I keep picturing one of those old witch’s brooms, the kind with sticks tied together with twine, or lengths of palm fronds bound up with string. I hear the swishing whisk of the tines on splintering hardwood; I see the clouds of dust that billow up around my feet.
Why is dust on my mind?
I know that it’s the medium for all things that grow; it takes decay and transmogrifies it into something glorious, something impossibly sweet like the buttery petals of daffodils or the leathery wings of a tulip’s leaves.
But there’s another kind of debris I see. Fog in front of my eyes. Weepy smears of grease on my glasses’ lenses. There’s something I can’t quite tackle--something the old witch’s broom won’t touch. Sticky, glutinous, weaving its hyphae through the seeping ick of my mind.
I sporadically practice yoga. Just often enough to know that I’m holding an impossible amount of tension in my neck and hips. I once heard my YouTube guru say that neck pain is failing to see both sides of a problem. Is that why I have a knot so hard, so sour, right at the base of my skull? Is that why, when I breathe deep and lean into pigeon pose, tears spring from my eyes?
I can’t believe the physical manifestation of psychic pain. It baffles me. There is nothing here so troubling as to make my shoulders rumple so. There’s nothing in my day so painful it ought to wrench my suboccipital muscles into a marble--a cat’s eye shooter--just beneath the skin of my neck.
Frankly, I’m afraid to sweep up the mess of reasons I’m clenching my jaw, straining myofascial tissues until the tension crumples into a tinfoil ball behind my eyes.
If I talk about the tension (blame disordered muscular systems transmuting external pain to internal aches) then I don’t have to think about the environment I’m in, the habits I practice that hurt me so. The company I keep gives me stress dreams.
Last night I dreamt I had to stay late at work, tasked with screenshotting a spreadsheet for a board meeting. Every time I tried to “print screen” the doc jumped--a few cells out of frame, a few cells down. And before long it was 8 pm and I was exhausted after fourteen hours of futile key-clicking. I looked to my left and my coworker had stretched out lengthwise along the table. A blanket appeared.
“You keep working. I’m sleeping here.”
I woke up with an ache already gnawing at the soft tissue below my C2; I sat down at my desk.
I’m conflicted.
I believe in hard work. I believe in putting your concerted effort into creating the best possible outputs, in giving your company the deliverables which they pay you to deliver. There is satisfaction in pushing yourself, in sacrificing time and thought and energy to see what you can create.
But I’m not a machine. I can’t replace the tires, oil the squeaky bits, chuck in new filters and fluids and rotors and run for another hundred thousand miles. I am not powered by engine grease and gasoline; I have no spare parts. Nor can I implement a software update, turn it off and on again, delete a few stray files and cut back on the operating load.
My mind is fractious and I’m sick of caffeine.
My brain is burdened and it’s bleeding down my neck.
And maybe I keep picturing the old witch with her broom of twigs because she sure has a lot of time on her hands for sweeping up. Gather the crow’s feet and the spiderwort and the eye of newt and the mushrooms densely packed on the forest floor. Stay up until midnight to pluck the flowers by the light of the full moon. Sleep until you’re sated, on a feather bed under the quilt you pieced from patchwork squares of linen and batted with carded cotton.
May your weary head fill with dreams free of slides and screens.
Thanks to Robert Merki, Caryn Tan, Dan Miller, and Jude Klinger for their thoughtful edits on this essay. And shoutout to Foster for bringing this brain trust together.