A small shard of Bliss.
Wednesday dispatch from Bicycle Boy??? whaaaat?!
I wrote you three letters last week. None were enough, none left me as the messenger. The message is still unclear. Will it come to light here, on this page, after all? Don’t be weak, a little voice whispers — push on through it all.
(((ps! Bicycle Boy is now on Spotify! here’s a linky dink to last week:))
Something is expanding in me. The possibility of a life. It’s late Spring now, birdsong softened by warm rain. Old sun is stuck to the bridge of my nose, in freckles, in brown. I want it to stay morning forever.
To type is slow, but by ink is slower… and the spirit moves quick, quick, pick up those words in the shape she left them in. My fingers try to keep the pace, but one has been maimed, slowing the rest. The index sliced by negligence, impatience, excitement. Jupiter sitting in my finger, slowed, stung, bleeding in the sink. I’m alive, I think. I almost don’t want to clean up the mess or stop the flow, keep going, keep glowing, keep gathering outside of me. Show them I’m real. That I feel.
It happened because I was living. It happened because I was slicing silver, to heat, hammer, and transform into a ring. A thing which now lives in the middle of my hand, shimmering, spinning, this shining thing.
Some circular loop. and what does it signify? Vows, vows… the eternal placed in an object. And what is a vow? A vow is a prayer, a song sung by a soul, a promise, a devotion. The lemniscate motion. The ancestors watch, the fates they listen. We can go against our words, but of that effort to shift them?
Will I ever marry? The wonder emerges, the torch held with bandaged hands. I don’t know. But I will make promises, I will make vows, my name is engraved on trees, on lands.
And of land… a dream of a life awakens in me. A return to the prairie plains that raised me. Not for life, but for a time. For a chance to sit still as the wind whips and the light shifts and I’ll sit in the backyard, no place to go. I’ll place a seed in my brother’s garden. Will you tell me if it grows? I’ll walk the dog while you work, Mum, I’ll help with the dishes. Please don’t think I have forgotten you, please know that I miss this. I’ll stay until it’s late. We’ll tell stories and I won’t be afraid to speak, just in case you stopped loving me three sentences ago. I’ll remember that’s not how love works, remember, it has no place to go. Okay, remember? I won’t be afraid to listen in case I’ll stop loving you. No, the ring is round, we’ve been here before. But now I crack the window. I don’t look for a door.
I left a teenager there 10 years ago. Her words still unsaid, but please, please, know she is near. She wants me to come home, to stop being there and start being here. To linger in that sill with her. To see what I’ve missed. To hear of that time and then that and then this. She wants to hold her cousin’s baby and a conversation and some small shard of bliss. She wants to walk past the house she grew up in, with the man who still lives down the street. The one who holds some of her father’s features and the family name, the one she never got to say goodbye to. His family the same. She wants to eat the carrots that Dad grew, sip the stew he canned and brewed from last summer, some hunting trip — a new hobby, tell me more about hobbies. She wants to hear about the figurines and the guitar and what it means to be you now. She wants to ask Nana about her life, all about how… to be a sister and be strong and raise three women and love dogs and lose them and the people you love.
And of love, she wonders if I will fall back in it with a man she left behind. If we will grow tomatoes on our front porch and make art and have our roots all entwined. See, here they can grow, there we can go. The world will call out to us, and we sit and listen. Even in the shade, I know your heart and it glistens. Here, on this grass which grew us both. Our words fell into them, without knowing, spinning some oath.
Go back to the village. Go back to the village. To have left is to know that one day you must return. The shire sits waiting. There you can shuck peas and peel oranges and keep your hands busy and your words easy. Remember words, they are things, they make up the oaths and the rings which breed stories and lives and those songs our soul sings. And of words, remember, we have shared the softest. So the heart hopes for something to hold on to, to make do. To see through.
And if we can’t see it through. If I’m not the one you turn to, the number you dial on a landline. The one you think of when some light dapples through the birch and onto the pines. If you can’t see the forest through the trees. Then please, I’ll go, back to the rock on which I somehow stuck roots. Soil slipped between the slate, a flower grows edible. I turn earth into a dinner plate. There, I blossom. A small fact, a big truth. May it bring salt to my parents’ eyes or not.. but there I will turn many calendars. There I will live in that dirt. There I will rot.
There is my piano and the garden I built. The soil, the rain, the sand and the silt. There is my practice. A small room waiting. A bookstore home. A dream of a dream of a lone heart not alone. A Japanese futon and a life low to the ground. Records and softer, softer sounds. Books my nightstand. A bicycle for a spiritual companion. I’ll sew my own clothes. I’ll get a flip phone, pull out the paint brushes, and call on the sisters I know. We’ll sip sweetness in the sun, tea by lamplight. A low glow on the faces of the bands and the people grown of lucky lands. A lottery life, one we live there. How can I give it up, for what? And for where?
And yet, I did. For here, for now. For a chance to learn how to live a life like this. Where I eat only garbage. I kiss a woman on the mouth and all of it tastes like bliss. We make art that is a part of us, a part of the world I want to live in. She reminds me to fight the war under my nose, to keep a war from starting in the sheets we’ve been given. We waste nothing, work for little, we want for less. We wake when we wake, I rest when I rest. Sure, I could move softer, I could stray further from the screen. At least when I wake, there is time to recite my dreams.
I ask about the birds outside my window, what grows where. I try to build up what was broken and break free what longs to open. There’s a box in the middle of my room. I pull out of it my greed and my jealousy and my grief and I learn a new name for love every day. There’s my shadow, of course, there it is. Showing from where the light strikes me, which direction I face. Thank you shadow, thank you sun. For long I ran from what could be, what is, what might be if I… and then, gravity slowed me, history showed me. Why would I run?
Where can I go but home?
How can I learn what I didn’t once..somehow…already… know?
The List! - a segment for sensory exploration
seeing:
this little strawberry taking shape in my hands, in the metal workshop…
alongside these other metal workshop scenes (I like this vibe):
The aforementioned ring
the deadline of my final project getting closer and closer, the to-do list growing longer and longer
the river shimmering as I eat my dinner in a patch of sunlight
feeling:
like it is officially summer mode here in Norway. The jacket stays at home, the bridge of my nose is collecting freckles
that old familiar pit in my stomach. one that coagulates while a difficult conversation waits to be had
Like I am growing into somebody that I trust.
compression socks hugging my calves. whyyyy, varicose veins, why!
hearing:
birds.
my own laughter on the phone. Mum says it sounds like her favourite Aunt’s, passed on, I feel glad… like she’s laughing through me.
this sleep hypnosis podcast… I like this lady. She is reprogramming my thoughts while I sleep! I think it is working!
smelling
a rescued candle. musk and sandalwood.
still waiting to find some deodorant from the dumpster gods….
tasting
dumpster meal of last week:
gnocchi with onions, tomatoes, spinach, artichokes,s and vegan meatballs. topped with goat’s chevre. bon app!
Bicycle Boys. Send me your lists! I love to read them and experience the senses of your world
Songs you heard in the Voiceover:
Intro: Excaliber - Good Morning
Transition: Meditation No. 1 - Laraaji and Brian Eno
Outro: Gypsy - Fleetwood Mac
Thank you all so much for your support — to Bicycle Boys far and wide.
I read this over and over again. I love seeing into your world... sometimes in your writing I see my own life shining through. You continue to always inspire me to make art! So excited for your next journey home :)