Thursday 14 February 2013

Un-doing

In life you will have just as many bad hair days as good hair days..
The water runs both ways down the drain.

You will have times of long and protracted undoing.
Just as life may slowly build up block by block, so may it fall down.. 
The un-doing..
Can be almost imperceptible.

Life is not an unbalanced sum of constant addition.
Not like it's sold.

There's division, leaving you with less, and straight out subtraction, less again, and more honest of a chop. Just gone. 

We tend to focus on next and more and plenty, not the waning, waning moon. 

The hair that falls out, strand by strand, collecting in bathroom floor eddies, picked up and put in a vast array of home fashioned bathroom bins, then to the big bin, and then away..
Away away..

When we lose someone, something, it is a shock.

But even trees die.

Sometimes of natural causes.
Sometimes because we'd rather that they be toilet paper.

Harsh realities of un-doing abound in this life.

Yet the waning, waning moon is mostly ignored, her full fat sister oft steals the show, so attracted are we to plenty.
Never has the life of the ascetic, the thin, the meagre been so wholly rejected by the mainstream as now.

"You're crazy! Put it on lay-buy. Shut! Up!"

Get Fat or get Rich tryin'.

...Or something like that.

                                          ****


At my age people keep getting married.

Is this another way of plus-ing one to ourselves? 
The great sanctioned addition.. 
Making ourselves bigger. More.
 Well, yes. As it often results in legitimate more. 
More people. Little ones. But they grow. 

I'm thinking of loss, of whittling, 
of hairs and hares and moons and Easter, 
(the pagan one, that was the promise of Spring, with Ostara, or Eostre, the Goddess, and the hares bounding by her sides..)

Funny how down here in the South the iconography doesn't fit the season. 
A Spring sprig is an Autumn branch, leafless or getting there.

But we'll celebrate the eggs and hares and new life anyway, even as our leaves turn and fall.

I'm thinking of my friend, an Autumnal girl, who has lost something. And is in pain.
The blocks fell away quietly, from the back of the stack, right in her blind spot, wouldn't you know it.

I'm just sitting with it, her loss. 
Ruminating on it I guess.
Because she has to.

I guess I think that by doing this, I'm sharing her load, 
Dividing it some.. though I have no proof to this effect. 
I've never trusted math. But I'll try anything for a friend who is hurting.

And because there is nothing I can add at this point,
but more subtraction. 






4 comments:

  1. wow, thats amazing writing..

    As someone going through some of their own "subtraction" at the moment, thank you..

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    1. Thank you Matt, for your lovely comment. So glad you connected with this piece.
      All the best,
      yours in subtraction,
      Ella

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  2. Amazing... as always.

    I hope your sharing of the load lessens that of your friend. :)

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    Replies
    1. Thanks Jess, I hope so to. It's a crappy helpless feeling, which is why I write about it here, but I'm doing what I can... xx

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