Anyway, we have a mad spring wind underway here – 2 days now, and it blows, warmish and super strong – gusts over 120kms an hour which batter everything and bring a sort of dry-eye-balled edginess to the living things in the area. My inner world is nervy and restless. This wind is strong enough to rattle the house and bend the trees over on unusual angles, and though it happens every year around this time, I cannot get used to it. Thus ‘Weirdness’.
I am thinking this might be why I am suddenly beset with opinions… Those odd wordy thought trains that pop up unbidden, saying things like “I hate landscape paintings… why don’t people just look outside at the ACTUAL scenery?!” or “It’s terrible the way people are SO rude to each other” etc etc.
I recognize these are little pieces I put together to help me define myself to others in conversation, and that they are complete bollocks. I like some landscape paintings very much – love them in fact – there are some breath taking Turners to be seen, and then there’s Van Gogh, or Monet (haystacks, churches – I could go on forever)… And I well know that people are rude to each other because they believe they are defending themselves from something that is very real to them, even if invisible to the rest of us… But once upon a time I threw these opiniony things together in a fit of ‘sounding impressively bored/ superior’ and now they float about in my head like useless flotsam. Worse, if I feel insecure enough, I may spout them afresh, adding to the stream of drivel being uttered by those-of-us on the run from real life. Mental restlessness.
So I wonder about opinions, and the need to be defined at all (See ‘Weird’ above). I feel like I have had a loose grasp on this definition game for much of my life – I have acquired a certain fluency in it as I get older, but I care less about it now – I might tell everyone I’m an ‘optimist’ because it’s one of the things I ‘know’ about myself, but when I think about it I know this actually came from something someone said to me when I was a kid, and it sounded ok to me, so I slung it in my bag-of-tricks. When optimism is called for, ‘look-at-me-being-optimistic’. Of Course, I can be despairing and miserable along with the best of you, but I find myself ‘overlooking’ that when it happens, because no-one gave me permission to be miserable. It’s a glitch in the system. It must be run out of town.
Other handy labels – “Friendly” (I am capable of being hell’s worst witch at times), “Warm”(except when I am cold, or luke warmish, or burning bloody hot), Intelligent(HA! Here I could write of stupidities beyond belief, but I’ll save that for another day), “Highly strung”(nice gentle metaphor for my state of almost constant tension and fear) and any number of other things which aren’t really all that interesting, so I won’t get lost describing them. Point is, they are all things I ‘DO’ sometimes. Then other times, I do other things.
And despite all longings to find stability and security, especially in myself, I have always known that there was not a shred of real stability in this thing called ‘me’. So I tried to ignore this and work harder to find the ‘right’ definitions. Broader, looser, more painterly (as my art buddies might say). Some people call me an ‘artist’ though I haven’t painted anything but my fingernails in 6 months, and this is the first written attempt for longer than that… I am ‘Mother’ when my children are around, but what about when I am alone? It has always seemed I become ‘nothing’ very easily, and oh, how this has irked me.
Because every day, I am another country. Just as every day my home is a different home, my face a different face, my kids a bit more grown… It’s hard to ignore all this change, but hell, that doesn't stop me from trying does it?
I write today in honor of constant change, and the paradox of trying to find a stable path through it, and doing so with as much good nature as can be mustered. It’s a hell of a task, this life business. I am trying to look around the edges of these opinions, and relax into all those tensions, because after years of war upon all inconsistencies, I am all worn out.
