New Pathways of the Mind

 In Russian it is called rasputitsa...http://www.thegardenerseden.com/?p=8453

In Vermont there is a season called mud season. I bet it exists in other places too, but in Vermont it really gets the respect of being its own time, when the sap flows and the snow melts. Normally it is in March. The dirt roads get really hard to drive on, you slip and slide out of pot holes. You try to stay in the less deep ones but fall back into those most used ones. You get stuck sometimes.

This came to mind as I was thinking of the pathways of the mind, which are habits really, the way we let ourselves be led down familiar paths of belief and consternation. The mind does not like change, though apparently it is always capable of it, you just need to keep reading, keep moving, making new connections between neurons, giving birth to new ideas. The Vermont road in spring is an apt metaphor for the striving, shedding, growing mind.

Remember the old pathways of the mind:
Roads, I wish they hadn't been mine,
well-rutted, pitted, full of mud,
I trode them to dark places,
when you were mine, I practiced thinking you weren't.

Those roads, I see them now grown over
with weeds, and I remember their appeal.
Did I feel brave? I liked the danger I suppose,
or maybe had too much time, was lazy;
I did not take my own hand to lead myself away.

Now I can. I won't take that road today.
But you aren't here to lead me astray,
the mind says, won't take the blame
for twisting fate to castigate your name.
I'm tired and I remember the gifts.

What if? All the love I wanted to give you,
did I drag it down that lane? Did I leave it there,
to rot, hot in the sun? I wish there was a path not yet begun
for us to wander, find in shade a glade in which to love. 

I wrote this poem today in an emotional spurt inspired by an exchange of words. It is an emotional day, where one feeling is passing like another in the sky. Another apt metaphor for the ever-changing mind. I cried reading about mud season in Vermont because I miss the beauty that is there. I laughed because I didn't like the style of what I was reading. I was angry, I stopped, I reread again. I liked it or I didn't like it, I judged it, I accepted it. I watched all this go by. Observation, perhaps that is wherein new pathways lie.  

Origins

September didn't catch me off guard. I knew it was coming. I had deadlines, which I didn't make. I knew Mercury would move forward again, and I thought that I would find a constant rhythm, a way to move towards my goals. 

But today I feel strange. Last night it rained and stormed here, as I rode home on my bicycle after midnight. I had danced so much I couldn't walk afterwards, and felt as though we had brought on the rain.

September

September took me by surprise,
light, rain, change,
my pain.

A cause substantial,
a reason just,
a minimal commitment,
betrayed trust.

The battle fought
between the twins of thought,
against the sure of heart.

Where was the fountain
that gave rise to this flow,
seep, mow, sow, reap?
I cook and weep.

September caught me off guard,
lonely, I can’t tell you so,
hurting, wanting you to know.

I do not act.
The energy recedes
back into the earth,
the harvest progresses.

Maybe it's the hurricane. I looked at pictures of Vermont today for the first time, and though I am so far away, I feel like it somehow affected me, as though I were caught in that maelstrom in the sky, or as though some of my inner roads need rebuilding, small communities are isolated. 

I'm thinking about my origins, which makes me think of a quote in my dissertation, by Walter Benjamin, from his The Origin of German Tragic Drama, on the concept of origin :

Origin [Ursprung], although an entirely historical category, has, nevertheless, nothing to do with genesis [Entstehung]. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis. (p. 45)

On the way to becoming, thus we are made, within this spiral. Where there is destruction, there is also the forging of the new, creeks and rivers swelling and rolling in their beds, finding a novel way to lie upon the earth.