The Path Above the Ribbon Blade’s Indigo

My thirtieth birthday anniversary has just passed.

I am now officially in my 30s. I am in love, inspired, in mourning, in training, in scholastic retreat, in the middle of an obstacle course. I am coming to terms with transience, forgiveness, and regret. I am expanding my definitions of sisterhood. I am approaching a more authentic independence.

Sorting out my life is not simply a matter of making an appointment in my planner that can be check-marked off, but a process. Like grieving. Like goodbyes. Like good results or golden opportunities. It revolves around a constant awareness of possibility, only available by way of risk and adventurous spirit.

Perhaps no one is ever truly confident of outcomes before undertaking a task. But to truly live, you must not be afraid to seek the thing that thrills you.

I’m glad of this revelation at this point in my life and of the many avenues it has lit up before me.

Sometimes, miles slip away as if they had never existed, yield their coldness into a warm glow. Sometimes, there are weeks outside of time, built through a wordless bliss. And, then. How we miss them when they have passed out of our present and into our memory. How we wish to inhabit them by way of an indulgent dreaming, recalling, retelling, invoking. How we linger. How we long for the next pockets outside of time. How we wait, as if anticipation could rush the seconds nearer, again.

When traveling throughout the New York metropolitan area, one can take any combination of the eight hundred bridges it contains. Constructed mostly of steel and concrete, they are wide enough to allow lanes of cars filled with people and cargo across. They seem sturdy, safe enough to take for granted, like the every day.

When going to the Himalayas through Rishikesh, one must travel a narrow suspension bridge that sways over an incredibly wide abyss. Made of wooden planks and rope, it is only wide enough to allow a single-filed line across it, between one high peak and another. It seems tenuous, dangerous, as do all quests.

I dream often of bridges. I hope often for bridges that connect one set of thoughts to another between poems, stories, chapters, expressions. The bridge that connects me to those I love isn’t even there. It is a series land-roads, impossible to walk across in a reasonable amount of time, of whale-roads, impossible to swim across with a reasonable chance of survival. When I think of these distances, I am grateful for the connections allowed by technology, for the possibility of seeing a moving, speaking face before you from miles away, or a dynamic, realistic voice talking to you from those miles away.

Tonight, I wish for a bridge to connect the matter in my mind to the pixels on my screen, for the discipline it will take to create and cross it, for the endurance to finish the task in good form.