Episode 10: Half Way Alive
Hi everyone, I hope you’re doing as well as you can be. This week’s episode looks at some of the ways anxiety shows up in our minds, bodies, and souls—specifically the elements of it that aren’t as frequently spoken about. February 1st/2nd also marked the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, which is celebrated through many different cultural traditions. This episode discusses how even with seasonal shifts—especially the long-awaited ones between winter and spring—anxiety doesn’t always dissipate. Further, I’ve stretched and re-shaped the old villanelle poetic form for this poem. The villanelle, traditionally, offers a frame for struggling with establishing conversational tone and narrative possibility, reading in non-linear circles that resist telling a complete story. This form sounds and feels a lot like the experience of anxiety, and I hope the structure and words capture the mood, emotion, and memory, too.
I’ll share it with you now:
We talk about aching waking up, but without
breathless sensitivity, tents pitched for toilets,
and angry skin, soul, and stomach, unable to speak.
The eye of the storm must be halfway between
winter solstice and spring equinox. Headache and dizziness.
We don’t talk about aching with each type of waking.
Could we craft a raft from what unravels us?
When spring sap is just sticky pus bleeding from
angry skin, soul, and stomach, afraid to speak.
Clear liquor looks a lot like tears.
We drink both to remind ourselves, first, that
we don’t talk about bone aches waking up
and second, of the taste of pain: simmering, stinging, salty. Feeling
so much that you question if you’ll ever feel again when
angry skin, soul, and stomach, now threaten to speak.
And if we sprint through winter we’ll boil beneath
coats of cold that should freeze flight. So fight to
talk about accumulating aches—waking up when
angry skin, soul, and stomach scream.
Breathe the words in. What do they make you feel or think? How did they connect with your senses? What colours or symbols did you notice? What meaning did you draw? Metaphors? Interpretations? Clarity? Messages?
