Tumbleword

This little bug casing reminds me of a puppy, for whatever reason.  Maybe it’s the way it lays sideways, similar to my beagle who daily suns himself in window light.  The ribcage is like my own ribcage, and the eye is so like a plastic window something once dwelled behind, looking out at life.  The way I have felt most of life, like something looking out of the window of me (eye, feeling centers, heart sensitivity, taste, touch) looking into and at this thing called world, life.

The earth is so encrusted here, on this bug’s given shape, it says to me something of archeological digs where objects of art are exhumed and wait cataloging.  It says to me that I too have a shape, an exoskeleton and will, yes, just like the embedded earthiness of the image above, as flesh I’ll turn to dust.  Then what?

I feel like we all leave these little exoskeletons around ourselves.  We move onward, day by living day we outgrow a shell of who we think we are; we stretch out of a formed conception and escape into future.  We excavate ourselves through time, moving from the earth to the air, to song, to light.  Progressively. 

Look at it.  How many little object type hollow or soulful exoskeletons do we each leave behind, inside others, and in our own and the larger social life?  We leave little gifts shaped in our image; little token aspects of our self.  Some will remain, some will mulch.  The way this was left and found by me, are there not kindnesses and art, poetry, notes, whispers and hopes we have offered to others? Passed on silently, purposely, and later picked up and found important. Thought provoking.

To some this little bug is ugly, to me it represents breath, an escaped exhale from the ribcage of life.  In other photos this creature has whiskers like an old woman, wizening.  It becomes me.  You.  My sisters, my mother, my life.  Your father, his brother, the queen of England, the president of history.  All things.

Today, even tomorrow and the day after is like a bug casing I will live in and leave, with my shape impressed in it, and what I do there, with that time, may or may not be found, or found worthy by another.  But I am made to live through it.  To try it. To try making something worthy in my image, my now.  Which is also always ever changing.

This image has become a new representation of thanksgiving—it reminds me to be thankful for life; for breathing, for moments that escape into new moments, for yesterday and all the experiences I have left, and yet impressed with my shape and my touch, my design. 

It tells me of time, reminds me that yes, I have a mortal coil, and do leave it.  In our culture we don’t sit and contemplate human corpses—because we (unlike the Buddhists who actually meditate on the decaying body) we try to tidy up our lives and pretend there is no death.  Antiseptic America, dustless, pageantry? 

I am no Barbie doll, I am no Mother Theresa, not even a Martha Stewart want’abe …and yet I am.  Maybe we are bound in language, as Aristotle said, the soul only thinks in images—but unlike the bug casing I still have an animate body and will, I can still move my hand in the world… how I chose to use this gift is daily, important… gentle.  Private.  I still have a voice and even if others find it shrill, it has to exercise, to use its power while it is given a breath.  Owned.  While I exist, I mean.  Hum, deep from the back of the throat.  Yes, try it.  Hum-hummmm within your warm throat right now… what is that power to shape words, to say a thing that sounds in another, beautifully or harsh? To sing?  To call a mother or friend, a lover? 

There was a time when women were not allowed to speak in public, or enter a library.  As long as I can hum, as long as you can, being of any sex as long as you can move your exoskeleton around in time and space, you too have something to do.  Do it—in the daylight, the night, in dreams on paper.  Whatever that is, may it help find you and by grace and the power of what we all just indulged in during our Thanksgiving, may it become a bounty to your (our) world. This is my Tumbleword, in Mansuetude, with gentle strength, do the thing you can do while it is yours.  Honor it.