There was once an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day, his horse ran away. Upon hearing this, his neighbors came to visit.
“Such bad luck” they said sympathetically.
“Maybe,” the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it two other wild horses.
“Such good luck!” the neighbors explained.
“Maybe,” replied the farmer.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown off, and broke his leg. Again, the neighbors came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.
“Such bad luck,” they said.
“Maybe,” answered the farmer.
The day after that, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army to fight in a war. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by.
“Such good luck!” cried the neighbors.
“Maybe,” said the farmer.
Tag: strength
If a Tree Falls
We climb to the top. He hangs on my arm and wraps his hands around my thigh. “Mommy, I’m tired.” He drags at me, trying to make me stop. He has no idea. Gravity has no effect on me. I am stronger than he can imagine. His fifty pounds are a ball of cotton, a cheesecloth sail. I can carry him to the top. Down the crevasse. Hoist him back up. I can lift him into the branches of an oak. I stand below him and know he will not fall because I will not fall.
I will not fall.
The hands under me are not visible. Are they any less present? Are they any less real? I have skidded and tumbled but still, my body is not broken. I rise every day. The smile comes, even it is forced. Music whispers at my throat. The legs walk on.
A good job, a good living. All there is? No, I still believe. Maybe that makes me a romantic idealist foolish idiot. Maybe small minded and smaller hearted. Maybe unable to accept the world as it is. Maybe? Maybe not believing in this one approach to things. Maybe ready to welcome the self that is becoming and not just the self that has already become.
It could have been beautiful, but then it was not. I left one when he was as ugly as I am now. When he could not get up and out of himself. When he got stuck. This is karma. It shows no mercy. It is a pitching machine. It hurls its force at a guilty spirit. It is deaf to the pleas. It is blind to the body, curled in a ball.
Get out of the cage. Just get up and out. It only hurts if you stay inside.
What is this jail? I built it. I put myself in it. The key might be right here in my pocket, but all I find is an ID card, a mobile phone, lint. I find the inside of the pocket. But there, a tiny thread, a small tear in the making, the skin of my thigh there, warm. Alive.
Who will come if I wait here? A chariot? A winged horse? Icarus, maybe? I would dare him to fly even closer to the sun just to feel its heat.
Up, away. Through the rent fabric, I feel my own leg. I feel the possibility of rising by my own volition.
This is what’s begun. The end. We unravel. We fray. The edges were never bound. It was all just us pressing the hems into one another, holding it up. The thread was not real. It was spit and prayer and no sudden moves. As soon as the twist was 180 degrees, the whole garment split and fell away. We were as naked as the emperor.
I could have gathered up what was left. I could have brought it to our naked breast, covered the soft place there before the broken branches had their chance to pierce
Our poor torn heart
Hearts
There were three there, inside that one body. Three bruised and busted creatures in need of a gauze, a soft wrapping and an untouched room with a curtain at the window to soften the glare.
It was not in my hands. I did not reach for anything but my own rope. I let the others slip down under, grabbed only the hair of my son.
I am single again. It is sweet nudity. It is defenselessness. He is not coming to get me again. This is not his job, and I must grow up enough to know this is the way it is.
Grow up. Bear down. Bare truth.
What is the thing you still believe even though you know it is false?
You have all the time in the world. You will get there someday. Being beautiful will make you happy. Having things will bring you peace. You can live a halfway life and still be whole. You can have it all. You deserve better. You deserve worse. You are a piece of garbage. Someone will write to you even if you do not write first. Doing more will get you more. People will change. Your criticism protects you. Love is unconditional. The number in your bank account is based on hard work. You can trust your neighbor. You’ll have another chance. You’re out of chances. People forget the words you say. People remember the words you say.
In which myth will I place my faith today?
You can live through your children. You can live without music. You can live alone. You can live without making something of yourself. The way will appear if you keep walking. The voice will guide you if you shut up and listen.
Which myth?
Swallow it down. Choke it back. Squeeze the muscle and contract. The only way to the woman I am becoming is to punch through to her, rip the torn place wider, shape her, make her, smooth her into being, breathe in life life life. Oil her. Wet her. Paint her with a paste of pollen and creekwater, gather the milkweed fluff and tuck it between her thighs. Draw down the branches of the hemlock tree. Weave moss and bough to shape the organs that beat her blood into breath.
Whatever is haunting me, I have to perform this exorcism alone. It is not the job of any man to boil down the sap of me into something sweet. He cannot discern the obscenities of the ghosts. He only hears their echo called back through my own flailing limbs.
A wise woman once told me, do not adore your man. She meant to be cautious of idols. We deify our lovers. We pray to them to shoulder the burden and quiet the demons, to absolve us of our sins. This is too much to ask of anyone. When I left the man I married, I merged into the first one I found waiting. He promised he would come for me. They all say this: I am here. You are not alone. But it is impossible. No one can get as close as would be required to inhabit the place where the dark chill lives. To unfurl the buds. To bring the spring. They would have to press themselves entirely into the skin I call my own. They would have to squeeze me out and become the skeleton of me. This is what the one adoring dreams of. Obliteration. Complete.
Now, here, I release the myth of disappearance. The only story I can live is this one. It is not for me to make this into anything other than what it is. The paycheck comes. The child is fed. He climbs, he runs. The work waits on Monday morning for me to arrive, for me to claim it as mine. This is mine. This is the only narrative, and here sits the only protagonist, inside the arc. I never thought of myself as anything other than an independent woman, but I have lived for 20 years as one who cannot get through a day without fantasies of rescue. This is the cage.
Giovanni will, alas, not be the last man I love. But he will be the last I dream of saving me. No one is coming. I save myself.
Maybe there is nothing to learn from this. Maybe it is the same lesson after all, returning like the first leaves. Falling is a choice. So is growing. So is stepping out from behind bars. So is opening to the sun.
Scene
Maybe every word of it is true.
Your heart is ice.
You are broken,
worth no more
than a dime store grocery bag
dropped in a back street gutter.
Maybe you have squandered
every chance you’ve been given.
You are a lousy parent
a boor at parties
unbearable in bed
and ugly to boot.
Maybe truth
is every harsh word
ever hurled at your brittle bones.
What then
but the choice to pretend
it is not?
Feign learning something.
Act like you care.
Flex your muscles and brandish your sword
even though you know it is foolhardy
and sure to fail.
Maybe all this posturing
will stretch the very flesh of your useless body
and in that capacious garment
you will find yourself changed.
Or maybe not.
It does not matter.
You will be so good
no one will ever know,
not even the dragon
as it falls against your steel.
Take your secret to the grave.
Fool the gods
into making a place for you
at the table.
Animate Object
I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots,
And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over,
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
But call any thing back again when I desire it.– Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
I need a new metaphor for strength. Since my late teen years, thanks to powerful role models and fantastic friends, I have seen myself as a strong woman. It helped to come of age protesting the first Gulf War. I can still remember Vietnam era activists visiting my high school to provide training on sit-ins and passive resistance. They were eager to share their wisdom with a new generation of outraged citizens. I was hungry for it. By the time I was nineteen, I was standing in the town square, raising my own fist and quoting Oscar Romero and Audre Lorde in a tireless call to rally the masses (however trifling they may have been) to right the latest wrong.
I was strong. Everyone told me so, but I did not need to hear it from them. I knew it inside. I knew that when I walked, I embodied the determination of a warrior. I painted the image with my fingers onto the walls of my mind, urging it to life:
A revolutionary leads the call-and-response of the swelling army. Eyes blazing, posture unshakable, voice speaking truth to power in rhythm with a thousand comrades.
Never mind that at night, fear and uncertainty would grip my heart and squeeze out the tears. Never mind my confusion pounding itself into the pages of my journal or into the recoiling chest of some lover. Come morning, I was strong. Raise the flag, compañeros! March into battle.
Nineteen also welcomed the genesis of my running life, and my body grew lithe and powerful alongside the public persona. I began to dance soon after. In the studio, I tapped into a creative capacity I had never known existed down there under the surface of things. Being able to speak for a more expansive way of being through movement only increased my vocabulary and enhanced my sense of potency. The form of dance I first explored – contact improvisation – allows dancers to move together around points of contact, using weight and gravity to form beautiful, fleeting pieces. Pure expression. Such power lives inside the ability both to lift and be lifted by muscle, bone, and intention. Sweat poured. Legs hardened. I felt lengthened and electrified by movement. In long strokes, another symbol:
A whitetail deer bounds up and over the hillside, never caught by bramble or tar pit. Reaching. Free.
Simultaneously, the mind demanded its perpetual improvement. College gave way to facilitation and teaching. Writing became central. Graduate school was next, followed by more teaching. Along with the decision to develop expertise in an area (any area!) came the simultaneous commitment to eschew short-lived comforts in the interest of the long-term investment. As both student and teacher, I would sleep while others socialized, wake up at dawn, study for hours while my peers slumbered, and plunge all my attention into the heart of the question at hand. In the interest of inquiry and craft, I maintained the ascetic self-image. I did not drink or watch television, I did not bother with fashion concerns beyond basic grooming. In this fastidious attention to my work, I felt invincible. I painted the life into it:
Leonardo da Vinci, hands grasping a brush, a bone, a chart. Heaps of books litter the space. Sketches and diagrams and spilled ink on pages of formulas. Behind his stillness, his eyes are a frenzy of motion.
Then, years turned into a decade or more, and I acquired a marriage and a child.
Whatever I believed to be true about myself not only thinned under the relentless rub of these primal and primary relationships, it bled. Bug’s intensity from the moment of his arrival until today, 5 ½ years later, has demanded a kind of responsiveness from me that is not my natural strength. Patient attention to another human being for days, weeks, years? Staying steady in the face of flash and fury? Living with constant yet unpredictable interruption and need? So much for da Vinci and Archbishop Romero. Neither of them had kids. Family and its strange, claustrophobic isolation sapped my strength and rendered my metaphors impotent.
My fingers drip with paint but the wall flexes its blank expanse. How quaint those old symbols seem now that they are emptied of their magic! In the absence of a functional concept of power, I find myself regressing to the ways of my elders. The patterns raked into this soil early in my life, far before I chose my own way, become the trenches that both trip me and trap me. I do what comes unconsciously when faced with these new, completely unexpected challenges.
Bug is aggressive and erratic, and I find myself tensing into a tight ball and barreling down on him like a bull in the ring. Is this strength? It feels strong, but the fit is wrong, and the chilling fallout indicates this approach weakens us both.
When I have to get through a hectic morning, I power up like a pneumatic drill. Snapping back help and narrowing my gaze, I grind with gritted teeth through each task. Constriction. Tension. Stress. Is this strength? It feels strong as well, but the power is deafening. Stiffening. A good way to snap.
My work situation is still less than adequate to support us financially, and I am Atlas, taking on everything and then some. I bear it all and look for other opportunities, and seek seek seek a way up and out. Is this strength? It, too, feels strong, but it leaves me sapped and hopeless. An absence of faith is the opposite of strength. It is defeat.
All the oldest ways of being strong – not ways I have chosen, but ways I have learned regardless – are the ones I am relying on now. Guard and push and limit and clutch. Come up with plans of action based on the idea that something is lacking and must be added, improved, removed, or fixed.
My notions of power are in need of renovation. As a working single parent struggling to make ends meet, living with her parents, and trying to learn from the failure of a marriage while dating and co-parenting – in short, as a person whose situation is wholly different from any she has faced in her past – what symbols do I animate? How can I draw true strength into this unfolding story? A metaphor is a gift Daedalus fashions to lift the narrative up and out of the turmoil of conflict and into the breathing space of redemption. Where do I let the wings carry me?
These days, I am sketching the rough outline of a few to see how they fit. One is bamboo, bending in the highest wind but not breaking. Another is riding the surf, staying loose, knowing another wave will hit, and feeling the way. I even try to hold onto a picture of oysters at the bay’s edge, adapting as the sea leaks into their beds. Instead of withering, I imagine adjusting the needs and ways of my flesh to the shifting climate.
So, tonight, I spread my palette with gneiss and stir in snippets of long-threaded moss. I let my fingers make the first strokes as the shadow of a new strength unfurls on the cave wall. As my hand does its uncertain work, I notice the ghosts of the ones that came before. Thank heavens I quieted my impulsiveness and did not wipe them clean. In a far corner, the others – warrior, deer, and scholar among them – begin to stir.
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
But call any thing back again when I desire it.
Because life is what it is, I suspect the toughest days are ahead. Fortunately, magic is never gone from anything that once possessed it. The old symbols, and even this old girl, may have a bit of juice left. It does not need to be much. Just enough to give awakening breath to the life unfolding before my eyes and right here, at the tips of my fingers.
Parts, Whole
In the dark chill at the end of another wearing day, the third in a succession of days managed on five hours of sleep, I stand on Tee’s doorstep. Inside, my boy is wailing. It is dropping into the 20’s tonight, and behind me, a river of cars, cars, cars, rushing in every direction.
In the early fall, I used my tuition waiver to take a course on somatic skills for conflict resolvers. In intervention situations involving extreme stress, when the intense feelings of the conflict parties can blindside even the most seasoned professional, it is wise to remember the wisdom of the body. Lift and align the posture, raise and expand the vision, breathe into the belly. The full range of our intellect is more available to us when we root ourselves in physical balance. Now, as I stand on the doorstep, I make a practice of allowing my vertebrae to slip into place. I lift my chin. I open my eyes. Hearing the sobs before me and the roar of traffic behind, I breathe.
Inside, my son is a crimson-eyed nuclear meltdown. Tee tells me the boy did not sleep at school on a day disrupted by two field trips. Bug yanks himself from me, rocketing up the stairs in his socks and t-shirt. It is late. Between this moment and the comfort of his bed is dressing all over again, another commute, dinner, pajamas. Tee and I try to speak calmly to Bug as he hides and cries upstairs. Whatever reserve of self-control the child has is tapped out. He twists himself away from us, flails, weeps. These days, such outbursts are rare. But what can you expect? Without rest, none of us is any good. I understand this. I am experiencing this, on my third overdraft from the sleep bank.
I cannot stand to see my child so miserable. I pull Tee around the corner and whisper, “I would be fine if he stays here tonight. We can trade a day. I’ll help put him down. I just hate to drag him out of here when he is so tired.” Tee stares, blank. The response, or complete absence of one, is so typical of this man that I am surprised to find myself surprised. His passive face calls up no indication he has even heard, let alone can summon a thought. One beats, two, three, four. No words. Until this: he steps back around into the stairwell and calls up:
“Come on, Bug, time to get your shoes on and go.”
And then I am up, hefting a giant tornado of a boy without a lasso, wobbling down the stairs. I am splayed in my work skirt in the foyer of Tee’s house with this arching, spitting 40-odd pound wildcat on my lap. I force his shoes on, and the heels of them, flailing, crack me several times on the shins. Tee sits on the bottom step an arm’s length away, silent, watching. Bug’s body wrenches with sobs. He is speaking in gobbledygook, wanting everything and nothing. I long to lift my child and carry him up to his bed. Crawl in next to him, let him surrender to my strength, sing him “Friend of the Devil,” rub his back. But that bed is not his tonight, no matter how badly he wants it or I want it for him. There is nothing for us to do but drag ourselves out on the serrated night.
I finally have to wrap the full power of my embrace around Bug’s torso from behind, force him still, all while doing the one and only thing I can remember to do: breathe, breathe, breathe. My grip tight, my core willed to softness, I whisper into his prickling scalp. “Deep breaths, baby. Shh, shh. Mommy’s got you, you’re safe, you’re okay.” Against my own rising fury, I speak these comforts. Anointing Bug with my scant supply of serenity has a cooling affect on me. The waves of rage at this passive man so close and so remote, and waves of distress about my own insomnia-wrecked body, and the waves of despair about the impossibility of rescue, they just roll on over. Without crashing into me or taking me down, they only pass by because I’ve got my boy in my arms, and I can breathe through them, and they cannot drown me.
I hope my love for my boy is enough to bridge these rifts in his world. A friend of mine, a hopeless romantic, tells me one of his guiding quotations is this:
Love, in the purest sense of the notion, can only be given and received completely. Anything less may be of great value, sustainable, and appreciated, but it is only a reflection of love.
He is childless, of course. Still, I marvel at the sting of the sentiment. My heart swells, aches, bursts open for my son. What could be more pure than the love a mother has for her child? And yet, do I truly give it completely? I deny him the single home, the one bed, the place he is always safe where both his parents are there to carry him to his sole sanctuary when he is unable to get there himself.
I wonder if I am capable of such pure generosity. I choose to follow a calling which carries me away from a man who cannot fulfill his promise. Bug is the one who pays for this choice. It would have been so easy, at any point during the past eighteen months, to say, “My heart can endure its own loneliness. It can even bear intimacy in the absence of faith. But it cannot stand my son’s suffering.” I could have asked Tee to stay, and offered our child that one, concrete gift of happiness. Is mine a true love, if I offer my boy only a fraction of what I have to give?
Without warning, Bug surrenders. He puddles, his skeleton and muscle dissolve to brine and beginnings. I pour him into his sweatshirt, gather first him then his backpack and my keys, step into boots, fumble with this shifting cargo out the door into the where traffic growls and pounds against the night. All I want is to slip my boy into the cocoon of his becoming, close his ears to all of this noise. I carry him, still sobbing, then drive him, still sobbing, through the tangled knots of congestion. Home, home. And when we come in, he is almost sobbed out. I am thankful for the small favors of grandparents who let us stay, for a warm and lit house, for someone to dust the toast with cinnamon and slice the apple. My boy, wrung out, eats in bed, slowly but with an insatiable appetite. I read to him from The Secret Garden and sing, finally, the song about running from the law straight into the arms of temptation.
Today, a poem called “Descartes in Love” lands in my inbox from The Academy of American Poets:
Love, accepting that we are not pure and lucent hearts, ricocheting towards each other like unlatched stars—no, we are tainted with self. We sometimes believe the self is an invisible glass, just as we believe the body is a suit made of meat. Doubt all things invisible. Doubt all things visible.
Because I hear no pulse up on the scarred surface of things, it can seem as if nothing living is left down below. Then, on pure chance, I tap a buried vein. Up flows nourishment almost too rich to stomach. I have neither the courage to trust in its permanence nor the strength to claim its limit. Faith in the moment as it slips through my fingers is the best I can do.
I am still more tired than I have ever been. But my boy sleeps now, his belly full on my breath, his soft spine curled into my unbending one. I will keep vigil. My love may be an imperfect force, but for this one night, its current is constant; its source, bottomless.
Ken Chen’s “Descartes in Love” is part of the series, “Brief Lives.” It came by way of Poem-A-Day from poets.org.
Shannon E. Williams 