I Want To Be Soft like the Moon

Arriving to myself as the Sun rises in Mexico.

So here I am.
In the mountains of Oaxaca.
I am gazing out at the most beautiful plants gathered around me like organized religion.
The air is clean, the birds ignore me and the flowers move abbreviated in the wind.
The leaves are shot with pink inky injections and shards of red streaking in random forms, bruised with virtue.
My eyes wander down ancient trunks, twisting vines, purple intrusions bursting out of terracotta pots and Flamingo lilies with boasting phallic stamens. 

They speak through all manners of being — bract, stalk and blade.
There’s a spiral beckoning in the Aloe Vera as I peer down her vortex of sea green.
Tufts of dry husk shudder in the corn field. 
The bark of large trees slide heavy down the bole, like dry brushstrokes from some tired angel’s hand.
I am humbled by the beauty of this quiet corner of Earth.

There are random noises puncturing the air; whining goats, a distant truck, Mariachi music from some busted jukebox then what sounds like a gunshot or a car backfiring. The dogs are boisterous like a giddy gang of teenagers and the roosters crow around the morning, proud and hyperbolic.
There is the the sound of my breath, always.
Straplike leaves brush against each other, entwined and needy like new lovers.
The ripple of the swimming pool calls to me from down by the steps, just outside where I am sleeping. 

I am taken by the goodness of it all. 
The fondness of detail. 
The concentration of green things and the pigments of dense chlorophyl that drench each cell with growing.
The kindness of my hosts. 
The Oaxacan cheese left in a plump and portly ball in the fridge. 
The colloquial face of Florencio, who drove me to the village from the airport playing ambient music the whole way. 
The woman named Concha who brought down two sponges and salt and pepper for the empty clay shakers. 
I feel my whole body drop down, like discovering gravity for the first time.
The screaming of city sirens feels like life on another planet — Manna-Hatta. 
I contemplate war going on in other countries while I get to sit in this serenity.
It is a dissonance that stings.

I have so much to give from the smallness of my day. 
I whittle down my list to three gestures and four tasks.
I feel a rest emerge from the abundance of Nothing.
The hummingbird is hovering above me and my hands feel alive with prayer.
The air is thick with a serious love. 
The kind that will envelop you in warmth and silence, without asking.
I can’t run from God here.
She’s imbued in every seam and fixture, every vein on every leaf, in every dangling vine, bloom and reaching cactus hand. 

Everything here feels like a hand. 
And I give myself over to being held.
I feel the labour of hands beneath my toes in the cool peach tiling inside the house. 
The clay pot outside the door is shaped like a young girl in traditional Mexican dress. She echoes herself and holds another pot in the same shape as her — and out splutters a Pothos richer than any house plant I’ve tried to keep. 

I hear the distant stream of cheers in my aural periphery, still vibrating from the concert I played only nights ago.
Back then I was teeming with something — exhilaration, certainty and fatigue. Searching for my breath to no avail, finding myself in them.

I move my fingers through the soft papery coats of newly shelled peanuts tossed in sugar and foreign spice.
They lay resting in a painted clay pot, modest and ready for eating.
I have arrived to feeling forgotten. A tourist in an ancient town.
I am enamored with my new anonymity. 
I love her like the inkling of friendship on the first day of school. 
I study the village as I walk through; she is overflowing with personhood. 
I demand nothing of her because I don’t know her yet.
But I have hopes of being known and sharing my school lunch — cut apples, fruit twists and raisins. 

I smile at the thought of days unfolding at exactly this pace. 
Half-read books opening to me. Blankets folded in brazen colours.
Mexican bibles cooing with their ancient mouthfuls from swollen hand-carved holes in the wall — sculpted with Spanish deliberation, everything rounding like chubby clouds. 

I am awoken by the smell of life around me.
I have nowhere to be. It is an insight I arrive at with my senses and with my skin. 
I am touched by the lack of urgency.
Devoted to the patience of slow time.
I wonder when the sun will set and if I’ll see the moon pout for me. 
I am lustful in my discovering, cautious not to disturb a thing but desperate to touch it all. Just once.
Just to let the trees know I was here, and I saw them, and they saw me — though they never needed to. 

There is such freedom to not being needed.
To participate in beauty without expectations of possessing it.
God always appears to me most vividly when I refuse to contain her.
When I cease my clinging and let her world unfold before me, precious and new, imperviously sovereign and quiet and boring. 

I hope for boredom — the kind that the elderly have.
The boredom of trees and grass. 
Endlessly repeating and seeking karmic release. 
To transcend this pattern, so familiar and ongoing. 
I long for the stillness that is the move.
I ache for mundanity, like a Sun that is tired of burning.
Unaroused by her force.
Sometimes she too, just wants to be absorbed. 
To be consumed by another.
For she is relentless in her consumption. 
Set in motion without a choice. 

I, too, feel fierce in my gestures and I want to be soft like the Moon.
I want to learn softness from the wild things around me.
Power without exertion.  
A heavy lack of noise.
So boring!!! — and perfectly empty.

I watch the still water, bursting with silence. 
It speaks to me with that deep kind of time.
Shamanic — woo wooing me back into my self.
I am like a Self.
Self-ish. 
Softish, and hard too.

I feel myself arriving to the place I always was. 
It’s hard to see myself when I am always running.
I catch glimpses of myself in the window of a New York deli and think, “Wait, I know that person!”
But it’s too late, the moment has passed, and without thinking, I put on a face for a new world that needs a new taste and a new high and new idea from a new place, renewing myself like a panicked snake, shedding my original skin, never sleeping but never awake…

It’s as though a part of me has always been here. 
And there’s nothing new about it at all. 
I am seeking nothing and I feel full.
My wanting is like laughter now, playful and irrelevant. 
When I try to hold God she slips through my hands, perpetually reappearing in evanescent shapes I can’t grasp.
I grab at God and I am given nothing, she exhausts form until there is no shape left. 

Till next time,