Month: February 2018

Fight Song

This morning I took a very slow amble around the duck pond where I used to regularly walk and bird watch. The local pairs of mallards and Canada geese are already about; I’ll have to remember to return and look for nests and hatchlings. I spotted a kinglet, downy woodpecker, red-winged blackbirds, and the usual passel of cardinals, mockingbirds, and sparrows. At one point a pair of raptors sailed overhead but they were too high to be able to identify in the overcast light.

Back in the car, this song came on the radio and it made me wonder for the first time how our parents felt about hearing us belt out “What a Feeling” and “Eye of the Tiger” hundreds of times in a row. Those were our fight songs and of course I’m not biased when I still prefer them.

But I’ve still got a lot of fight left in me.

Further North

This year took ten years to tell me that I’m alone again.

Almost exactly a year ago, my ribs began subluxating with a frequency that kept me from doing just about anything I wanted or needed to. Then my ankles and knees started going out from under me. I stopped being able to walk, do yoga, swim, write, type, sit, stand, lie down for any amount of time without pain. My migraines came back, my digestion stopped working right.

It began to seem that everything I did only led me further down a path toward immobility.

Everything here’s about to break / I’m one inch from more than I can take.

Coming to terms with chronic illness is exhausting and maddening. Quite literally maddening; not infrequently, I have feared for my sanity. During a year when I have needed my strength and capacity more than any I can remember in adulthood, I have had diminishing control and function.

Who am I if everything I was and did is stripped away by this illness? What am I if not this illness?

It’s beautiful and sad but it’s all that I have.

Radical social projects call us to move beyond that which we can imagine, imagination being limited in some fundamental way by experience and prior narrative. Our fantasies reflect the bounds of our reality and what we desperately require is a future truly unimaginable. What we need is to push ourselves to the bounds of what has been possible and step past into the unseen.

There is no path to where we are going, no backward return. Just the outer bounds of what we have known, and then something more.

Further north.