and if you fail,
think of how well you've failed—Joyce Sutphen (These Few Precepts)
I fail, daily and
hourly, to be my own person, when under siege.
I remember out of
the blue a house in Oakland with a tangled garden where I (just out of college
and far lost from my way forward) shut myself in my room and hid, not wanting to
be overwhelmed by my overweening roommate who knew herself already—her tastes, her
style—unerringly.
But I have
blundered very well into some semblance of a self, even here in this
centrifugal force-field.
Squirreling one piece of me away, and then another, and a third. The little stone Buddha, Jonas Kaufmann’s
Verdi, a sunstruck bench at one of the missions, a red bocci ball and wood
grain at Tassajara, my French press for Ethiopian coffee, the small
kaleidoscope, a postcard of the Seine, an angelfish, the paper birds, white
mint tea, roast tomatoes, beaded bags with semiprecious stones for keys and ID
cards, this and that piled against the onslaught.
Mixed metaphors, I
know—but that too is a fine failing, and very me.
image: She Who Is
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