ode to the edge

echolocating my 23-yr-old self; and What We Are Here To Do in these times

i was drawn today to what i realized was my first Individuated Form of Identity in the shape and embodiment/ensoullment of The Land— this sheer edge at socrates sculpture park; where i worked for 5 years as director of public programs, and where i grew up playing as a little girl, and then seeking solace as a young adult.

it has taken So Many Years to understand The Importance of This Edge— this edge that has been slowly and then swiftly eroding and tumbling into the east river; so much so that what i used to call My Perch— a piece of concrete jutting out over the sheer edge, no longer exists. socrates— the park, outdoor art museum, and community space, was created in the late 80s at the site of a former ‘illegal dumpsite’ in my industrial hometown neighborhood in NYC— hence all the buried things, hence all the concrete in the underneaths. hence what was once this fantastical ruinous barge-like structure— with its water-logged/rotting wooden beams and rusted nail-spikes.

below is what it looked like, in october 2009, when i was 23 years old and writing about This Place. in early 2010 it was published on my friend’s now-defunct online magazine (effectively) called the whiskey dregs, under the title ‘riverwriting.’

here is the beginning of the piece:

i keep coming back here.

maybe i just so desperately need to know that there is something more than the streets and sidewalks, than rushing from place to place, than the rat race and the job hunt and multitasking and networking.. maybe this — sitting here on my perch before sea and sky, the grass and the rocks and the ruin, the manmade empire — maybe this helps me to remember the rest of the world, the endless expanse.

i can see the river moving for what seems like miles and miles, and it’s free. it isn’t worried about health concerns, about articles to write, about finding a job, about being on time — it just is. now i know why emerson wrote the things he did, the way he did — or at least i have a glimpse. words fall short and pictures can’t capture it — just how refreshing it is to be here. maybe this isn’t the most practical way to be spending my time — but i need it. i’m recharging myself.

i keep coming back here, and it’s odd — i feel antisocial, and can’t seem to ever shake the fear of missing something — but the silence sings to you in a way few other things do. it seems there is my family, my love, and silence. the time you must allow yourself to settle into the space of existence. it’s so much more difficult than it sounds..

**

i want to hug myself, back then. ‘maybe this isn’t the most practical way to be spending my time— but i need it.’ yes, you Do. and you have no idea, my girl, how much being a cinderbiter will Teach you, in your older years .. <3 </3

‘maybe this helps me to remember the rest of the world’ …

depending on how you grew up— going to sit outside at a sheer edge after coming back from college or your job may not seem like anything significant. but for me— in an enmeshed family with heavy projections of fear and control— following the call to not go directly home or keep working as an early-20s person in the media field (i was a local/arts journalist back then) was quite (or at least semi) miraculous. and Then, Continuing to Return, over time— to the point that i found myself there on christmas eve or after getting fired or on new year’s day, after i first made love with the man i’d spend the next decade-plus returning to, while i still had a long-term boyfriend.

*

i traced the origins of my connection with this particular place, as meticulously as i could, some recent months ago— but don’t have the current wherewithal to find it in my myriad journals strewn around the apartment. either way, i found that my going-to-this-place coincided with a Very Real Need for it. early twenties, and suddenly the world had become More Unresolvable. graduating college in january 2009 and navigating That Big World for the first time without the structure of schooling. being a youngin’ magazine writer and editor working with, becoming friends with, hanging out with, folks that were 26+ (who often mistook me for that age). ending the two-year-long clandestine double-boyfriend’ing i was doing, at the end of 2008— and abruptly bumping through a series of extracurricular car-crashy love trysts, including with one of my best friends, and my college professor (i had already graduated, Okay).

but/and Especially— my dad’s sudden life-threatening heart-related health issues that cast him as a medical anomaly, shook him to the core whereas he was usually stoic or aggressive, And kept ending him up in the ER at literally random. still now when my mother txts me a certain way or has a particular lilt in her voice when she calls me, i’ll flash back to the bodily-trauma-feeling of Those Times.

there was A Lot. there was So Much.

and this place was Giving Me Something i didn’t yet understand— but had had intimations of since childhood, and then in high school reading the romantic poets like wordsworth (THIS poem of his, that i read first when i was around fifteen, will always be a crucial piece of work in my life), and in college reading emerson and thoreau.

*

16 years, now. it’s wild to Think So.

especially because, this morning whilst sitting at That Edge i realized— was reminded, rather— that The Way It Is Now will be gone soon. i was told by one of my beloved former colleagues that the longtime-coming shoreline restoration of the park would be happening this year. Literally— My Place. the way it had existed and shifted and collapsed and Changed since my childhood— would be Entirely Different.

i almost can’t hold the weight of that right now, but i told the edge to remind me— to tell me when the construction would start— to help me to Pay Attention.

this is nothing new, as all us earth-feelers know, especially those who live in cities. the city makes repairs. the city cuts down trees. the city ‘rehabilitates’ or ‘restabilizes’ shorelines, for ‘climate change’ and ‘sea level rise.’ and your friends— these special beings that you’ve come to know— the rocks, and the trees, and the landscapes— are displaced. altered. cut down. destroyed.

the thing i’ve come to Learn— that they’ve come to Teach Me, though— in the very Real grief throes of this— is that Essence. Essence cannot be destroyed.

me on the perch in october 2009; 23 years old (and look at my friend mugwort there, too— i had no idea, then, who she was or how important she would become in my journey ..))

me at the edge where the perch has now crumbled, today; 38 years old (with a ferry shuttling by in the background; a transportation system that didn’t yet exist in the earlier photo; and condos rising above the housing projects that were also nonexistent, then ..)

***

i write this in the midst of a Continual and Great Intertwining. of So Many Teachings i have received from the land, from the mythic/imaginal and spiritual, from my body, from my research/readings/inquiries all these years; from The Stuff Of My Life.

i am trusting the twining and intertwinings of these things. the braid of my life, the Braid of Me.

returning back to the first paragraph of this post— realizing Today that this first sovereign Connection with the land, outside an upstate trip or anything having to do with friends or family or boyfriends— was an Edge.

all these years later— recognizing myself Vitally and Truth-fully as a medial being. a go-between. a psychopomp. an edge-dweller. as a person sensitive to transitions and thresholdic consciousness. There It Was; right There, in the land. in my Draw to the Edge. sitting, watching, reflecting.

**

i also realized today— the Necessity of the wide berth of pendulation between the seriousness of Action needed by folks like me, at this time— and just the pure and Simple need for Beauty and the need for Rest. and how fucking difficult that is if you haven’t spent any time practicing it. how both/and-y and mythic and paradoxical and painful it can seem— to be able to Discern— i can’t always be showing up as the Flaming Sword or the messenger or the threshold-crosser or even the gentle space-holder. i can’t always be figuring this out, receiving, receiving, receiving my ‘marching orders’— in the context of What Is Happening in the collective right now, to humanity right now— in direct relation to my Part in it. i have to be able to Let Go. to Yield. to Empty My Hands, and My Mind. i have to be able to take wandering walks just for the sake of wanderings walks— and not worry, for some moments, about how i am being heeded to train-folks-up in the new-old ways needed to survive these Next-Of-Times .. i need to just look at the warmed-up underbelly of a seagull above me, on blue sky. i need to listen to the twittering of birds in bushes along the sidewalk. i need to notice the color of the river, or the mud, or the way the reflections of sun in windows makes those angel-prints on the building on the other side of the street. i need to just Yield. i need to just Be.

**

i hear my 23 year old self, in “riverwriting.” these “practical ways of using our time.”

i understand, so much more now, Why my life has looked the way it has looked, especially since 2021 onwards. why i was released by the parkland of socrates, in exactly the way it told me it would, a few years earlier. how i needed to suffer the slings of arrows of decoupling the admin from the land— and how much of my life delivers meaning to me in this Micro in Macro fashion. this decoupling of myself from, as danny deardorff loves to say— my explicate identity. my title at the park, my role inside the organization, my place in the Center as the programs director, the ringmaster, the one tying it all together, the one holding the microphone. for this to Literally, Fully, Rupture— for coyote to come and take the song away— for this explicate identity to be so Suddenly and Painfully De-Formed— so that, So That, the implicate identity— the True Identity— could come to take up residence/embodiment, in This Life.

**

we are our own Frame of Reference.

there is no more looking to society or the overculture for validation, or permission.

there is no Frame of Reference in our current-times for what we are doing, except from, and only from, the Others who are Doing It— we are Re-Membering.

we are Re-Membering inside a time that has never happened before, in this way.

the territory is new— but those old ways. those fantastical-seeming, metaphysical, miraculous, or impossible-seeming things we are Re-Membering about How To Be A True Human Being— in Its Fullest Capacity— this isn’t new. isn’t new, at all.

i’m a few days to week 3 of 4 of my singing over the bones effort, and i’ve realized— yet Again, Micro in Macro— this is what we are Doing, Called to Do, Each in our Own Way.

SING OVER THE BONES OF OUR CULTURE.

THE ORIGINAL CULTURE.

and it’s Our Choice how we participate, what we bring, what we sing.

*

i got the very clear message today: that it’s Just Time. whatever you are Called To Give— or to Be— doesn’t need to look professional. doesn’t need to be complete.

when and if we are left without the conveniences of our modern times— will your calendly matter? or the slickness of your website? or updating your resume? or how beautiful your virtual-graphics look?

esse quam videri; this quote came to me via some readings we did in an undergrad class called ‘cleopatra of egypt.’ esse quam videri: to Be, rather than to Appear to Be.

you will just need to Show Up, my friends. person-to-person. earth-to-earth. imaginal-to-imaginal. nothing to Hide behind. gifted and wounded, As You Are.

*

terrifying prospect, Yes? but it’s Coming.

i want to be and hold a space wherein we can Practice This.

the naked and unarmed.

the magical, multidimensional, trans-species, strange Ways of Who and What we Actually Are.

i’m Here for it. i Have to Be.

*

are you with me? cuz i’m With you.

:)

<3

*

“hope therefore lies in a poetry through which the world so invades the spirit of man that he becomes almost speechless, and later reinvents a language … true poetry is what does not pretend to be poetry. it is in the dogged drafts of a few maniacs seeking the new encounter.” — francis ponge.

***

“riverwriting” {the full piece}

‘how sad the flesh! and there’s no more to read.
escape, far off! i feel that somewhere birds
are drunk to be amid strange spray and skies!
nothing, not those old gardens eyes reflect
can now restrain this heart steeped in the sea..’
— mallarmé, ‘sea breeze’
translated by peter & mary ann caws

i keep coming back here.

maybe i just so desperately need to know that there is something more than the streets and sidewalks, than rushing from place to place, than the rat race and the job hunt and multitasking and networking.. maybe this — sitting here on my perch before sea and sky, the grass and the rocks and the ruin, the manmade empire — maybe this helps me to remember the rest of the world, the endless expanse.

i can see the river moving for what seems like miles and miles, and it’s free. it isn’t worried about health concerns, about articles to write, about finding a job, about being on time — it just is. now i know why emerson wrote the things he did, the way he did — or at least i have a glimpse. words fall short and pictures can’t capture it — just how refreshing it is to be here. maybe this isn’t the most practical way to be spending my time — but i need it. i’m recharging myself.

i keep coming back here, and it’s odd — i feel antisocial, and can’t seem to ever shake the fear of missing something — but the silence sings to you in a way few other things do. it seems there is my family, my love, and silence. the time you must allow yourself to settle into the space of existence. it’s so much more difficult than it sounds..

i can’t help but wonder what this river has seen — the secrets it keeps about all the people who come to see it. the kids cutting class and joking loud, the couples talking low on the bench near the tree, women coming to practice santeria — dumping the remnants of their rituals.. volunteers cleaning, artists working, photographers framing, and someone like me — just a few blocks from home but still in need of a reminder that the world can turn slower, and moments can last longer, if you want them to.

so many seek solace but the river still moves, undeterred by its wordless burdens. this is our true nature, if we can grasp it — flow on, carry on, humble yet limitless, inspiring yet silent. unpretentious and indescribably beautiful. i wonder how many others sit on what has become my perch — how many before me, and how many after? it all flows on. and sometimes the most important questions are the ones we are all asking silently. silently but in unison — held together by the force that brings us here to watch the river, as if we all somehow know the answers it holds — as if we all somehow know the answers we are still holding within ourselves — even at that very moment.

does the wind blow in silent confirmation?

from this perch, yea, the earth speaks.

are you listening?

{written october 2009.}

*****

GATHER IN > > my 4-week series of online storied ritual-gatherings in international community, SINGING OVER THE BONES, continues this sunday on 2/9, and culminates on 2/16. it’s not necessary to attend every session; it’s been Quite The Adventure and unprecedented for me thus far. details here.

hallo to new subscribers + old. // a reminder that you can read more about my storytelling gatherings, talks (like ‘mythic mental health’ and ‘the urban mythic’), unique 1-on-1 ‘legend sessions,’ and storywork HERE. thank you for wanting to share this journey of ‘the Angel; for wrestling’ with me. it’s very improvisational so there is no ‘set posting schedule’ or regularity at this time; i usually do one online international story-gathering a month and am open to connecting with new journeyers/clients. i appreciate your Presence whether or not you like/comment. <3 writing and imagining are how i learned how to Stay Alive from a young age, so being Witnessed in my Truth and my raw processes is doubly a gift. Thank You.~