The Blooming Dark

It is 8:34 pm on a Wednesday night and I feel like an ocean is closing over my ears. The laundry that has been piling up in equal heaps of clean and dirty for weeks has a sound now like a new universe being ripped open. There are other piles too. All of them precarious and seemingly senseless. Why have I not got a place for all of this detritus? Is it necessary? Does it help me to breath or walk or dream? The piles are competing with my son's tired plaintive voice to be heard. My husband's patience is rapidly thinning too as his own panic ebbs and flows on it's tired treadmill. We are all strung rather tightly right now. In our natural cycles; spinning and weaving faster and brighter, hotter than hades, all of us combustible in our skin.

Our natural cycles aren't comfortable. I keep waiting for a calm that never comes.

This degree of mess makes me feel like I am suffocating under a wool blanket. I imagine my soul as a tundra. Scrubbed bare by dry cold winds. I imagine my soul as a reflection of a monastery wall. I try to drink in the ascetic stone arching towards the empty blue. Try to catch the cleansing in my throat. I am so thirsty for empty quiet spaces I could walk out this door right now and not stop until I reach some vast plains with only the crickets to know what is said between me and the grasses.

My mind has two simultaneous tracks. I hear them both at the same time. I will never ever make order out of this chaos, the cycles are too fast: I clean, I organize, I put our lives away neatly in cupboards and drawers, I scrub and sweep away the thousand little crumbs that stick to my feet-hands-knees; and as soon as I have put away the last unknowable puzzle piece the laundry is already piled impossibly high and the cooking isn't done and the dishes are sprouting wings. I am not equipped for this life. I will never be equipped for this life. I am equipped only for an organic slow life with no paperwork. With no phones. With no chaos of noise and cars.

At the same time I have to keep making order out of chaos. No matter how much it makes me want to lay down and not get up. I know that I am strong. I tell myself I am strong like an Ox. That I was made to bear the precise burden of life I have been given. That I have sight, I have sight into the heart of mankind and it has to be used and protected. I know that this is how life is for all beings. The constant shuffle to come to grips with the tangled odds of survival.

Panic is ugly. I despise being a person balancing so precariously between madness and reason like my piles of laundry. Like my hundred piles of papers I probably wouldn't miss if they all vanished in the night. I am here, at the end of a successful but tiring day. The first day of recovering my back from pain. It's tired. I'm tired. I should feel satisfied. I have had two main goals for the past two months and so far they have been reached: to stay in business and to help my mom get out of an impossible situation. In the mean time my house has fallen apart.

If I try to clean, which will take days, then all else will fade into the background. My back will be further strained. My ankle will swell again. My neck will stiffen again. I will pay in a hundred ways.

In the hospital this morning my mom handed me her cell phone to answer in case anyone called. The nurses gave me a beeper so that they could beep me when the surgery came to an end. This is more technology than I have ever carried in my bag at one time. Technology that makes awful noises, that interrupts everything. That needs fussing and button pressing to silence, only I can never figure out which buttons to push and inevitably I end up putting people on speaker phone or hanging up on people. Having a pager on my person felt like a violation. The way car alarms feel. The way house alarms feel. Like a panic ready to peal out at any moment, swinging wide into the air with all the urgency of Armageddon rising.

I answer like prey. Pulse racing into the near distance which I hope to reach faster than my legs can carry me. Faster than the snarling technology can move.

I like technology but not a confusion of noise. I play music sometimes but generally I prefer to listen to music at sonic volumes or on headphones both of which drown out all other noise that can start scrambling messages in my nervous system. I hate having speakers on my computer. I always have them on mute. I don't want the extraneous unpleasant brain scrambling noise.

It's possible that I have a little anxiety.

People either think it's quaint or extremely annoying that I have continued to refuse to get a cell phone. They assume I'm either playing out some charming anachronistic dream or that I am stubbornly trying to remain the most inconvenient human being on earth.

I want to be sometimes unreachable. I want you to not be able to reach me whenever you feel like it. When I'm on a walk. When I'm using a public restroom. When I'm breathing the fine spring air. All those cell phone "songs" that are supposed to make the ringing pleasant still create jarring noise everywhere I go. Friends answer their phones no matter what they're doing or where they are. People all around me are chirping, buzzing, rapping, and in constant connection, in constant communication, as though the world might just fall apart if they don't get every call.

I want to sometimes be unreachable.

I need to sometimes walk out into the world and leave you with questions. Leave you with your own silence. I sometimes need to be where no one can find me.

I think all people need this and that's why so many people are sickening. They have no break from the constant umbilical cord between themselves and every person in their lives. I think constant communication has become morphine. I know whereof I speak. I check my e-mails and my blog all day long. But when I walk away from the computer, my break is clean. When I go out to inspect the new millimeter of growth on every plant in my garden, you cannot break my communion. You can call on the phone. I might hear it ringing in the distance. I won't run to get it. I don't need it when I'm out there with my herbs, leaving resinous scent on my skin for my spirit to drink.

I am a communication junkie like everyone else. It's just that I have drawn a line. A line I intend to keep clear. Because if I don't I will need a little padded cell to house my crazy in.

All day, hearing that strange awful low howling of the wind through the hospital vents made me think about wind chimes. Wind chimes make me feel like all the life has drained out of earth. They fill me with ghosts and an emptiness more terrible than death. When I was a child I was one of the few kids of my acquaintance who did not attend church on Sundays. In our town Sundays were silent days. Everyone was in Church (presumably) but us. We continued to go about our business. But because no one in the town was talking or laughing or working or yelling or living, I could hear every wind chime clanging in the emptiness across the town like the escorting of souls into the nether worlds.

I despise wind chimes.

I am aware that I may be the only living person on earth who doesn't think they tinkle charmingly. They make me think of reapers, of dark winds draining blood from stones. When I hear them I literally recoil inside. Not so you would see. It's a primal spiritual recoiling from a poisonous sound. I have sometimes thought they are reaching for me. Like their voices are personal. Menacing me specifically while casting fairy spells on everyone else.

It's possible I have some issues with this mortal coil.