I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Posted on September 11, 2012

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I am tired. Weary in a way that seeps in along the sheath of my veins and pools, collecting at at my juncture points. ( As an aside these sheaths actually exist- it is made of fascia and wraps the vein in this protective layer of tissue. true story).Elbows and knees and and the place where my clavicle ties into my shoulder~ forming that little hollow bowl of flesh meeting bone. I wake and sleep and wake and sleep and cannot shake the vestigial nature of this tired. It feels ancient – as if I’ve tapped into some archetypal well of sleeplessness. It is vexing how much it changes all things in my life. Thoughts. Feelings. Interactions and reactions. All things shift beneath the weight of it and yet There is a beauty in this sort of tired – Methinks that it would not be too Shakespearean to say that it is a tragic sort of beauty.

I always discover value in unlacing the threads of fatigue. In perusing its openness until I crack in a way that does not or perhaps cannot belong to the rational world. It is a messy endeavor and many times the gain is only a hairsbreadth wide but still. Gain. Here’s the thing:rational thought demands crisp edges and wide sleep awake is not crisp-it is fractured- like someone took the lenses of perception & diamond cut them -changing the corners of reality into beautiful refracting shades of darker or lighter.

The ONLY thing I can see more clearly is the distance between the hunters and the fugitives.
I see less clearly every other thing, but it is a beautiful (and therefore untrustworthy) kind of myopia.

Remember when you were a kid and you would press your hands against your eyes until these brilliant starbursts of color exploded in all directions against the backs of your eyelids? I used to do it until I couldn’t stand the pain any longer. I believed that I was tearing open new dimensions. That I was discovering worlds. Existing constantly drained is like this – the feeling of almost finding a new place but having it hurt too much to go there…. so you let go. You let go and return to this aching, fuzzy, watering eyed reality and think:

Next time. Next time I’ll find it.

The deep.

Weariness causes me dig into the things that live in the deep – it’s compulsive – like how I clean and run at times to excess. When i am tired, the stripped bare parts of me think, Heeeey, now is a GREAT time to muck around in the sore parts of your soul!

So.

When i am bone tired I play with hidden things, soft as the underbelly of a salamander and just as fragile. My insides are open, barely covered by this worn thin layer of ego and because it is more visible it is also very simple to push up against protective barriers that have been erected over many years. I push HARD and many times I break through into the deep dark and while it hurts to go in, I still do (compulsion!!!) Perhaps it is because sleeplessness anesthetizes (nope it’s compulsion), or maybe it’s because I just can’t work up the energy to give a fuck (mmm nooo.compulsion). The kicker is almost all of this is a silent endeavor marked only by the bruise dark skin beneath my eyes.

In case you were wondering-It is the worst fucking idea ever to do this kind of thing…except for the growth of course. It is the worst ever because of the following:

There is a tenuous balance between being “a little bit tired” & “ bone tired” and digging in it too soon sends me spinning – makes me into twisting bits of hellfire & fear. Digging in too much makes me recoil and radiate all of my “shit” outward aaand someone else recognizing my vulnerability and pushing against it makes me go bat shit insane. In short I become a turbo bitch. I run to avoid looking at the things I have crafted to keep the dark shit in or maybe to keep it out. I blame, I curse, I fall back to old patterns, I allow myself to be embraced by shadows and pull others in with me.

But hey – at the very least I recognize that I do it.

Rubbing against someone with a weary soul can be an experience of the real and truly spectacular deep self. Discovering how one’s conception of “authentic self” looks after running the shadow gauntlet with another warm body. This kind of being tears open one’s self-perception (ego) and says, “Look. Look at who you are. Look at how you treat others when all of the societal trappings are torn away. Look long and hard and deep.”

Ever had a bad trip (I would call it a deeply introspective trip but meh. semantics.)

Yeah. Like that. For me this is the real experience of unconscious.

None of this fucking about in the psychologist’s office poking at an Electra complex. This is the untamed unconscious. This is the unconscious I don’t even know exists until I wrest myself from its grasp and realize that I.am.drowning. This is the dragon I’ve been interchangeably chasing and running away from. She is an ugly, beautiful, spitefully loving bitch and “she” is me. This self is the self that almost never makes an appearance unless the veil of perception (Aldous Huxley reference! Read him!) is tugged back a bit. This is where I grow and I find THAT concept to be apropos and shitty.

Sleeplessness.

Tragedy.

Intense emotion.

All of these things are trigger points for me. All of these things tug at the stitches of my humanity and ask me to question and commune with the world naked and beautiful & hopelessly hopeful and at the end totally accountable for all facets of my life – the seen and the unseen.

It’s like that feeling of waking up after a black out drunken night and KNOWING that you did something so stupid that your rational self could not even conceive of how you made it happen. The great Joseph Campbell waxes philosophical way better than I do about it and he does it without personalizing the story which I have always found to be a part of his wonder. I can’t talk about a thing without translating it through my body and soul. In fact I think that I usually begin writing from a soul place so that I can end up here – on the outside looking backward and assessing. It becomes a thing that can hold beauty when I look back on it. The “value gain” has already been tacked on and so it isn’t pure dark. I’ve threaded a silver lining into the process. One must. I must, and this is where it becomes…fitting. This is where it becomes tenacious.

Life is tenacious in its ability to provide one more. One more cross road. One more gem studded into the ocean. One more gilded edge made soft so rest may come. So that we are propelled onward, out of the weary. Out of the self-assessment. Out of the shit and forward to continue looking for the gold. The philosopher’s stone. The things that make our heart quicken and our soul sigh.

That’s it.

That’s all you get for the positive message – a few lines tacked on at the end of a rambling and long missive. If I lived hundreds of years ago I would have written this to a sibling or lover. I would have written it like Khalil Gibran wrote his love letters. I would have written it like Dickens poetry. Like an Ondaatje love story. But I was born now. So blog it is. Welcome to my modern day letter to the self.

Much love,

Sara of the Sun.

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