A Window Learns to Blink
Lately I’ve been chewing on the wires again, soft ones, the kind that trail out of the walls of my mind and into an old television set. It doesn’t play anything you’d call programming. Just static that tastes like ancestral saliva and the occasional blinking of a deer that used to be me, but now sells oranges on a highway in my dreams. Somewhere between a half-steeped thought and the smell of yesterday’s rain in the spine of my shirt, I find the shape of what I’ve been studying—if you can call it study—more like sitting beside, pressing my cheek to the cheek of a foggy mirror and humming until the fog hums back.
Transpersonal psychology. Not a method, not a ladder. A temperature, maybe. A small draft curling around the ankles of the soul. I don’t go into this house to solve anything. I go in because the floorboards remember the weight of old questions. That’s the thing. This isn’t therapy in the classic sense—not a neat untangling of ropes, not a measured inventory of my sadnesses. It’s not about finding a diagnosis to wear like a name tag at the ego convention. It’s more like standing barefoot in a puddle of old rain and waiting for a goose to whisper something that shatters me. And then bowing. And then asking the puddle what it remembers about my mother’s womb. This practice isn’t there to fix. It isn’t even there to hold. It’s a trembling. It’s a room with no corners. You don’t sit down in it. You hover. You blur. You dissolve into it and sometimes leave pieces behind—usually the pieces that thought they knew who you were.
If it’s even a practice, it isn’t contained. It leaks. I paint because I need to. Because the colors show up in dreams and threaten me if I ignore them. I write because there’s a second mouth in my stomach and it likes to hum through my fingers. I sit. I breathe. I listen for the static. I watch for images in the oatmeal. Sometimes I try to share what I’ve seen, but it always comes out warped and soft at the edges, like a VHS recording of a fever. Spirituality, too, isn’t the right word, but it will have to do. There’s something electric in the silence, some warbly music behind the fridge of reality. I’m trying to stay tuned to that. It sounds like insects praying. It sounds like my wife breathing next to me.
I am not just in a body. I am a door held ajar. A room peeking into itself. A soft-eyed wink in the idea of impermanence. The world keeps trying to measure me in linear feet, in daily calorie intake, in ink-dried qualifications of “progress.” But I am somewhere else entirely, chasing the shadow of a voice I only hear while folding laundry, or painting a hand that does not belong to anyone I know, but still holds the brush better than I do.
We live slowly now. Mel paints in soft eruptions. I float, a little useless, but wide open. I speak to stones when no one is watching. They whisper in languages shaped like birds. I am not in a rush to translate. The walls have voices, and I let them talk. I’m not in a rush to belong. My body is here, but the rest of me is still arriving—by train, by boat, by envelope. I try to be polite about it. I thank the forks when I set the table.
Some mornings I wake up and I am the breath before the breath. The part that hovers. Not quite awake, not quite a dream. The fog between. I carry it like a shawl through the rituals: making tea, sweeping my thoughts into a corner. I let spiders build there. Being here, between the leaving and the arriving, feels like stretching a skin over a bowl of sky. I’m soft with it. Limbs half-cooked. Green card not yet planted. I think about melting a lot. How being legal is just a form of being solid, and I’ve never felt less interested in solidity.
Art becomes a synonym for soul maintenance. A ritual of splattering light onto the lie of separation. I don’t make paintings. I shed them. They are skin I was too tender to hold. Mel and I make art and breakfast and sometimes we confuse the two. We trade dreams like cassette tapes. We fold into each other like a pair of socks that got caught in the wrong load of laundry. There is a sweetness in this limbo, even as it frays us. This practice asks nothing of me but attention. It holds out its hand like a child with a worm. Not to scare me. Just to show me that even the smallest thing has movement, has impulse, has a little voice that wants to curl inside the wind and be felt.
I miss silence but I find it in odd places:
in the dust that gathers on old ambitions,
in the way the dogs look at me like I’m a mouth,
in the way grief takes off its shoes at the door and asks if I’ve eaten.
Transpersonal work doesn’t want answers. It wants skin. It wants ritual. It wants to remind you that you’re not separate from the chair or the crow or the thought you tried not to think. It says, you’re not broken, you’re blooming in a shape no one’s seen before. And honestly, I don’t know if I’m healing or hatching. I don’t know if this is becoming or unbecoming. But I’ve started lighting a candle when I feel overwhelmed, and sometimes I don’t even need to blow it out—it just flickers until the room understands me.
I am covered in lint and leftover metaphors, trying to stay faithful to the shape of experience. Trying to love the in-between like it’s my only body. Trying to bless the cosmic gardener even when I forget what it planted in me.
I don’t know what’s next. I don’t think I’m supposed to.
But I know the path because my feet are muddy.
Because the leaves keep bowing as I pass.
Because some mornings, I wake and feel like I’m dreaming someone else’s dream—but they’re kind, and I let them dream me anyway.