deep and difficult to address level
Not if I do something about it
And I sat there with that thought and that experience
And I asked somehow to go deeper into whatever that was
And I had almost like a psychedelic experience, though I've never done those substances
And my vision changed and stuff started moving and I was brought to tears
I felt broken open
And like I'd been given a gift
Because I've been thinking a lot about faith
And what that means to have faith in other people and in life
And how difficult that is for someone who is stuck in pessimistic, negative attitudes that is always looking out for how things are going to fail
And how I deeply and completely I don't want to live that way anymore
And I think that that thought was just a gift
And I was sitting here under the aspens and this man was walking by with his three dogs just now
And you hear him in the recording calling one of them
And the two dogs that were with him were staying really close
And the third was a hunting dog running around out of sight
And I thought often recently about how faith is like loving something to a degree that that person or animal or thing feels so fully understood and cared for
There's no need to control
That they'll always be coming back to you
Even when they're not
Even when they go out into the world and make their mistakes
And disassociate and damage themselves and others
And get in fixes and hurt themselves
And make bad decisions
If you have enough faith and care for them enough
That kind of belief and understanding of someone will see everything through
And there won't be any need to try and control the way that they're learning or the way that they're living
Because the most important thing about someone that you care about is the bond that you share
And a true bond can never be maintained through control
Be in truth
Follow your heart
Thank you for listening.
