On one of the thirty-three islands they call home, my thoughts can rarely puddle up together to form droplets for a cloud to condense upon. They stagnate in the atmosphere; rarely falling to wash things away, adding to the methane gas emanating from the cow fields over many out-theres, alternating the amount of solar energy that is reflected away from my Mother Earth.
I have spent much of my time training those thoughts to stay into their designated cubicles in the left and right sides of my brain. Despite the tiring effort, I have become a master in sculpting their minds to obey. I ask them to stay within an impermeable metal box, silenced, pacified, temporarily suppressed.
When the fine nerves that connect their legs to my brain are awakened, I ask my thoughts to please tiptoe barefooted out of the metal box. Please take caution. Please don’t wake me up, I say. They sling their high heels across the backs of their shoulders just like a cult of drunken mid-aged single women, faltering home on their tiptoes from a club at 4am, unsure if they can keep their promise of not disturbing.
In the morning, I school my thoughts to retreat, line up, step forward one at a time and present their faces unveiled to me. Like an officer in passport control, I do that. I never show them how much they are a part of me; because we both know that I created them. All this is called meditation in our realm.
At night, the sounds of those thoughts are like ghost bees diffusing through the walls of each room I enclose myself in to stop the stimulation of a fast life and its’ merciless selectivity of either blocking or waking certain neurotransmitters. For example, today, I try to indulge in the soothing printed lull of Henry James’ crispy words to take me into a mossy England or a sun-dried Rome.
But I am not immersed in Henry James’ creation of a spoiled Isabel Archer. I can’t feel his coffee breath. Not with the movie being watched in the living room, power and gunshots are penetrating through the walls. Bill is being killed. Then the fact that the embassies are all closed for an indefinite time weighs me down. So I put the book down and rest the back of my head on this rocking chair from which I will soon nurse a human to be humane, like a baguette resting diagonally in a bread basket waiting to coat a hungry stomach.
I think of how gratifying, how wonderful, how miserable my day was. I think of how there is life, slowly unfolding with the position of the sun playing with its’ light. And then there is a calculated trained life, scheduled on the calendar hung on the fridge.
I think of how one way of life always offers us discount coupons to acquire the other way of life. Both lives look just the same when you open their boxes: gaze turned upwards to a greater power, hands clasped together in prayer when the going gets tough, crow’s feet lining the sides of inevitably aging eyes that are squinting against the fluorescence of pandemics and wars.
Sooner or later, all lives turn one’s attention away from one’s mind and onto one’s body:
Here’s a handful of walnuts to mend your pot-holed brain.
Boil some ginger for your infected stomach.
The four seeded chambers in the center of tomatoes can clean the four chambers of your inflamed heart.
The core of a sliced carrot can assuage the delicacy of your eye health. Slice them to see how their centers look like your eye. Consume them.
The sanitation of a womb’s home is found and achieved from the core of avocadoes. Scoop them. Mash them against the roof of your mouth.
Each of these Earth’s foods looks like the organ it heals.
Each has its’ own healing signature. Eat them.
How perplexing am I? In proportion to how perplexed you are. Relative to how beautiful she is. Consistent with how intricate he is. Absolutely commensurable to how vulnerably in love with life we are – to keep alleviating and ameliorating our thoughts about it tirelessly – to earn our healing frequency, our very own signature on this Earth, and offer it to others like a walnut does to the brain it resembles.
Does it matter if I’m wrong to float this way – on my back on a pool of theories – filled with this outdated doctrine? Watching the stars, flicking the dead wet fly stuck to my collarbone? You tell me what’s wrong and what’s right; it has always been your job anyway.
Beisan A. Alshafei
June 1st, 2021
Beisan's Burble 