Following Messages

This morning my mind said, you should take a shower.  A shower will wake you up, but my heart said, let’s take a hot bath.  So, I took a hot bath, sinking deep into the lavender-scented water, feeling the release in my knees and shoulders, and my heart said let’s go for a walk. My mind interjected, we can walk to the bank and then buy some groceries.  No, said my heart, lets look for flowers.  So I followed my heart down
Kalorama Road
toward the fancy houses and embassies, seeking blossoms and daffodils, and forsythia in professionally-cultivated gardens, and then my heart said, go over there.  It pointed me toward the Chinese embassy, a big ugly box with darkened windows and a straightforward rejection of all thing frivolous and soft.  I walked past the front door toward the

Connecticut Avenue

bridge with its fierce stone lions and expansive view, but my heart forced me to turn toward a dumpster at the back of the embassy. Heart, I said, you're mad, but I kept walking until I came to a crumbling cement slab that merged with a path into a wooded area.  I wandered along a stern  fence until the path curved and wound down a  muddy slope.  You already have a bum leg, said my mind, and my heart said, one more step will be fine, and they argued all the way down the hill until I came to the edge of the creek and startled a few deer from a clearing.  An official-looking sign said something about flooding and sewage and my mind responded with sarcasm but I could see the bridge on

Connecticut Avenue

above me and hear the percussive rattle of leaves in the wind.  Small hints of broken glass and discarded water bottles peeked out amid the snowdrops and the wet leaves and then a colossal bird with yellow plumage burst through the sycamore branches and transformed before my eyes into a moving van on the bridge above and I felt a quiet descend, a silencing of judgment and desire and the fear of things ending badly, of deep bone pain, of loneliness and doubt.  I sat down by the sign that said something about flooding and sewage and thought deep and meaningful thoughts in the space just below my conscious mind, thoughts so subtle and profound that even I couldn’t hear them, thoughts so effortless and light that they fell through the gap at the end of my breath like seed pods spinning in a spring wind and they planted an intention deep inside that will bloom one day like antlers on a fawn, like a stalagmite slowly pushing up from a cavern floor.  Spring is the time of pushing up and planting seeds and sprouting and loam, whatever loam is, and I found myself yearning, yearning for an invisible homeland of loam, in which to plant myself and grow.  And then my mind said, how are we going to get out of here? And what’s over there? And aren’t you a little bit chilly?  My mind suggested a path which led to the parkway where cars hurtled by like debris from a catastrophic blast and we retreated, following a brown and yellow moth back up the hill, hoping for an encounter of some kind. A voice from inside said, “without expectation” and I let the moth be a moth and not an oracle.  Finally, I threw my mind a bone and we went to the bank and then bought groceries and I treated my heart to a salteña.  My heart said your home is not on

Kalorama Road

or not only on

Kalorama Road

your home is in the slippery places that lead to water, in the prickly dry desert, in the moment when the defrocked and rejected become holy.  Behind the Chinese embassy I found a way that called to me in a language I must be prepared to learn. Wandering, listening, among all the city voices clamoring for attention, for that one that knows a the way for me to go.