In 2006 I stopped the world.
I quit my job, packed up personal objects & mementos I wanted to keep into a six trunks to store at my parents. Then, armed with two suitcases, I moved to another continent with a primary intent of meeting working and practicing with shamans who were energetically similar, the other to study poetry.
Now, seventeen years later, having completed both intents, armed with the healing return of all the energy I'd invested into completing those intents and much more, in what feels like an infinity of lives and experiences bookended by a linear timeframe, I've returned to these trunks.
I am giddy. I've come several loops around the spiral to relive the living past inside these Pandora's boxes. The past I have retrieved through recapitulation. I am giddy. How many times does the opportunity of a seventeen-year pile of objects to retrieve energy from present itself?
I am giddy. What a gold mine. I begin.I hold an old pair of wedge sandals that crumble in my hands when picked up. I clutch the pieces and breathe. Images of dancing, the clothes I wore, the places I went, all rise and collide to present themselves. I breathe furiously. I am giddy. I am detached. I am ferocious, fueled by will, over these precious pieces of nothing yet something. They just are, as paradoxes often tend to present themselves as being.
A pair of old leather boots, hardly worn: time portals.
I retrieve, then thank them for carrying me all those years ago before I put them in a bag for good will. Here's stack of old love letters from my young first love from the war.... nothing. Only a line from a Terrance Hayes poem I once loved rises: "youth, stupid and lovely." Young love, the stuff great songs and poems are made from.
Those memories, the good and bad, are now hollow. Already emptied. Well good-- that's what I thought. Wait, what was that song we loved.? … What do you know, a gold nugget. I see it in whisps of color, a bit of grit and texture, and breathe over it until it's flat-flat-flat.
Wait, there's still some of him on these pages, a 'him' long-since unraveled. Hmmm, what should I do with this dead energy? The outcome can go in a few different directions.
It feels right to move his energy out of the words that held on to those tendrils and watch it unwind and disappear. A wind picks up and bits of plastic and paper dust scatters.
Aladdin and the cave of forty thieves has nothing on this treasure-find.
Come nighttime I am one trunk down, five more to go. Another day.
I am no longer anything. Nothing and yet a thing: calm invisible eye resting as reclaimed parts of my energy settles. There's a heft to this bounty, a centeredness. I shower off the dust and material residual, watching them swirl down the drain as if all this dust once signified never happened. Maker Eraser Power. I like these words. I write them down.
Now, to take back this luminous day. Before I fall asleep I grow big and let my awareness fly out and above the town, seeking out other dreamers, feeling the pulse of the night.
I fall asleep, intending to continue any retrieval or needed perspective I might need to see on the asleep-dreaming side.
Dream well.