The Healing Balm of Beauty

My Night Owl-ness is in full effect, again.

It's late, and I'm still packing. But I was thinking about this and decided to get it down, regardless. I am nothing if not one hell of a procrastinator. I rock, basically.

As I've written before, for a couple of weeks now, due to certain circumstances, I've been having a difficult time. But I have to get this down or it'll swim in my head, pressing at the sides for an outlet. Anyway, I have been struggling to find a proper way to describe my experience authentically. This is my feeble attempt.

I still can't find the exact words, and it's been vexing. I've usually been able to figure out what's going on with me if something's amiss. So when I come up at a loss for applicable words, it tugs at me. Words are my way; my expression. If I can't get "me" out, I'm in trouble.

Alas, my blog here in the late hours of the night/early hours of the morning.

One word keeps running through my head: beauty. Even with the difficulty I've been having, there's beauty in it. I run the risk of this sounding sadistic here, though that's not my intent, but...there's beauty in pain. How else do you think so many artists got famous? Pain can be cleansing; can strip away all the outside layers of funk that have begun to settle on your skin; refine and burn away all the rough, dark spots. The journey through the feeling purifies.

Thankfully, the searing that has permeated my minutes has been abated by the beauty I've been fortunate enough to be exposed to: art, music, literature, poems.

There are moments when something is so beautiful that time stops; you're shocked into paralysis; all you can do is stare ahead and listen/look/learn. There is so much FEELING that it's as though any minute things will suddenly converge into one tiny spot of light that suddenly explodes and consumes everything in its path; changes its molecular structure; penetrates it with its fantastically perfect wonderfulness. And then the tears form. I used to wonder how people got misty at the beauty they saw or with happiness - I always thought, how does it really come from anything other than physical or emotional pain? Don't know. But I can say that I found out that it does, indeed, happen. And I can tell you what it feels like - I think:

Joy. Elation. Breathless wonderment at what your senses have taken in.

There's a special journey that one takes whenever something knocks you for a loop. You're forced to sew the pieces of you that have burst apart together in a new patchwork. It's almost a joy to know that you are alive and well because you have the ability to feel that which the body and mind resist. It hurts like hell, yes. And sometimes even beauty hurts because there's so much to take in and it resonates with that which has been pulling your heart apart. Your mind can't quite comprehend it at first. But oh, how willingly I'll take the inside burning for the quenching that stirring, lovely, truth-saturated human expression brings. :-)

Words

The words, they will not come.

Teasing me, always on the outskirts of my mind
How can I think, with that car alarm going off twice now?
They've made the parameter their home

I sit, I stand, I come, go, lie, lay
And still I cannot move myself quite
Enough to get me where I want to go.

Painful is the intertia; paralysis suffocates
I reach, stretch, strain but cannot grasp the bar
To pull me out of the cement I've poured myself into.

And still, the words, my one tool, weapon, lifeline
To the life I know could be; to describe this state
To form in the air the reality of the world I know exists right along my own, they don't come.

It's there! It's RIGHT there! The bars are open;
The side-step-forward shuffle is all that's needed to escape;
But still I prefer to see life sliced between the black.

It's easier and yet infinitely more painful.
There's a dullness, a flatness; my molecules have slowed down to form a solid state
That won't move. It's too heavy.

Heavy: that's the word. A word came.
Perhaps more will follow; I'm at their mercy.
The words, they hold me at bay, hold me prisoner.

And yet, a word did come.