How to Love a Wolf: Day 1 June 2, 2019
How to Love a Wolf: Day 1 June 2, 2019
Today I wake up in my own bed. A Sunday, I relish the long morning, the couple of hours since dawn indulging in and out of sleep, dream, and the breeze moving my bedroom curtains. I think, "I feel happy," when I finally move the curtains aside for the light and slide the windows higher for the breeze.
[I'm looking anew at the imperfections of my life, knowing that word 'imperfect' is just a placeholder for something more expansive and welcoming, a something that gets tamped down somehow by language. But I'm grateful anyway for this newfound tolerance for imperfection. Something about messiness, clumsiness, acclimating to the awkward underbelly of being. Tolerating, humoring, welcoming.]
I walk a lot, mostly to get where I need to go. Lately I notice the jiggle of the muscle-y flesh of my thighs as I walk. I remind myself with each footfall to let the flesh feel itself and reorganize to internal systems of wisdom I can't see but have spent over forty years trying to control. Anyone who's taken a dance class with me in recent years knows this word well as part of my vocabulary: my instruction to look for the jiggle. Walking now I imagine my fascia, long fraught with pushing, tightening, and forcing, welcoming these jiggles as invitations to let go and invent new riverbeds of transition under my skin.
I walk home on Ellet St. from the cafe and co-op; my backpack full of frozen mango, raw milk (a new experiment), coffee, vegetables, and small paper bags heavy like softballs with forbidden rice, beans, and walnuts. I can smell the cilantro wisps hanging from the outside pocket. Fifty yards ahead I see a rose bush, now exploded from the inside out, its blooms obscene with lushness, and utterly surrendered to each blossom's curling, soon-dying petals, now coexisting with still-opening tiny buds. I look down closer to my hip height, right here as I walk, and see three more rose bushes in a similar state: decline and abundance, death and the assurance of more life, heat and cycles of fecundity. I marvel at the rose season of Mt. Airy. So glorious, temporary. I stumble on an unevenness on the craggy sidewalk and don't worry about the interrupted rhythm as I catch my weight and regain stride. A thuddy, sophomore drum beat starts up from inside the nearby enclosed front porch of a familiar house. Immediately, I smile and marvel at this unrequested break from my cynicism. Ten yards ahead a woman in blue capris and taupe sandals walks toward me, slowly, deferring to her small furry dog meandering on a leash. She says good morning or good afternoon, she means, and I respond good anything and we smile together. She comments that she's never heard Rodney actually play the drums before, smiling, and hopes that nobody is taking a nap.
I don't know Rodney, or the woman and her dog, nor do I know the gaggle of people assembled in the tiny corner park at Ellet and McCallum, eating their lunches together from tupperware and bags from the co-op, voices swelling in emphasis and laughter: this is Mt. Airy's version of a potluck to be sure. Unplanned, messy, abundant. Now I'm right at the obscene rosh bush, passing by with alacrity to get this raw milk to the fridge, the backs of my eyes wet with gratitude and, not unrelated, no phone to capture this wonder of imperfect passing time.