on staying in the feeling

I’d like to invite all of you to a zoom book launch September 4th at 5 pm PDT. Please RSVP here! Please note this is a free event! I want to keep track of who is coming. Don’t pay! Just bring your enthusiasm, Tell your friends! Bring your children or your mom!

I’ll read a few poems, we’ll acknowledge that this book made its way into the world this year!

Today I was told stay with the feeling. I immediately thought about sex and then about peaches. The person instructing this was talking about anxiety. I was transported back to the middle of the night where I reminded myself to get soft. I reached out to D and felt him breath in rhythm that meant he was sleeping. I looked up through the skylight and saw stars and remembered they are shining. Breathing. Shining. Soft. Soft. And back to dreams…to sleep.

This morning I was driving across the reflection that is the marsh in late august sun. I could have been in the sky or underwater. Everything was reflecting and I couldn’t see well. The car smelled like old snacks, sweat, children, something mechanical that I don’t recognize. This is the perfect place to stay with the feeling I thought.

I could feel my imagination fraying, the nerve endings tangled and agitated. When something reminded me to breath a deep breath I looked at the dust.

I thought about the way concrete crumbles.

As I told you, I’ve been counseled this week to inhabit what is going on. The dust from replacing the floor of the trailer billowed across the afternoon sky. Too fine to recognize or breath. I realized I don’t always know how to stay when things change so quickly.

So then I remembered how I dreamed about the blistered metal underneath and how I would scratch my body along the dirt sanding as I went. Goggles, a respirator, not nearly enough protection for my imagination of collapse. Or how in the middle of the night I hear the wind walking through the gate and knew who it was.

In sleep I am confident in staying with the feeling because there is only the feeling, I can’t meander away even if I am terrified. In this I find things I don’t expect. I learn to know the wind as a person. I discover my body as its new shape and am in wonder. I watch incredible things unfold and they are real because I can stay and experience them. Is this what happens when we inhabit what is actually going on? Is this what happens for you?