Walking down the street the other day with a friend, he happened upon someone he knew, a tall girl with a small python coiled around her neck. My friend couldn't remember her name and did not make introductions, not that I would have noticed. While they made small talk about a trip she was supposed to take, I looked at her neck. I thought it was a snake, then a necklace, then a snake, and so on. It was brown, like a piece of beautiful polished wood, eyes the color of watermelon Jolly Ranchers. I couldn't take my eyes off her neck, watching for signs of movement. She made her exit to a nearby clothing store to look for a new outfit. I said, "Great necklace," going with my it looks so real it's fake logic. She smiled a little and left when my friend said, "That's real, you know. She wears it everywhere. I didn't even notice it until you said something. I think she's a little creepy." When someone is hanging out with me and thinks someone is "a little creepy," you know things have taken a dark turn.
The whole thing got me to thinking -- how the hell do you try on clothes with a python around your neck? Thought about all the things I'd worn around my neck, the phases I'd been through from the delicate (tiny translucent cubes suspended by invisible thread) and the more durable (a fishing lure, a cross with a knife in it, my bullet) and what I wanted to say about myself, why I wore what I did. How invisible things hung from all our necks, things that moved and changed and threatened to strangle us at every turn. About instinct, about how I knew what the snake was until I talked myself out of it. Love is a lot like that, so still sometimes you think it's something else, so real sometimes you couldn't imagine you'd ever doubted it.
Michelle's Spell of the Day
"He did not know what love was. And he did not know what good it was. But he knew he carried it around with him, a scabrous spot of rot, of contagion, for which there was no cure. "Harry Crews
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Benedictions and Maledictions
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9 comments:
You could be strangled by your own neck ornament!
I was.
Talk about getting wrapped around the axel!
Do the Hokey-Pokey!
"Love is a lot like that, so still sometimes you think it's something else, so real sometimes you couldn't imagine you'd ever doubted it."
Once love is known, you can always imagine it to be something else but it is what is and it is; never forgotten or taken away because it is always remembered.
Someone can tell me or show they don't love me anymore but the love they had for me and I for them is still there within.
Even if it grows no more, with careful tending it always remains nicely alive and eventually flowers. This is the great thing about Love that is true and honest in the giving, it is eternal and nothing can kill it.
Not even the pain of the loss of the giving of new love from that person hanging around my neck or any neck can kill it. For the nature of love is fire, which burns all that tries to destroy it.
Peace (the flower that contains the seeds of love)
mark
what kind of store would even allow her in with a python?
Loved the last lines, You know it, love will rationalize with you to the point you do anything for it--and that's just it: Doing things for love, but not with the person in mind. It's our own desires telling us that it's love so often.
Men could be that python, too. I've often wondered about a lot of people's ability to get dressed while being attached to a leach by the forehead. I've tried it, and it's not easy. Judi couldn't stop laughing enough for me to get the shirt on us!
I'm missin' her tonight.
Peace wins--or so the hippies tell me. Take care, friend.
Hi Michelle! I am back on line after my move. I did not have internet access for a couple of months. It was like a quiet vacation on a little deserted island until I began to feel so cut off from the rest of the world.
I missed you and your lovely photos and brilliant writings!
Interesting about the snake . . . I'm sure many snakes slither by us wearing familiar faces of people whose names our memories won't hold. It takes a good friend who will rattle our senses and say, "That was a snake."
Take care.
I like the line, "you know things have taken a dark turn." Got a good grin from that one.
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