A Short Poem

There is a space inside my mind

    Two Lines 

An intersection of sorts

Leading to nothingness towns 

Edits

I haven't actually talked much about myself on this blog, at least not directly. I think I can safely assume 99% of the people reading this do not know that I'm currently working on a Ph.D. in Archaeology (Anthropological Archaeology to be specific but that's for another blog post). What's important to take away from that factoid about myself is that I am an adult, 32 to be exact, who has been in school for essentially my entire life. As someone who has focused their energies in the Humanities, I've done a lot of writing. If I've learned anything it's that editing matters, yet at some point, you have to pry your hands from your creation and set it free. Now if you're like me most of the time your baby goes plummeting to earth at a velocity you previously thought unthinkable but every so often it goes soaring into the blue sky. This precarious balance of editing is constant. 

The first draft of anything should be rough as sandpaper.

It should contain nearly everything you have to say on the topic

But the flow may be off.

There will be lots of tangents, 

You'll probably have too much information. 

Second, 

Third, 

And more drafts is where you edit your thoughts.

Like waves crashing on the beach,

Battering the sand,

Pummeling rocks into smooth granules,

The words will be rearranged,

Punctuation and quotations,

Proper citations, 

All added and subtracted as needed. 

You'll carefully lift the sails of your ship in a bottle,

bundle it up like your firstborn baby,

Toss it all to sea and hope it washes ashore.  

Willingness

It feels like my whole life my biggest dream has been to climb a mountain and scream at the top of my lungs. I've seen them do it in movies and they always feel better afterward. But maybe that's just a metaphor for how opening our voices to the world quiets the demons inside us. I'm sure that's what it is just a metaphor but I want to believe the metaphor, live the metaphor. I want to climb to the top of the tallest mountain and scream until there is no breath in me nothing left in me at all and the only way off is to throw myself. And of course, no one will be there to catch me. Who waits at the bottom of a mountain to catch people who are trying to just let go of their past. I don't think anyone does that. No one I know waits around to catch those trying to start over. I mean it's probably for the best because they say you have to hit rock bottom before you actually start again. Maybe that's what they mean. That you can just throw yourself off a precipice onto the rocks below and there you will be reborn. You'll have an epiphany about starting your own business and participating in the community. You'll start going to church and meeting all sorts of nice people. You'll settle down and feel the urge of your animal nature. You'll raise small people waiting for their own turn to jump. And you hope you'll be dead or gone or missing by the time they fling themselves into their rebirth.

    Hitting rocks seems to be a good way to find your way into the normalcy of life. No one says they hit rock bottom and decided to keep going. I don't know anyone who started tunneling deeper or even just laterally. I've only heard stories of ladders, and helping hands, and those who stayed there. But what about those who just moved on? They didn't crawl out and join everyone else. they just dug and found a place to be. Maybe not even by themselves. Maybe they dug and ran into a group of people who had also dug deep into the earth. And you find everyone sitting surrounded by brown earth, warming themselves on the flesh of trees, sustaining themselves on underground wells. I think I want to be there. Underground with the people who chose not to climb out but climb in. People who saw no point in getting out just to be in. I want to be like them. Covered in mud, one with the earth, knowing things only those who live below can. Not calmly and peacefully basking in the sun but heartily and pointedly sustaining yourself in the depths of the world.