Discontent.

It’s Everything.

The sugar maple across the street started it.

The last Sunday in September, a bluesy sky, the morning breeze barely trembling the twiggy outer most branches. Then the graceful twirl and glide of golden leaves, a beautiful baker’s dozen at a time. Wait just a minute, hold on! lamented me as I waggled a two-handed get-back-up-there-where-you-belong. Not yet, it’s too soon! I don’t want bare trees, cold winds, gray skies. I thought I heard them laughing as they continued to float down.

For days, even years, there’s been nagging discontents I’ve harbored and submerged into silence. I resist examining the culprits that tighten my gut, even though I know if I don’t they will surely be the death of a project or a dream or me. I have one right now, it’s sounds like this: You’ve spent four years writing this memoir and now you have to stumble into a terrifying foreign land called PUBLICATION, where the learning curve is so steep you’ll have chronic vertigo, the odds are minus zero, and the horror stories far out weigh the successes.

My discontents immobilize me, cause me suffering, and they illuminate the fears I mistakenly believe will keep me safe: my fear of failing which I avoided by not doing which insures failure; my fear that my Want is too large, too who-do-you-think-you-are?; then there’s the people-wouldn’t-like-me-if-they-really-knew-me; and my belief I must do those things considered by others to be more important than what fulfills me.

We create our suffering by trying to avoid that which cannot be avoided, that which is impossible to evade, that which is ineluctable, inevitable: Our becoming all we are meant to be.

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Of Being

I know this happiness
is provisional:
the looming presences—
great suffering, great fear-
withdraw only
into peripheral vision:
but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:
this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:
this need to dance,
this need to kneel:
			this mystery.   	
                                                                -Denise Levertov

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Discontent is the mysterious bellwether of our true nature, who we truly are. Discontent holds our contentment if we dare to look.

Oh, those fallen leaves? A golden carpet over dried, sketchy patches of grass. Beautiful. Exactly where they belonged. Maybe they were laughing.