Diving

It is so easy to push stuff down inside and hold it there, surf on top of it and live my life. Then every once in a while I notice it's there and I realize that I am only surfing. I haven't dove down into the deep of living. My Tai Chi teacher says this about Tai Chi also, you can float on the surface of it or you can work really hard and dive down and Chi will present itself to you.

I am tired of surfing, I want coral reefs, sharks, fish that glow in the dark...and ENERGY. In order to get to it I have to go through all of the stuff that I have pushed down where I thought it was out of the way, what I realize now is it's lurking, waiting for me to decide to start living so it can rear it's ugly head. I know there is a lot of metaphor here, but how else to discuss this?

In reality I've been pushing against this amorphous layer for a long time. I've just come up against something rather ugly (it has something to do with feeling lazy and not good enough) so here I am...trying to use language to sort it out.

Adrian Rich perhaps has already said it better than I ever could. (Reading this as I was typing made me cry, to think that someone else another human has experienced the same feeling, sanity)

"Diving Into the Wreck"

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it's a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she. I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.