Mud Room

I have much, much further to go than I ever thought. That's clear, now. The loneliness is crushing, sometimes. Often. Usually. And I really didn't know that. I used to be scornful of people who were afraid of being alone. Now I realize they were a step ahead of me: at least they knew they were afraid. I hadn't even got that far.

They tell stories of the old yogis who would meditate alone in a cave for ten years; think they'd achieved enlightenment, and come on down to the village, only to realize, after five minutes in the company of others, that they'd fooled themselves again. All the obscurations, all the fear and desire, returned with a rush, in the presence of others. Back to the cave, back to the meditation.

And I could not care less about enlightenment: the word has no meaning or allure at all, to me. I really have locked myself in the mud room.

I am so tired, so tired. I don't want to start again. But there is a little tune beginning -- there is someone picking out a tune on the piano, hesitantly, with one finger. If I'm further behind than I ever thought I'd be, in this life, it's also true that there's more occult help waiting than I ever expected. Further behind: but that means the way is better marked than I had thought, and that there's more company ahead than behind.

From the house, voices and laughter; from the woods, what might be calls or cries. And I with the boots and the coats, unable to go in or to go out.

But Spring, or whatever it is, is building up under the clouds and making little mumphy noises on the south slopes of the hills; woman are braving the cold in elaborately patterned stockings. There's tiny daffodil on the front lawn, alone on the moss, looking a little desperate. It's hard to settle to any work. I keep reviewing my life, as if there was some lesson there. I turn it inside out and backwards, just to see. What if there was a villain in my story, and it wasn't me? I keep trying to unwind, to untwist, but it ravels again, faster than I can unravel.

I live in dreamscapes, now. Maybe I always did. This jail, this neither-in-nor-out, will vanish with a waking, or a falling asleep: I'm old enough now to know that much. You don't get in, or get out: the world refolds itself, somehow, and what looked like an interior becomes an exterior. You become uncertain, and move to the other side of a heavy invisible curtain, and you realize that the air has changed, and the season.