Walking on Alligators

Relationships, especially new relationships, or even long time relationships when you are known very well, are a lot like walking on alligators - so is writing.

A new relationships is like building a step ladder. The side rails encounter and put on the first few steps, solid. No worries. Then it seems they start taking turns adding steps, setting nails. sometimes a bit of wood has some rot left in it and just as you put your full weight on it, it gives. But you only slip one rung and it is not fatal.

Then each person is mounting a rung, a rung, a rung. Then one puts their hand against the tree, the house, the wall and pushes off. The ladder in the free air and all you can do is run.

Some people know.
They don't run.

The world is visible for them.They see beyond the physical troubles, the distances, the missing rungs on the ladder.

I am someone who is afraid of certain things. Having borne them and mourned already. Yet, I know, I was authentic and alive and real.
So here is a rung, screwed to the sticking point, fast, solid.

It is one rung.

But it is steady. And sometimes the view is the scariest thing, looming, a thunderhead, a bear upwind. It will come for you sooner or later. You could run. But you choose it. You turn into it and roar and wave branches over your head, and the bear runs away.

The bear. You fool the bear but the ladder and the water are waiting.

But sometimes the rung falls over water - those waves, churned, white capped, fingers curling, dark, dark. You just let it go. Let it go. It's not death.

It's life.

Mere Mortals

So it is difficult to reveal oneself and difficult to know when we meet someone if we have met them. I've been reading "I am not Jackson Pollock" and it is clear that the people in the story don't know Jackson but even more so that Jackson doesn't know Jackson. So no matter how genuine he attempts to be, the challenge is insurmountable.

A friend wrote to me today, "I think I have been misjudging you slightly on something which may not be true at all...." Well, the misjudge, misstep, misalignment, is one of the banes of man's existence. All we have are our sense and our perceptions and our own histories which are never exactly what someone else has experienced. So people layer meaning onto what they can see and touch but that is no measure for accuracy.

Neena Birch is a wonderful artist and yesterday at an art show in DC, she told me that as she studied this technique or some particular aspect of the art process, that she moved away from herself; "Such that sometimes you lose who you are. You get lost." She's right, of course. Having been lost repeatedly in so many years, the excitement is when you find yourself (as no doubt she does continually)!

Creation of something brand new is altered the minute outside influence falls upon it. But I know she hasn't lost herself in any fashion in which she has not also discovered some other aspect of herself, because her work is strong, solid. And the portent of it cannot be missed. Something is happening, something strong, shapely, meaningful, and yet, utterly without the artist and from within. This is what art is, how life is made, how we express what we can, being mere mortals.

This in life is also how we sometimes misjudge, although I am sure my friend meant misunderstand, one another. Because we see it all through our life's spectacles, tinted or now we have altered from the prescription. Things don't fit, the frame does not hold; until we widen the lens and allow for a bigger picture.