lavender softens anxiety
and i wonder whether i can plant a garden, so dense in my mind, that knots in my chest unravel, and never tighten again.
So much of life is muscle memory, and I have begun to realise
there are so many more parts of ourselves to flex and stretch
and strengthen than those we were taught in anatomy lessons.
No one tells you how much of life takes practice. Not just writing, painting, running, singing and all, but practicing how to make friends. How to make the right friends. Getting practiced at how to be a good friend, a good sibling, a good person. Practice identifying when people have not earned that. Learning to recognise your right to rage and, eventually, how to offer mercy.
I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. — Franz Kafka
I’ve been told that people do more by 7:00 am than I do in an entire day,
but if I wake up at 6:59 am and turn to the Sun, close my eyes,
and trace the outline of your face in my head, I will have done enough.
picking myself up;
has been the heaviest weight I have lifted
How strange is it. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyse us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?
“Some people turn sad awfully young … (they) bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else. I know, for I am one of them.”
