the anger and the wind come back to you
in our nature we dance like trees
At the second world premier of Honeyjoon the director speaks simply, the kind of way that helps me remember each word weeks later. Life can still be sweet after a bad thing happens. (I have been searching to know this for sure.) I have been both the lightness of the girl traipsing on the ocean’s line on the sand and the darkness of the mother craving to cry all the way through grief. I have been Honeyjoon for two years and a lifetime to go. On some days, the ache feels like a howl in the air.
On a bench with brown sugar cookie dough ice cream, you and I reminisce about the summer nights we’d bike with our parents to the local Baskin Robbins. The finale of the TV show we’re watching ends on a grief-stricken husband officiating the wedding of his best friend, finally able to stand and say that every moment with his wife was well worth it. I think of how far someone must be in their healing to say this. How easily it can be taken for granted the ability to transform the pain of a life lost to a life you can still be grateful for. I think of the purity of my father’s heart and how it fortified my own, and a sinking feeling comes in that perhaps I was more myself when he was alive. It isn’t true you say, these selves continue to exist, now splayed in the comfort of life’s messiness.
I was born with a flicker of rage in my tummy, is what my family jokes. In the conversations I have with friends on the strange flurry of emotions and phases of life we’re in, lately I’ve been encouraging others to feel their anger. And then what might be underneath. To say “it’s unfair and”... and I want to find a way to be happy anyway. And I understand that happiness is not what I naively thought it was. And I cannot control others but I can do my part, to communicate or to let go. Anger rots from the inside, a poisonous apple if you do not spit it out in time. Our nature is not anger but compassion, so let it guide you there. In the summer all it takes for me is watching the blue sky with birds fading in and out to feel the humility of being human. In the June storms the trees breathe in lushness like they never have before.
The trees need the wind for more than just dancing. We see the branches sway and leaves flitter each day without realizing it’s the roots that push and pull and give the tree its motion. The wind coaxes the roots to expand, to furrow deeper into the Earth. The wind knows what it does to the trees even when the wind is relentless, the tree will stand. Unknowing of its strength preserved down below, the tree will grow for itself. The children that scrape their knees in its tangles and the old man resting his back for a moment in the shade, the tree sees the ways of the wind all around.
Meha and I take a Dance Church class one evening: lights are off save for some colored hues projected on the wall, the music starts and we dance for an hour like no one’s watching. Except I was watching, and couldn’t help but smile at how all these people have gathered to let something go or let something in. We don’t have to look good while giving in to the movement. Any body can use their body as an expression.
We fold and straighten until we know what it feels like for someone else to lean on our foundation, and only then do we learn of our own resilience. Like this, we become the wind, the trees, the wise, the old. We emerge of our own energy, which can be so easily muted by desks and phones. When stillness is nowhere to be found and the thrashing of the changes within seem to be the screaming in our ears, find the nearest breeze. Perhaps it’s swirling in its speed or gentle in its touch, yet the wind keeps carrying on to you.