Stretto in a Fugue
Before my child reached adolescence, I’d not thought of myself as dense, dim, dull, dumb, obtuse, slow to learn to grasp to understand. I counted on my brain to lasso errant tangents, and deftly package coherence.
But when the child I once carried in my womb towers over me and asking if I agree with the cascaded deluged torrent of white-water words he proffered while my brain paddled, panting, stroking, struggling to keep up, I try to buy myself time.
I wonder—
And before I even know where I’m going, before I even fully realize the forks in my thought-roads or the directions of the trains of my thoughts, he interrupts with his usual I know.
What do you know? How could you know what I’m not yet said?
And I wonder because more and more I don’t know myself. There is delight, albeit no longer surprise, when he tells me, with a precision and acuity I cannot always muster, what I was about to think. What I was about to attempt to say. He answers my unformulated questions and responds to arguments and rebuttals I haven’t yet conjured.
Before my son’s out-loud thoughts sprinted circles around my brain, I’d not though myself dense. But now I know that it is only the young and the thoughtless who flow like waterfalls, like rivers, like streams; for our minds grow dense as they years fill them with ideas and quotes and memories and loves and lives that connect and intersect and thicken.
I am dense. Dense as a bog, meters deep in peat, waterlogged with an ocean’s worth of water, sweet and filtered. Safe. Brimming with butterflies and damsel flies and dragonflies and skylarks that flitter and sing.
Thank you all for a delightful weekend… I think this will be my last for this weekend, but so appreciative of the generosity of both Rogan Kelly and the whole group. What a delightful workshop!