We are being whittled by life, down and down, until we finally fit the shape of the self that wishes for us to become it. I suspect many of us are standing at a version of this wall right now, whether we’ve admitted it yet or not.
Are you still trying to climb it? Or have you, like me, reached the point where your knees are finally starting to give way?
I am standing before a wall.
There is space in every direction, yet I cannot move forward. No one else can see it, but here stands a barricade, a checkpoint without a guard. There is no authority but my own, meeting me in the burnished light of a dusty road where the earth has cracked from a long season of drought.
This wall has been here for years. I have run at it and thrown my weight against it, trying everything I know to get past. I have reached for the drive that used to move me through anything, but the wall does not budge. It meets me every morning and waits for me every night, wearing me down. Could it be, the old way I inhabited the world must die completely before this barrier can be removed?
I can see through and around it, but cannot pass.
Two small children dressed in hand-made uniforms come wheeling from around the corner in their cardboard police cars. Through a megaphone of taped, flimsy paper, they tell me it’s time to make a decision, and that there is a fire running down the hillside and I must move— forward, they say, forward. Don’t stay in this one place, you must keep going. “As you were,” they repeat.
I let their little, urgent voice fill me, and I’m just beginning to lift my right foot when I pause. Is the seat of my power still occupied by a child? I am seeing now how much of my life has been a response to this voice that has been inside me since the beginning, established long before I understood what I now know about myself and the world.
Could it be that these small voices have guided me all this time? That they shaped every choice I made, including whether or not I am allowed to rest here? And that this wall, is not a wall at all, but a clearing asking for my attention.
In the distance, I see a serious looking man, with a chiseled jaw and strong hands sitting at a desk with what looks like a long list, waving me over. Obediently, I move toward him, but at the last minute, turn away. Now I look past them to this woman—me—with her wrinkles and her sore hips, her greying hair. In my hand is a gold bracelet I have worn my whole life, but today, the clasp will not close and it no longer fits my wrist.
I hear the sound of a woman in distress, talking in circles about everything she wished she had done better. She sits on a winding staircase before me, white hair falling to her waist, turning a silver ring on her finger over and over. I watch as her regret pools at my feet.
I hear a third voice now, crawling out from a lump caught in my throat for weeks. It hasn’t spoken in words yet, only a faint humming growing louder. I focus on the lilting tone, and as I do I begin to forget about the wall. The woman on the stairs. The children with their paper megaphone. The man and his list.
Melody running through my chest, reverberating like I am at the bottom of a riverbed. I put the small bracelet in a hole I dug in the ground, and with the dry soil, I cover it. I close my eyes and begin to pray over it with sound, and a few drops of my tears. A bittersweet melody telling the story of beginnings and endings and transitions. The high and low tones, of marked thresholds and shedding, and grief that lingers around the edges of everything. What once fit, I lay now to rest. I hum until the final stitch of sorrow unwinds through my throat.
I open my eyes and see there is no longer any pull to get past the wall. The hum has returned me to center—if center can be called a place at all. It feels more like a line, running through the earth and the sun and I am strung along it, one small bead among many. Around me, the land keeps changing, weather passing through color, light bending around me. Water, island, sky, that is all.
I remember a dream that keeps visiting me in the night. I am running through the maze of city streets, slipping on rain water, and ducking behind tall stone walls. Someone is close at my heels, chasing me. Eventually I am cornered into a dusty stall. Bracing myself, I turn around to face what relentlessly has been following me, arms spread wide, an enormous figure, draws me into an incandescent embrace. Legs and arms spread crossing the heavens, flashing and arcing around me, a love suffuses me. I lean in completely, to the pillow of relief, of this body, of this thing I thought was going to punish and harm me, but only rocks me gently.
I find myself looking at this great invisible wall, placed here by kismet. I kneel and bow, my knees meet the parched earth, a small cloud of dust rising into my eyes. I close them.
I rest, head drawn toward the dry ground. A light rain begins to fall.
Love,
Sarah
~I'd love to know what your wall is exposing in you.
