While I love the idea of riding on a train, I do not want to live my life on a single track. I prefer the image of meandering this way and that - unshod - over soft paths grown over by grasses and maybe an edible plant or two.
Too long on the asphalt and concrete, let alone steel rails, makes me squeamish. My feet begin to curl - itchin’ to be bare and to feel the dirt and weeds in all their spendiferous textures.
Too long hearing the radio or any mass communication media and being too many hours under electric lights, which mask the changing of the days and seasons, makes me hungry for camping out and sleeping under the stars. I want to dance to the rhythms of the cosmos. I want to ebb and flow like the tide, bluster and hail, lightning and thunder, drip and scorch - like real weather. I want to smell the spring apples budding - so tenderly green, sweetly flowering in that perfect white tissue pink blush way, and then the over-abundance fermenting as full ripe fruit at the foot of their mam - their brother and sister apples having fed hordes of happy horses and cheeky children.
Why am I so eager for summer to return when it has only just departed?
Gettin’ old. Recognizing the metaphor of Winter as Death. Each pause at this dark time of year brings with it the vivid urgency of getting on with it before there’s no more life left in me.
So, what do train tracks symbolize? Why do I want to steal off the steel and into the grassy paths leading to sunset on my own recognizance?
Cleaning out my clothes closet today, I felt the righting gesture of steel beneath my every move. “One is supposed to clean away the old, Melinda, before embarking on a new adventure.” I hear my Grammy Stern’s prim voice as if she were next to me, her blue veined hands crossed low over her belly - fingers never quite reaching her pubic bone, which is where mine land without effort. She must’ve used considerable effort to keep from touching herself.
Yes, but... I’d love to be at the Mad Hatter’s tea party where, once done with the goodies on your plate, you simply move seat and enjoy what’s there on the next plate... never mind the tidying up!
It does feel good to be DONE with (some of) these pesky “Start Of New Year” (“SONY”) chores. Still dreaming of AWOL. Can’t I play hooky without getting so far off track that I lose all perspective and reasonable resemblance of my accepted/acceptable self?
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Pleased with my progress after the closet clean-out, putting Christmas away, and organizing one file drawer, I take a walk in the most glorious part of the afternoon. Black clouds make the rain-washed greens glisten with life. Red-leaved Liquid Amber and Camphor trees catch and hold onto the sun’s light ferociously - as if in a heated contest of whose light is more searing. (Silly trees, don’t you know you’re lit-up by that distant star? Yes, you have your internal life force, but it is dependent upon Earth and Sun.)
I guess tracks are for convention... to convene with other folks...a point of reference, a common meeting ground. Couldn’t we meet up under the oaks as in times gone by? I prefer to sit in a circle than to stand in line.
DUH! Light bulb over my head!
Every little boy I ever met builds long roads and tall towers with the blocks, leggos,and tinker-what-evers. Every little girl I ever met, in the course of teaching nursery school and in the wide world, builds nests and circles the blocks into cozy houses and protected corners. Is the biological imperative so strong that we’re always enacting “sperm behavior” and “ovum behavior?” (Sperm Behavior: I don’t know where I’m going but I gotta get there fast and I gotta be FIRST or I’ll explode! Don’t wanna lose my head, but it just might be worth it! Ovum Behavior: Lyrics from West Side Story: “Something’s comin’ I don’t know what it is, but it is gonna be grand.” I’ll just sit here round and soft and wait to meet it and envelop it.
As a gal person, I’m kind of an “egg” head.
Perhaps I’m railing against rails because I’m tired of being dissed for being a woman. The media are full of the rape/death of a twenty three year old woman in India, and even as I’m horrified that it happened, I’m glad of the thinking and conversations that are being stirred by the tragedy. That we live in a patriarchichal world and are suffering from the imbalance is patently blatant. The earth herself is showing signs of our uncurtailed hubris. Global change is accepted as fact in nearly all political camps. Finding our way outa dis mess gonna take all of us - ALL GENDERS working together.
I see signs that the goddess is rising. Over one hundred women have taken their seats in our new Congress. Pakistani women are making inroads to get their daughters educated. Gabby Giffords and Malala Yousufzai have risen from the ashes. Our president is steering the nation toward healthy debate over whether or not assault weapons are appropriate “protection” for those who wish to own guns. Sperm Behavior run amok means you think you need to have big scary weapons because you're frightened of being enveloped.
Momentum is building. Rounding off the sharp edges of a paternalistic world view does not mean we’re “going in circles.”
Imagine a train that has no track but hovers above the land - not scarring it. Imagine that we control our destiny and destination with our heart-mind. The conveyance takes us to our heart’s desire quietly. No person, critter or landscape has been harmed in this journey. Meandering likely.
Anyone for a ride?
All Aboard!
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