My tea has gone cold four times this morning.
Right now, I'm tracing my fingertips along the runnels of the rain graying over the world outside the window next to my computer. Two weeks ago, the same flesh would have singed against orange hot glass fired by blazing sun — a week ago, frozen by searing blue skies and hoarfrost. All of it has just been so much. All in cycles: the proximity of each impression heightening the one before, preparing for the one after. And paired with physical sensation, tumbling through an incredible joy and crushing grief. I feel empty and overflowing all at once; everyone uses that, don't they? I've been a ghost of a cliché for weeks, floating above the earth in felicity and a shadow of myself in raw sadness. Truthfully, I am exhausted.
How is it that sensations and feelings like this always align all at once? "When it rains, it pours," or "happiness is greater when shared." I haven't heard the one about "when you're happy everything rains on you and then others will fill your heart but it's still fucking pouring" yet.
In all this hyperbolic thought, I've come to the same conclusion that countless others have over the time and span of human emotion. (A cliché yet again.) I need all of this. This is what I'm made of. This is what allows me to find beauty — all of it; not just our incessant tendency to strive for perfection while blinded to the fact that it simply cannot exist, where we miss out on huge swathes of our reality chasing allure with tunnel vision. Were I not to be both broken and fulfilled, all of these past days and experiences would be the same, mean the same, uncoupled from an inability to experience only one thing at a time. The aesthetic and tangible feel of the world around me spins centered on an axis of emotions seemingly in complete opposition... without this whirling, melded blur grounding me, I would have floated off into the void numb to everything that makes life so painfully, inexplicably gorgeous.
I fully realize that this rambling sentiment has little context and very likely, little logical sense. I'm lost somewhere in a morass of work that needs attention now and the desire to be on the road and having been embraced by the kindred souls I needed and was just waiting to touch without knowing it and in the haunting rending of my heart while cradling my best friend's head and whispering love as the life drained from her eyes. Weeks of opportunity and loss and gain and stress and freedom and revelry and depression, balancing grinning through tears and trying to remember to be respectfully morose while fucking high on life. All I can say is that allowing me to confuse you with my oddball posting is beautiful. The potential of the future stretched out before us here is beautiful. The markets and the seas and our souls all rise and fall and it's beautiful. I'm still here, and you're still here, and it's beautiful.
For the fifth time, my tea has gone cold, and I realize that it's beautiful that I even took the time to write this for myself.
Should it have a similar effect on you, that's lovely too. If you don't, I realize I'll find you beautiful, all the same.
Thanks for giving me space on this one. Despite weeks worth of events to post about, today I need this space on my wall to trace the connections that bring me meaning and personal context, with or without an audience. The horribly stunning pictures accompanying this slightly unhinged exploration are of a whooper swan I discovered alone and decaying, hiking half the way up a glacial bowl in Iceland. Don't be scared to sound a little manic sometimes, if it allows you greater clarity of thought. Beauty in all things.
These photos and words are my own work, inspired by travels all over this pretty blue marble of ours. I hope you like them. 🌶️
