As The Wheel Turns
Aloha from Hawai’i Dear Readers,
That’s not just the title of an album by the great Elvis Presley, it’s my life and I am so grateful. Although I am fluent with words, I find whenever I try to write one of those year summaries I so enjoy reading when others post them, my words come out stilted. I am not here to command the words to do what I want. I am also not here to be commanded by them. I am here to co-create as innovator, and I resolve at the dawning of this new year to stay true to that. I will do my best not to offer you anything performative.
This evening, looking through a little notebook filled with bits of dreams I jotted down and notes from oracular readings, I found a few lines I wrote sometime last March and completely forgot. Tonight, I am sharing them as a message for the new year without interpretation. If you read through to the end, you’ll understand why.
Thank you all so much for being with me here in the first year of The Corpus Callosum Chronicles! I have notes and ideas for so many new essays and explorations and look forward to learning and growing with you through our shared love of the word.
The Silver Wheel
Before I could walk I saw my grandfather’s prosthetic legs in the corner.
Flash: a silver wheel in my face whirling like a ceiling fan.
Dare you to stick a finger in the spokes.
Who said that? The child gazes into the empty space next to her.
What made Dorothea Lange turn the car around and drive back through the mud
to the pea pickers’ camp where a mother waited, starving children all around,
for Dorothea’s camera to reveal her soul?
Layers of time like tree rings beginning-where? Rippling out.
The first words of our stories don’t begin at birth.
Don’t say something fake like stories begin with lightning.
Don’t pretend you know where to go.
A million seabirds washed up dead onshore in Australia in 2021.
comma, dependent clause
Why doesn’t matter anymore.
HD, refusing to leave London during the Blitz, writing the war.
Have we sped past her so fast we didn’t see her prophecy come true?
Your root chakra is damaged, the new age shaman told me.
Turns out he was right so I went to Peru where a condor was chained in a market
so tourists could take a photo.
Its bald, red head-baleful eye up on you. Scavenger.
Waiting for someone to kill you.
Why not just come out and say the sight of my grandfather’s prosthetic legs
traumatized me so much at 1 year old I never trusted my own two feet and
learned to stand upon them?
Because conclusions are a shortcut.
Better to rest in the symbol, eye level with the spinning wheel.
You used to push his wheelchair up and down the hall, my mother told me
many years later when I told her about my vision.
I remembered. There was a shaft of light in the hall we crossed
over and over.
Kō aloha la ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light
Provocative, as always. Happy new year to you, Jen ❤️