Always.Leaving.Something.
Today, I’ll board a plane; I’ll rise and arc above the Atlantic; I’ll leave my exhausted thoughts in the jet stream; and with the grace of the skies, twenty-seven hours later, I’ll land gently in Mumbai. It’s a wide span of in-between – a clock ticking off hours and time change, a foggy film of jet lag, a suspension in stale air – but I’m sure the discombobulation is a recent take on an old, essential rite of pilgrimage. The crucial limenal state of going and coming. An airborne, encapsulated day yanks me out of gravity’s field, away from habits of seeing, the usual traffic of thinking; it snips away at all I am lashed to, until I arrive, unknowing, in the dark of another place. Deposited like an egg on a warm, soggy runway, newly hatching, seeing everything as for the first time.
We are always leaving something; or else nothing new can find the dark space in which to surprise us. Each time I come to the end of a weaving, taking the scissors to the warp makes me anxious. But I oblige, over and over cutting the threads I have stroked, counted, mended, wound, warped, divided, woven together again. Because now, they are complete. This has become a part of my practice of living: attend to the end.
In my cramped seat, 30,000 feet above sea, through the long black night, my mind will loop back to what it knows – the projects going forward without me, the phone calls I wished I had made, the emails purring for my attention. Each time, I will snip those threads that hold me to a place I am no longer, one by one, until I am weightless and free.
One day, when the ending is the last and the night is long and dark, I want to remember how to release those threads I have woven, one by lovely one, and fly away.
Susan
Susan
Stephanie
A Still Life...A Life Still 