Lay Me Down

Removing my top, I sit beside a cool stream and feel the summer air on my bare skin. With my mind full of the most recent atrocities committed at the encouragement of our nation’s top officials, I turn my face to the sky and watch as a perfect V of Canadian geese flies toward some distant destination, their cries sharp and haunting. Fall will be coming soon and becoming a Canadian has crossed my mind more than a handful of times in the past few months. Wanting to escape more immediately however, I take a long sip of the Sauvignon blanc I’ve brought with me in a pink thermos. My notebook and pen sit beside me against a tall oak tree, we are both open and ready for any kind of inspiration but for a long while the only thing that happens is the occasional butterfly and the stream rushing by, dazzling and beautiful in the sunlight. What stories can I possibly tell that would amount to anything. Where do I begin when inside I feel like a run down beach front hotel on some vacant island, abandoned save for a few seagulls soaring overhead, boarded up tight for the harsh winter.
I used to write in order to figure things out on the assumption that to figure something out – to break it down and understand it – would somehow ‘help.’ A quaint notion now. Now facts are fiction and the truth is no longer a beacon calling you home but a weapon used to nail you into the ground. Something in me feels like I did as a teenager who begins to see that the strict religion I was brought up in was really designed to keep me obedient inside a system built on lies and oppression. It happens gradually, you sort of get the sense that things are not as they seem. That ‘protection’ is just blind submission to a thing you are never meant to fully understand. You don’t ask too many questions. You are scolded for looking behind the curtain. But it’s too late. The curtain falls at your feet. You suddenly become fully aware of your own nakedness and theirs and while they search desperately for a way to cover up again – to go back to the way it was – you in your wild heart rejoice. You walk away gladly and forever, wanting to be naked always.
The truth had set you free so long ago. And you knew you believed in something so much bigger than they ever will, something that could destroy every horror and soothe every fear because life is a miracle and death is ever at your throat. If you can just let go of the lies and the madness. Inspired by a truth that seems to make my bones sing, I pick up my pen and scribble a few lines in my journal. Take another long drink of wine and lie back upon the warm soft grass. If only I could make them see. If only I could say the right words at all the right times and save just one other person from the unspeakable sadness they carry so deep inside.