When asked to contemplate my special place
My first reaction is to go external
To pick my hammock or my reading corner
Where I curl up with my leather bound journal
But that first reaction is not my true instinct
For that instinct has been covered by culture
Re-programmed and repeated to,
A media messaging kind of water torture
My special place is some place internal
A well-spring in my stormy center
I can’t pick the spot where it lives in my body
But I don’t care where it is, as long as I can re-enter
This special spot feels peaceful, but mischievous, like an elf during an apocalypse because all he knows how to see are blessings
Even in the murderous nuclear fireworks
It is like a guarded secret you want everyone to know
But it doesn’t matter who you tell or who you show
Because it can’t be related through words and ideas
It must be experienced like a burn on the hand
The blister that forms is the roadmap back to my special place
The throbbing, a reminder of my sobbing
As I lay down in that energetic meadow and breathe in the grace
And forgo the chase
and slow my pace
and learn how to taste
The subtlety of inner peace having nothing to do with outer experience, but being a visceral experience all its own,
And tasting like freedom, like magic and like flying
If flying tasted like mozzarella frying
I may lose track here as I try to tie this up with words
To bind the experience of my inner place with rope sentences and glue,
But a boundless place won’t be bound
Won’t be captured
Won’t be explained or mansplained
So my metaphors have kind of hydroplaned
Because trying to describe the indescribable is getting in the car knowing you’re headed for a crash.
But you get in and go along for the ride because you know now of surrender
And that a fender bender is not some ender because life is much more tender than I normally care to remember.
