All that remains
Standing barefoot & empty handed on unfamiliar ground
What remains when you have stepped well beyond the bounds of territory you mastered, land where you labored on hillsides and played in the woods, terrain you surveyed and strolled and studied and owned, when you say goodbye to the features you know by heart — every stone on every path, the particular way the light glows around the trees when dusk is nearing — and place your feet in soil you’ve never seen, now a foreigner in a landscape unknown, a wild and unruly new world to learn?
What remains when you take the banners of your own self appointed titles and identities, lower them letter by letter, honor and recognize their service in your survival and the ongoing unfolding seasons of your life, wrap each one carefully and tuck them away in an attic of gratitude and caution, and then just feel the awful nakedness of leaving the marquee empty for a beat?
What remains when you take your vision for your life and you rub your full fleshy hands through all the colors and swirl them around until the shapes dissolve and the whole canvas is a monochrome shade of nothing that asks you take five steps back to be able to really see it?
What remains when you round up all the things you are certain about, the sureties on which you can count, the matter of fact reliability of confidence and conviction, when you roll them like dice of chance and spill them out long beyond the horizon and out of sight, and watch all that was just real and clear and here disappear into a magic poof of smoke with no trace left behind?
What remains when you peel down the layers of comforts that cushion you against the world, when you tear down the reams of moss-covered habituations that soften the edges of existence, when your skin comes into contact with the gravity and cool reality of the granite earth, the bared bedrock of it all?
What remains when what you thought was your core turns out to be a shell, another layer to shed, and when what you thought were your edges turn out to be a middle, another center to cross, when the elements of your environments are somehow whittling and expanding you both at once?
It’s a deconstruction of all that I knew and relied on that seems to always reveal the absurdity of certainty, and that what remains as it all comes down is only a striking clarity of the mystery in which I am suspended, another lesson to learn about all I don’t know. It’s a stripping down to the bone of all my ideas about myself that seems to always reveal just how many older versions of me I am carrying in my marrow, how many archived pieces and parts are still finding their way out, and that what remains as it all comes forth is always another lesson to learn about the story of who I should be and the truth of what I am.
To stand barefoot on unfamiliar ground, empty handed and absent of all that I spent years collecting, unsure and unadorned, amid this modern world of frenzied gain, linear ascent and aspirational security, is often an exposure that feels primitive in its threat, like I’m a lone lowly animal out on the edges of a civilization, like I don’t belong among those who cared enough to follow the rules and stay the course.
But I breathe in the wild air and let myself be lost because it’s only out here, where answers become questions and periods become commas, when the whole snow globe is glittering down around me with the glowing ashes of whatever my world just was, that I learn anything about anything at all.
I don’t know what remains when nothing of me is left. But I know that I’m still here, even though I’m not.
xo,
Taylor
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