Slowing Under the Acacia Tree
My love, were we born half a century too late?
It’s only two hours away from my home, but coming here, I leave my sense of time in a suitcase in the car. In the morning the sun pours like bright oil across our sprawled bodies, and it releases the grip of my circadian rhythms. That internal cycle lives in between my eyes, right behind my optic chiasma. You reach over to slide your fingers over my face, and it dissolves as a yawn drinks up the viscous light.
Could our uncovering be more an archeological dig rather than a momentous discovery? Tell me more than things; tell me other things. I understand life as a riot and a ruckus, so I find it difficult to accept that all there is for me to do is to gently unearth a skeleton sense that has always been here.
Before I came, I thought my water of stillness would be hurt if I exposed it, and that by accessing it, I was allowing the world to damage it. This place of stillness needed to be protected, or it might be taken from us. I could not imagine the particular scent of strength that is cultivated by stillness, shaped by methodical reflection.
I sit up in the bed, as your fingers graze my thighs. I walk to the bookshelf, and think about unlacing all the bindings, and sewing them together in a different order. I pick up a glass and considering painting it, so it confuses the color of liquid it holds. I wonder if I should glue all the logs back together, before you split them. I unravel a towel, refold it, sit down. But as you call from the bed, there is nothing here to be done or undone.
By understanding life as some Voltairian comedy, things are easy to let pass and pass through. I had always thought flow meant frantic finding.
Does such patience and such banality help us fathom words like fortitude and integrity? We’re laying on a cowhide under a big tree, hiding in the watercolor shadow of the afternoon. Human beings were more frayed on the edges, and they didn’t fold themselves like they do today to hide the wearing and tearing of experience. A different consortium of notes ladders up towards a pleated ensemble.
I suppose, people considered their fibers more extensively, examined the things buried in the moment where yesterday changes to tomorrow. They held it up to the light, like a tooth in a jar, rolled it around to see the dimensions.
Could I take the chapters and leave the shelves in born frenzy? An unstoried self, one that is written with loosening of ambition, the hiccuping of velocity.
Would the tendrils of words in the books I read root deeper into me? In between I see colors like taupe and mauve, and the broad sun moves across a broader sky. We count days by sunrises and sunsets, not by fragments found and furrowed away.
In the evenings, as we make a ritual about lighting the candles, and I watch the wax roll down the side of the wine bottles they’re implanted it. In the flickering of manual light, of combustion in every moment, conversation feels more intentional, like you’ve chosen your words to match the cadence of the glow. In the decade cast by the light, there are no distractions before, during, or after dinner — only dialogue. I often think I’m just being lazy here, but you tell me it’s not important when or where we eat, only that we do so.
When I need to be reminded of how to be tender to myself, I simply remember the way you count my ribs in the bathtub. You tell me the spaces in between matter as well — between bone and bone, bone and skin, bone and aloneness.
Our home unfolds in front of me, the expanded pages of novella. I should be sleeping. I should be eyes closed and traveling. Horizontal, I am learning about my no, and cannot. This is my neither nor. This quiet resource is knowing how to prune tasks like trees, precise and bold. Each fiber of me is coming into focus and feeling.
This.
This.
And this.
This is the gentle breath of our shared existence. This coming home and leaving again and coming home again. This cadence; this step; this getting. This place of stillness is my earth and origin.
