undertow- you are an ox's curly tail.

I want to say something that comes from Henry David Thoreau's (someone else I know has the same favorite author) Walden.  He is here talking about the way the hides of oxen tails retain their form and shape forever and ever-

  "Next Spanish hides, with the tails still preserving their twist and the angle of elevation they had when the oxen that wore them were careering over the pampas of the Spanish Main — a type of all obstinacy, and evincing how almost hopeless and incurable are all constitutional vices. I confess, that practically speaking, when I have learned a man's real disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse in this state of existence. As the Orientals say, 'A cur's tail may be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelve years' labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form.' " 

I wrote a poem a while ago:

                    I hid in the deep cave

                          hid in the smoke

                                       walked with stick

                        Languor in slow-sinking mud

                    I ate tired mice

                        And saved all my coupons

                        No matter where I go

                        I can't escape my self

Frankly, this scares me a little bit.  

Here, I wrote this last summer.  It goes along with kind of the same thing, but it's a little less scary to me.  I will post it here:

I've been thinking about the inner man.

Thoreau compared it to the curly tail of some beast; no matter how much you press and pull and try to straighten it, even after a length of twelve years, the tail still has the curl. Our innerman is who we are, our core, our center.

While thinking about this, I listened to Stop Whispering by Radiohead, and there is a line in there that says, "And the thin man say I don't wanna hear your voice."  All of a sudden, I imagined (why did I imagine this? I don't know) a scary, gaunt (or like the song says, thin) person.  That's the image that popped into my head.  I thought how sometimes exceptionally skinny people can carry a scary persona with them, like they feed off of darkness instead of food, and they wear black cloaks and have hooked noses. I thought, why would some people want to have that persona? Why that particular image?  Why do any of us choose the image we choose?  Why do we have the persona we have?

It led me to the idea that our inner man, each of us individually, is a certain piece of a whole. There is a complete spectrum of every element and thought and feeling and everything, and we are each of us a piece of that spectrum.  We are each important.  We are exactly who we are, no matter what.

What we build around that unchanging inner man element are our virtues and our habits. But those aren't who we are.

All of us, all together, are a whole.  We complete a beautiful spectrum of everything, and each of us is a unique piece of that spectrum.  That is why we have to find ourselves, so that we fill our niche in the whole.

Then later on in the summer I wrote this poem after a really cool (like awesome, not like the temperature) night.  I felt like I was in a dream.  Maybe I had done exactly what my inner man was.  I let it out, and it made me happier than I had been in a long time:

It must be a dream
When life comes easy to me
No more agitated pulls on the heart
No more straightening the twisted tail
Sequestered life no more
Because life becomes more than me
And it becomes more than you
I think it becomes all it's meant to be

I wrote this about a year ago:

Someday we may be a shimmering mass
Of each other, all woven in
Pulsing light and sound

So where has this taken us?  Did any of this connect?

I wouldn't fight to the death defending these ideas, but I like them.  But not as much as I like this.

Oh and I like you, too.  When I say you, I mean YOU because you just read this.  I LOVE YOU <3