Metamorphosis

By: Edrie
February 19, 2010

Don’t let your throat tighten with fear – take sips of breath all day and night before death closes your mouth. – Rumi

My skin is glowing as if I am lit with thirty candles all centered in my heart. My freckles stand out stark against the transparent thinness of my skin. I am warm and damp from a very long bath in which I put too many bubbles. I am a changed version of myself – reborn, clean.

A story is like water that you heat for your bath
It takes messages between the fire and your skin.
It lets them meet and cleans you. – Rumi

I always read in the bath. Reading brings me out of my own life and into the lives held within the book. I read a book about North Dakota The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere by Debra Marquart. A friend used to joke that only self-help books had colons in the title like Manic Depression: The Facts your Family Should Know or How to Lose Weight While Eating: A Guide to the Grapefruit. The colon in Debra’s title reminds me of that; perhaps this is my self-help book. Already in the first few chapters I recognize some of the universal truths about the place where I grew up. Its people, its landscape, its slow way of drawing you into itself and making you a part of it like seeds are a part of the earth.

Don’t let your throat tighten with fear – take sips of breath all day and night before death closes your mouth. – Rumi

Seeds grow and reach for light and turn into beautiful things only to wither and die and return to the earth, bound to it forever by deep white roots.

Cut off those chains that hold you prisoner to the world of attachment – Rumi

I have different feelings, knowing that even growing up similarly in a place analogous – that all people are singular and experience things slightly differently. Napoleon, North Dakota, where Debra grew up, was only a very short distance from the farm where I grew up. She was a farm girl too, still is. All of us farm girls retain pieces of our hard working, early raising ways. But not all of us retain the same pieces or even in the same way.

Debra always wanted to get out, out of her homeland and out of herself. I did too. I used to be homesick for places I had never been. Because I read a lot, those places were so real to me that I felt that if I could just step into them, through a knot in the door of the barn or down a dark staircase in an abandoned house sitting in the middle of a plowed field, I would be living the life I imagined for myself, the sort of mash up life fueled by overlapping stories in the hundreds of books I had read.

Don’t let your throat tighten with fear – take sips of breath all day and night before death closes your mouth. – Rumi

I am in a life sort of like that now. A life made up of experiences I’ve had since leaving the place where I grew up. I’ve had many years of cities and traveling and foreign countries and school and work and clubs and drugs and bands and booze and sex. None of which I partook of while cloistered by wind and sod and sky.

The minute I heard my first love story – I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was.
Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere.
They are in each other all along. – Rumi

I did not know that I would have to go through a complete metamorphosis to become what I am now – nor did I know that it wasn’t over – that in fact the change continues until the last sip of breath. We are all constantly changing. It takes seven years for the cells in your body to completely change over and a lifetime for that change to become you. In seven years from right now – even if we were all gathered here in this same place, none of us would be the same person. Relish this change – be a willing party to it. Embrace it and make it yours. Morph: Change, Alter, Transform.

Don’t let your throat tighten with fear – take sips of breath all day and night before death closes your mouth. – Rumi

Art provided courtesy of Walter Sickert who is currently underway on a project called WSInkDrip a Day where he completes a new work of art everyday for an entire year – see what he has so far using the following links:

February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009

***

Artists in residence archive.