Gather. Discover. Cultivate.
25 push ups will not get you a promotion.
They won’t get you published
and they won’t get you laid.
25 push up do not walk the dog, stock the fridge, or keep the kid out of jail.
25 push ups do not set the record straight.
They do not cover the rent or replace the busted alternator.
25 push ups do not even give you defined biceps.
You’d need curls and rows and extensions, multiple sets,
and a gym membership.
Desire, heartbreak. A headline shrieks the momentary drift back to bloodshot vigilance.
She gazes back to now and says
Hold those eyes open. Ears too. Skin. Throat. You will find the break in thorn and bramble, the place your body fits though.
We are the compulsives. The chameleons. The deluded. The wounded.
Addicts. Bigots. Enablers. Aggressors.
Gossips. Accommodaters. Over-sharers. Fixers.
We are the guarded. And the stuck.
We are passive. People-pleasers. Avoiders. Myopic.
We envy. We compete. We keep secrets. We give up.
Liars. Caretakers. Impulsives. Fanatics.
Re-enactors of traumatic events.
Prisoners of mindsets we refuse to reject.
Continue reading “CrazyTown and the Ambassadors of Acceptance”
Maybe the talisman doesn’t save us after all. Maybe something suitable just happens to be within reach at the moment we need to be saved.
When it comes to rescue, coincidence can look a lot like fate.
Several months ago, I “threw my back out.” An uber-intense workout involving a particularly brutal instrument of torture called Jacob’s Ladder twinged something in my lumbar region. Within hours, pain immobilized me.
Eyes like a growling. Eyes like a treasure box. Storefront reflection, candid photograph, inverted glint on spectacle glass.
Eyes tethering me to corporeality.
They write their stories on my body. Make their confessions on my body. Cast the runes and decode the signs and plan their fortune on my body. Ink the map of their nightmares on my body. X the spot of their rescue on my body.
This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.
– Naomi Shihab Nye, “Gate A-4“
Someone vandalizes a church and a Jewish community center in Northern Virginia. They paint swastikas on buildings and dark words over a sign supporting Muslims. This happens on the first night of Passover, at the start of the Christian holy week. The story is here.
Then the police track down a suspect. Dylan Mahone is a 20-year-old man who has found his way into white supremacist and neo-Nazi circles. A student at the community college. A neighbor who lives just blocks from the house my former partner shares with his two kids. A young man whose Facebook page drips with racism and hate and noxious fantasies of violence.
White. Christian. Educated. Male.
One of ours. One of us.
I take a deep breath and add another 2-1/2 lb weight to either end of the chest press bar. These “graduation” days are bittersweet. Each crossing of a threshold puts the lie to the comforting narrative that I’m only so capable, only so strong. If I keep surpassing my own limits, I might start to believe that most of them are self-imposed. How in the world can I avoid living my full life under those conditions?
Image: Mary Ellen Mark’s Photograph of Shavanaas Begum, the Indian Circus Strongwoman, 1989
Downstairs is the Cave of Dudes. It is where the free-weights line up in rows by the mirror, where contraptions pierced through with grimy iron bars and corsets of straps hunch in the corners and dare you to approach. Someone has squeezed a couple of treadmills in at the back. They are the wireless kind that run on human power instead of electricity. The robot machines are quartered in the vast gallery upstairs, a whole army of them blinking out their perfectly calibrated, simulated tracks on LED screens.
Down in the cave, incline benches. Pull-up bars. Clangs and grunts. Some days, most days, I’m the only gal down there.
I don’t have to carry all this
because I’m alone.
I get to carry it
because I’m strong.
Image: “Female Atlas” by Heretical Jargon
In the neighboring lanes, retirees walk the slow churn. Sinew writhes under mottled hips, hearts chug in their loose cages of hollowing bone. We turn the creaking millstones of our musculature and send low ripples along the surface.
Mid-afternoon is a world apart from evening here. During the late rush, fierce middle-aged racers tear a wake between ropes. Teen divers knife skyward before the plunge.
Now, the most animated bodies in the water are a half-dozen preschoolers gripping swim bars and kicking with all their might. The rest of us sway. We are seaweed, we are prey. Continue reading “Lapping at Edges”
Shannon E. Williams 