Making Out In the City

February 14/2012

Blessed Rat Race

Happy Valentines Day

Hard times in the city, do you feel it? The trellising dark roots of winter holding on with a vengeance as the birds push against the sky with their persistent optimism. Riding my bike into China Town a few days back I was filled with a thick lethargy that seems to eat my bones. The oppressive low clouds pushed me into the cement, keeping the pedals turning felt almost impossible as I hunched into my own body, looking for some heat as momentum to lurch me that last fifteen minutes that it would take to get me home.

I felt exhausted by something metallic that lolled in my mouth, I kept spitting, and attempting to free my body and my thick skull of self imposed darkness. A hopeless clamoring rattled against my heart, I felt lost and alienated. Trees, rivers, and the wild that I have always run to, felt like an opaque delusion I had fabricated in some other lifetime. My neurotic, self-absorbed ego was dancing a joyful victory dance as I wallowed in the depths of self-pity.

Then I heard it, the unmistakably glorious call of an eagle, pulling my sorry head out of my own pit of distraction I gazed up.  Thirty feet in front of me, lacing the budding trees with glory was a young eagle and it’s parent dancing in mid air. They were so close it felt as if I could have stretched my body into their tail feathers.

Here amidst the smut and squalor of my inner and outer reality a thorn of beauty ripped across the heavy handed sky and kissed me awake. My mind leaped out of the dirty tales I was so preciously building as my heart threw open it’s red door and made love to the world like an awakened hungry bear on the prowl.

I looked across the infested, clamoring city skyline, and fell into that drunken angel love that is giddy and translucent with new beginnings. I began to sing the glorious song by the Po Girls: Take The Long Way and wheeled my bike across the streets and into my life, realizing that I was home. That this city was my place; I am a rat in this blessed rat race, with its undeniable beauty and horror. For the first time since I was a girl I am truly living in an honest reality that offers me the opportunity to find grace in concrete, rain, filth, poverty, and general fucked up urban squalor. I love this city; I adore it with a crushing determination. Yes sometimes I go down into the depth of the rabbit hole and lick my ugly old stories until my fur falls off, but no matter what I am always lifted up and into life once more. Not that home and garden story book life I lived nestled in the middle of the Kootenay mountains, where interestingly enough, I was far more despondent then I have ever been here. I have found more opportunities to be human in this city then I ever imagined possible. I have felt loved and have loved in ways that are so honest and sometimes so tragic with a raw inescapable openness.

I live on the Eastside, I am an Eastsider at last, thank the powers that be, city living, I love it. I cannot placate myself with cascading waterfalls or serene wild flowers at my doorstep. My door step is often littered with puke, garbage, people going through my recycling or stealing my bike, and what have I learned, keep open, keep opening, don’t push it down but just stay curious and eagles will fall from the sky and kiss me.