let it be

I keep seeing feathers on the ground. Am I molting? And a couple of weeks ago I saw a shimmery snake skin lying on the ground. It glistened next to one of those red-brown husks from the big palm tree presiding over the hill. It seems like everything is stripping off its layers in this heat but not me. I keep buying more clothes. The quest for the perfect pair of jeans – I hate to admit – continues. I find it easier to stare at racks at a thrift store than an empty page. Do you buy in goodbyes? I seem to. I’m even tempted to pick up all those feathers (bird flu be damned) and make dream catchers, anything to slow the tide of time and its advances.

And yes, we did just move house. Our skin not shed but altered post-move with new ink. Last Friday marks another trip around the sun for me and the overlapping of all this change is rather startling. In boxing up what we own, every paperclip, bobby pin and egg beater, I experienced the pulp of my being, the mundane intricacy of self and home. All the granularities form a kind of hallelujah chorus, thrown into relief by upheaval. It wasn’t Zen but an assault on the senses. We worked like dogs and in a less-than-sane amount of time, we shelved, hung, packed, unpacked, carried and unfurled a load. I reach for the olive oil and it’s not where it ought to be. No mail comes here yet and I love mail. And we are not sure if we’re just relieved to not be moving or if we’ve really settled into a belonging here.

Olpol and I went to see Yesterday, the new Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis film about the only man who can remember the Beatles after the world endures an inexplicable cosmic event. The man who can remember claims to have written Let It Be, a song so embedded in my person I can’t imagine shedding it. Until Saturday, I felt the song was about letting go. But now I hear... let it BE. Like the way my friends’ baby is about to BE in the world. Let it BE. Richard Curtis with his dream-deferring protagonist grabbed me by my head and said, all those plans, all those ideas in there, let them BE.

So I’m picking my own side, salvaging the molted feathers of my mind. My ideas won't respect me if I'm a deadbeat landlord and I know how to work hard and earn my creative keep. And it’s not the perfect jeans that satisfy (though they help), it’s the way the pulp of my life finds use; I am the infinite universe in miniature form. So what if time insists on speeding and the chaos of change is ever-near? I can let it become me and let it...