Summer Chaff

Solidity. The earth beneath my feet, pushing up against them. Grounding. Firm.

It feels like a past life. 

Damp, cool soil, rich in worms and minerals, covered in moss, crawling with the smallest forms of life, tiny lungs breathing in and out for centuries, living and dying over and over again in perpetuity - I cupped it in my hands and saw my own reflection staring back through the dense black dirt. I saw myself in the roots, the stones, the lichens and ants. They saw themselves in me. 

Where did it go? Where did it wander to late at night, when it slipped out during my sleep? 

My ghost looks out at the parts of itself that were once unmovable, now scattered like chaff to the wind. I chase them, I grab greedily, hungrily - but they slip through my hands and laugh. 

I tell myself it wasn't a dream,  but I can't see the ground.

Four years ago something happened to me and caused a fissure. I haven't figured out what that something was, where the cracks started, or how they managed to expand so vastly while I wasn't looking. Each time I think I've stitched the seams back together they burst wide open again and all these parts of myself flee like moths into the night. It seems to take eons to gather them back up again.

Still, there are moments. There are times when I can feel the sun on my skin and and the grass under my feet and I know us each to be one and the same. There are moments when my pulse feels aflame with something that is much larger and deeper and older than me and any sense of understanding I have - this same thing that grounds me to the earth, unmovable, whole, and frees me into a limitless and timeless scape that I cannot fathom yet know to be true because I can feel it.

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Being human is hard. Biologically, socially. 

I crave meaning while at the same time I know it to be a Sisyphean pursuit. I crave purpose and acceptance despite wanting freedom and solitude. This silly social part of our biology won't let go no matter how hard I try to push it away.

I remember my first trip to our home in Achill. I remember the tears falling down my face while I stood alone in our overgrown property, amidst the 300 year old stone ruins and fallen walls and lichen-covered boulders. I remember how I slowly lowered myself to my knees and sank my hands into the thick wet grass while I cried silently -  the realization that this was home, that this soil and I were one and the same thing, that this place had fed and watered and given birth to everything that was within me, was so powerful - I was overcome with complex emotions and a sense of connection to a patch of the earth that was so strong and so primal it could never exist in language alone.

I remember feeling a purpose in life in the years immediately after that. The path wasn't solid, and there were no financial or social gains to be found in the things I was doing, but the endeavours I was making were the most worthwhile things in the world. 

At some point I became disillusioned, perhaps after being told over and over that those things were insignificant, pointless, that I couldn't survive on them.. Words like "401K" "savings account" "insurance" "loans" "career" "salary" "job security" "retirement" "investments" "student loan repayment" "benefits" kept showing up on my plate, the lingua franca of the adult western world coupled with my worst nightmares. They'd say I needed to grow up and be responsible. My heart would race, acknowledging the severing blade to everything that meant anything to me. But I tried - I tried and I tried.

Then the earth beneath my feet disappeared.

I'm going to get it back.