instrusive thoughts

Feels white-hot
struck by lightning
slips from my ears to the back of my neck to
the tips of my fingers to
the soles of my feet
making them
itchy and restless

Like: being dipped in an arctic pool
then yanked out again -
in an instant, the ice-cold is gone
and what's left is
gaping gasping heaving emptiness

My temples feel cold
and my head, strangely weightless
In my pounding chest, heaviness, and:
Fear Fear Fear Fear
loss of control
falling into nothingness
clawing at the air

I will every muscle to do something about it
control that which brings the fear
My mind is the tool, searching for ways,
for answers, anything to bury the risk

But there's only so much I can do
and I hold with shaking fingers
every possibility
every prevention and promise
offering them up,
Is this enough? Will this be enough?
If I imagine it
then maybe it won't happen

I do the best I can
but some people's best
wasn't good enough
Fear singes those edges, also

I want to revolt, strike, to run, hide
pummel with fists the rudeness
of an over-active amygdala 
but there is nothing there,
nothing threatening me
only my own mind
and its confusion about make-believe and reality

it would be easier

As an introvert, it would be easier to stay home. When social situations exhaust me, when I feel endlessly awkward and don't know what to say in the quiet moments, when I don't know what to do with my hands when I'm done with a meal, when I don't know exactly how I'll feel in the future (plans are the worst... how am I supposed to know if I'm going to feel like peopling on Sunday the 9th at 12pm?!) - it would be easier to say no.

As the daughter of a military man, it would be easier to stay home. When I've witnessed dozens of friendships dissolve due to cross-country moves, when I've learned how hard it is to integrate into existing circles, when I've said goodbye so many times the pain is a peculiar nostaglia, when I grew up moving every three years and can only count childhood friendships with three fingers, when starting something new isn't worth the emotion because emotion is fragile and I know I'll have to leave - it would be easier to say no.

When I've been discarded by people I would have never discarded - because of theological differences, lifestyle differences, age differences, political differences, priority differences, or maybe even just because I never felt freely and unconditionally accepted because of all of the above, and I hold people at arm's length as a result of my own trauma - it would be easier to say no. We pretend these petty problems exist only in high school, but as someone who never went to a brick and mortar high school, I can say I've mostly experienced them as an adult. Even acknowledged, we pretend it doesn't matter in adulthood, because we're strong and impervious, but it matters. And it still hurts, even when you're thirty-one and you're new to town and the table is full and they aren't interested enough to get to know you past that of which they don't approve - your vote, what you wear, where you live, how you raise your daughters. 

It would be so much easier to stay home. It would be so much easier to say no.

But I've held out. I've been okay with the loneliness, and then I've been very not okay with it, and then okay again. I've hoped for genuine connections, prayed for community, waited for someone to want a friendship as much as I do. It's hard, it's so hard. And especially when it's easy, I'm scared. And when it's new, I tread cautiously. I don't assume anything: loyalty or apathy or comfort or appreciation. But I'm trying to say yes. I'm trying to sit at the table. I'm so grateful for the people who choose to sit with me.

breath

It's like breath:
have you ever thought about it?
Have you emptied your lungs
and filled them again,
focusing your mind
on the right amount of oxygen,
the right length of a breath,
the right dispersal of carbon dioxide.
Have you told the cells
to open and absorb
the life that hangs in the very air
we walk through,
and do you marvel
at this unconscious system?
I am awakened to the wonder
of how it keeps happening,
even when I am done marveling.

This is my breath: 
A peach sky and
cicada's song which fills the quiet spaces.
The way my kids love each other
between the bickering.
The way new words
formed by a careful, callow tongue
sound in my toddler's sticky-sweet voice.
Pulling cabbages from the garden
(the ones the rabbit didn't munch)
and with it, making a dish
to fill my family's belly.
The dusk hours and whip-poor-will's call
when the world is painted that ethereal blue
and the ground is cooled by
shadows like a blanket
pulled up under the chin of a sleepy sun.
Mint tea with honey, too late at night.
My babies' flower-stem arms
around my neck:
how the littlest give the biggest love.

I cling to these moments!
They
are my breath.
And in this same way
in which I do not
think about breathing -
it simply happens.
It is simply there.
And then
I am made aware,
and I marvel at how it works,
how it keeps me alive.

this morning at 5

The sky was heavy with
the deep morning blue
of diffused fractional daylight.
The damp air glistened with fresh innocence,
the sunflowers asleep under the weight of rainwater,
my garden, all flat shadows and shapes.

I sat in a chair knowing the seat would be wet.
I could hear the workers with their engines
roaring down the highway
on their way to start their version of the day,
but only just.

What tickled my ear, what had me in wonder
was the chant, the trill, the choir
of a hundred - no, thousand! -
birds politely suggesting:

Listen, please! Attention, please!
This is what it means:
this is the good and perfect thing,
this is the pure and lovely,
the excellent and praiseworthy.

This is the peace we are asked to enter into
our hands held gently, beckoning

just sit - in this wet chair, in the gentle rain,
under a gray sky even, and just listen.
This is balm, this is breath.

I think it's the birdsong that makes the sun rise.
This might be anecdotal, but I saw it respond:
like a thousand strings pulling him up and up
(he might have stayed asleep otherwise)
swirling the shadowy shapes with strokes of dawnlight
I could see the individual drips now
I could see my sunflowers dance now
I watched a bird perch on the railing
so alert and fidgety - imagine, at five in the morning!
Just like one of my children.

I never regret wresting myself
into slightly reluctant wakefulness
gathering my books and cups and
tiptoeing from my sleeping  baby
across my creaky wooden floor
in that narrow slip of time
when night meets the morning
to watch the world awaken
and hear the birds start their version of the day.