Chains

A few years back, I stopped by New York on my way to Europe. Tasked with photographing "interesting things in nature," I wandered around the city with my camera, hoping to find something that might satisfy the requirement. I planned to take a creativity class in Florence, and we got our assignment after I departed nature-ridden Ohio. Trapped in a mecca of urban life, the task initially concerned me. Central Park was no where near where I needed to be, so I had to rely on the concrete haven of Union Square. I spun beneath a few trees before finally landing on a small patch of flowers. Gripped by the juxtaposition of nature and metropolitan boundaries, I could not remove my eyes from the daisies.

They spoke to me. As if they were waiting for their moment--knowing perfectly well it would come--they hovered peacefully behind the black chains. Existing in their own space, they danced in the wind, growing, blooming, coloring the drab, gray landscape with their yellow brilliance. I studied them for a while, wondering if they would be grander in a garden, or if their place behind the chain was worth the view. Perhaps they were happy where they were. Perhaps they were proud of their home in Union Square. Perhaps they enjoyed the performers, the story-tellers, the lovers meeting, the artists drawing pictures of them glowing against the backdrop like fireflies in the darkness.

I eventually left the daisies, but the daisies clearly haven't left me. When I thought about my silly exercise of pantoum writing yesterday, my mind returned to the New York City daisies that were no longer alive anywhere but in my images. See, when I started, I didn't want to repeat my lines. I didn't want to continue writing about the silly bear poised atop my worn, wooden ladder. I didn't want to maintain the rules I made; I wanted to stop mid-step and choose new ones.

I kept going though, and through the terrible verse I produced, I managed to take myself back to the musings of my childhood. I took myself back to a girl who used to narrate her dreams aloud--fantasizing about her first book getting accepted, or about winning an oscar; in so doing, I realized the little girl in me still does that. She still dreams aloud in her room when she's all alone, all alone except for the tiny, little bear stooped in the corner, a bear who has been with her through thick and thin, from room to room, moving from state to state. That bear has seen me when I've been my most vulnerable, and she has never fallen apart. She has never laughed; she has never told me to be realistic. In my moments of reverie, she always accepted me, sitting, as bright and as reliable as the sun.

Long after I wanted to stop my pantoum game last night, I managed to write the last stanza. In that stanza, I captured what I most wanted to say. As soon as time escaped and I was free play with my own rules, I removed the chains and I rewrote the verse. It still isn't anything special (and there are some serious meter issues), but it happened only because I started out with rules; I started out with chains. If I would have tossed the chains aside before I was ready to be picked, I wouldn't have made it all the way back to the core of my memories.

And so, I suppose chains can be good sometimes, because sometimes they're meant to preserve us until we're ready for what comes next. Hopefully one day my chains will fall on a much grander scale than they did last night. Hopefully one day, I'll live on like the daisies, inspiring a grander search for truth.

***

Stopped on a worn, wooden ladder

Quiet as the sun in the sky

Real as the rays that touch me

"It's possible," he says with his eyes

Dreams manifesting like water

Chains crumble so I might emerge

On the edge of possibility I totter

As reality and reverie converge

My tongue scribbles language aloud

Energy ignites and it bleeds

His presence on that worn wooden ladder

Fills space with lucidity

Quiet as the sun in the sky

Real as the rays that touch me

The bear on the worn, wooden ladder

Tells me, "it's okay to believe."