TIMBRE TO MY MOODS
If I sail unawares for too long, I’ll find myself in the realm of the spleen and not seeing my part in it.
Victor Man • Red and Dark Haired Sisters • Oil on canvas • 2017
I’ve grown to notice a tone quality to my moods. Rhythm. It’s in the grain, the seaways and the loops. I pick up drifts, fluxes, streams, rising omens. Once in awhile, I’ll slip. I’ll find myself in earnest beneath the currents of my own life. I am swallowed whole. There is a particular tone to that predicament, and it has nothing to do with a whim. And I know it, that I love and I feel in tides. Through all of the highs and all of the lows. I am told, it is a testament to my capacity for depth. A faculty to dally with my own experience in real time. And that, they say is a gift.
At times patterns and threads reveal tangled and crammed. The mind aches and jams and clenches and wounds. We stutter. All of the thoughts. Congregate spontaneously, unruly. Frenzy does not know its own force. It probably thinks it is acting a kindness, wishing to show you a thing here or a place over there. It does not realise how obstinate and self directed and torrential it becomes.
It is demanding not reading more into things more than what they are. I’ll grow heedless, worried, apprehensive. Scattered. Though I seem not able to recall the moment of the fall, I now cruelly lack a soft ability to focus. I’ll notice my growing recluse. Rigidity in the movement of my thoughts. I mistrust. It feels calamitous, I am taken over by a side of me looking in, coiling, and I become trapped in its eddy. I have now unintentionally stepped in the chamber of make-belief. I proceed enchanted, with my own thoughts. I have imaginative thought. Possibly not quite tethered to reality, that of above ground and, at my worst, entertain sincere suicidal tendencies. I seem not anymore able to clearly differentiate between truth, and invention. They say I spiral. They talk about demons and and delusions. It’s just, I activate in a certain way.
« But too much fear destroys the brain »
Feeling the lurk and the bile and the stammer with every flight of ideas is a clue. Now that I know it is obvious. I must be cut off, because the eerily feeling is familiar, I have been here before—and all I see to eternity are what lies in the crevasses and tears me apart from others. Spellbound. Hermes-like a trickster, now I know from experience when I find myself in the dark place. I have awareness of the grim. It sort of hurts and nudges or throbs, and it’s relentless. For me it comprises a great deal of sadness too.
There is no such thing as attempting to untangle the wires while I’m in the realm. Whatever preoccupies me then, never prodded a way out. In such times of drought, learning to recognise abnormal energy is, most of the work—telling brown study from life current, and not letting myself had by siren songs. Recognising patterns, assessing the state of mind gone amok, odd dispositions in my my humours. When caught in an ebb, I best do away with swift escape. Not that I reject what the happening has come here to say altogether, but that I know that if I am to hear, it’ll be more conducive from a place of flow.
Yet, I still need to get out. A sort of Ariadne’s thread device is a good metaphor for this intention of a method because it involves discernment and logic—not thinking. Sometimes we have got to wake our own selves in this way. Just getting out, this way, right now, is the task. This getting out must be induced by my own hand and it must not involve thinking my way through it. Visiting a kind friend that I love; Taking a somewhat exerting walk in the wild; Visiting some touristic hilltop slightly panting; Trying my hand at an intriguing new way to cooking fish.
Sustaining the impulse, the kind of velocity just found—and keeping it live long enough. Sometimes days, because I need to keep distracted from thinking about the enticing thoughts again. It seems counter-intuitive then, because naturally I have a tendency to want to be present and feel everything all the time. Where beauty lies, where I can drift, where I can trust the swirls and the momentum. But this is not such place. How to make the difference might be the topic for a future post. For now, coming back into alignment is hard work. Until the found again kind of weightless quality to myself.
I only wish that I had realised sooner that I am not alone while I’m in there. I thought for so long, for real, that I was. But there are so many of us, musing and dwelling in those parts, from time to time, lost in the multiplicity of our conflicting selves. Some are actually excellent at not slipping at all, it turns out. I recently found in myself a new respect for such resilient yet intriguing creatures—kindred folk it turns out.
I endeavour carrying spindles as a keepsake in my mind, a cheat device as a reminder to not drown any further in the daze. To come out of the slumber—dormant state, unbeknownst to me in real-time. Pricking pinching, spindles in a cache where I place all the things that I know in there are good tools. At other times when serene, such occurrences or episodes or slides can be but tumbles; merely noticeable, unremarkable. And this is how I know, this is too heavy, too hauling, something’s not right. Spindle. I only add things and rules to the drawer when I’m in the good place. I do feel that there is a slower pace for us, and in the wake world catering to our natural pulse is very hard—we do as a result seem to wade wind facing a lot of the time. Although don’t we all? And do we really or is this what normal people call experiencing a life full.