Untangling Tangled Tangles

discard that

One time, a very long time ago, a woman told me to wake the people up. I think that’s a little silly because, for example, my best friend told me over the phone that I had been sleeping for a while (a year, to be exact). So how can I wake the people up if I am asleep? No clue.

Sometimes I’m awake and sometimes I’m asleep. Except when I am in my bed asleep and then I am often dreaming of my friends morphing into scary looking fish or the house I currently live in opening into a larger house where there are beds for everyone who wants a bed. And then I wake up in my room, in this house, and I hear four legs scampering through the walls and there is a No Pet Rule. So I’m not sure what that is about or what my dreams mean or if I’m awake or asleep at any given moment, to be honest.

I just wrote a whole newsletter about untangling things but I’ll give the short rundown because at the very end I realized that I can’t untangle much and to truly have everything figured out would mean Death and death hasn’t happened to me yet. And that was weird.

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about Death and I hope to god that mine is very slow and that I can reconcile and make peace with it all. I’m not ready for that kind of untangling.

But there are times in my life where I feel like I’m going there, to Death. Like I have to stop myself from dying? I hope that some of you feel this too, but I guess this could’ve been what that strange lady from the beginning of this newsletter meant. And so maybe this is mine and mine to carry and sorry I included you in it. Don’t worry. About the death thing. It’s just once in a while and I don’t want to die—like I said, I hope it’s slow—and these moments are NOT slow they’re like fast little heart rate people in my chest telling me terrible things are happening.

Ohhhhh. Anxiety.

I’ve also been having dreams of the Big One. If you live on the PNW maybe consider getting yourself an emergency box of flashlights and batteries and granola bars.

We live our lives in the West being pretty certain that Death can’t get us. But here I am living on the end of some very large, mountainous terrain. I could totally just slide into the ocean one day or fall into deep dark crevices, whenever the crevices themselves decide to open up. If that’s how it works. I decided to stop reading about it because my fear was projecting outward and my ten year old friend picked up on it and said, Maybe my parents shouldn’t have bought their coast house. And I don’t want to project fear, especially to the children, that was not part of waking the people up (I don’t think) and so I will have to untangle natural disasters later in my life when I’m out of tsunami/earthquake/fire zone.

The other thing I wrote about in my Very Tangled Newsletter is about taking some steps back. I am not sure what else to say about this, because everyone has different steps, but I miss some things about who and how I used to be. If anyone else feels that way, I hear you. And if anyone feels scared about natural disasters, I’m sorry I brought it up. Yes, I’m still crying for everything. And now I am crying and tangled. Which is probably a good place to be before whatever is next.

Here is a poem, a very unfinished poem, about waking the people up:

Wake The People Up 

says a woman I can still see at night. Whose name 

I can’t remember. She shook my shoulders

and told me that Earth is not my home. I agree

If I run far enough backwards I’ll see lumps of cells

breathing in and out, their little mouths open, their dreams

reminding them that they are piles of their mothers and fathers. 

I have thousands of mothers and so does the sun when it hits

a shopping cart on the sidewalk or the cracks on a sidewalk or a child’s eyes

Let’s switch places, says Mother in love with Child. In love

with who she can be when she makes a sacrifice. 

…

We could do a fun thing where any of you poets (anyone who writes poems) out there wants to finish this tangled poem. I don’t know where it’s going because I’m tangled. Okay I’ll stop using that word. If you want to share a poem, or anything at all, please do.

Tangle tangle tangle

love,

jo