Waking up In Edinburgh, 7:30 in the morning. The Rented flat is quiet, I’m the first awake.
Dallas to Charles-de-Gaulle to Edinburgh flights fatigue still heavy behind my forehead and in my joints. I put on the kettle and brew some chamomile, I haven’t had enough sleep or water. The view is shockingly quiet at this hour, shops opening, cafes putting out their tables and roll out floral displays….My body Longs for a strong coffee, but its too early for that, it would shift the feeling of the “quiet and calm” of the morning to “trapped and anxious”. It’s strange to now be so aware of such subtle changes and shifts.
So I sip my chamomile and sit at the window overlooking the city and the towering castle above it all. Current 93s “Sadness Song, quietly plays over my headphones (construction and car horns are not my preferred morning backdrop of sounds, though they will do in an aesthetic pinch) The song is one of my favorites off “Thunder Perfect Mind” which in it’s own turn is one of my very favorite albums. The song has an over arching theme of emptiness and quiet sorrow…..but a peace, a reflection on it, a finality. There’s an aimlessness to the song that for me, seems to be a tonic against my minds constant need to perfectly define and derive exact meaning from all things. It isn’t quite a defeated feeling, more of a “in this moment, sighing then getting up and going through it despite that “knowing”.
A sudden and drastic shift in perspective, rather that be foxishly framed by “Philosophy” “psychology” “spirituality” “religion” “chemical” “magic” can often be shattering. Quite how I feel: shattered. But here in Scotland, so far from my home in the swamps and Cyprus knees of the bayou, which is still further away from my childhood home of mesquite and yucca and the open skies of the desert, I feel shattered in a completely knowable way, shattered as so many, if not all other living things are. All the ideas, all the “signs and “symbols” are spilled out around my shattered pitcher. They are all still there, all of me is still there, the form has simply changed. And I cannot say I “hold” these things anymore, I cannot neatly define them or self, or form. When I say form, I mainly refer to the inner forms and systems of self, systems of thought and magic, inspirations etc. but now, I sing the same song as the world, and rather than only mourning the loss of that inevitable and false safety/invincibility that my Badgerine-ram heart insists on (which is needed and appreciated at times! Thank you 57) I can watch these ideas and pieces of me go out into the world, walk outside of the “pitcher” in steaming ether, along and around whatever is and becomes of this “form” as all forms do in it time become. Though this is all yet another definition in the foxish-ego-perception of things, it is new to me at least, and necessary. This morning, I will do my best not to mourn the fragility of my body or concern myself with the contain-ability, definition or eternity of my self-spirit, I will instead, notice the glisten of the broken pitcher.
All my love to you, from Edinburgh.~Rat
