Morning Pages

As I was writing my morning pages this morning, I kept getting a whiff of ink from the pen I was writing with. I hadn’t smelled that smell since college or maybe early in my career when a pen leak was not uncommon and geeky pocket protectors were a necessary accessory. There was no leak, no mess, just the scent of ink as I wrote, playing and frolicking in my nose. I got up to make a second cup of coffee and as that smell now danced as a memory; I poured the water from the Brita filter pitcher into a measuring cup to microwave. As I poured, the sounds of the water swallowed me, their lips sucking me in like a piece of spaghetti and carrying me away, tumbling and rolling into the cup. The sounds continued to echo even after I was done and returned to the writing.
Sensations kept coming, the feel and texture of the cushion I was sitting on, the clamminess of my skin from the warm humid morning as the sun began to pop over the tree tops. The taste in my mouth, latent aftertaste of that first cup of coffee and a reminder that a brush, toothpaste and mouth wash was in order.
I continued to write, thoughts of wounds, questions of healing, how’s and meanings, rights and wrongs, solutions, answers; a quest for an elixir of wholeness and cure. When in the depths of the quest, thoughts flowing feverously winding up for a profound break-through in understanding; the silence was shattered by the earth shattering CRUNCH as my cat began eating its food. Again and again, another and another, some short, some in pairs or triples, no two the same. I stopped and listened, listened to the voice as the universe spoke, hearing her voice, remembering the taste of her words, the feel of their texture and smell of their essence. And in all this cacophony and thought distracting diversion, a tiny spark in a cavernous darkness lit those thoughts, though dimly, but lit them none-the-less. In the echoing flashes, a glimpse of thoughts, faces without eyes to see, smooth without nose to smell the fragrance of wonder or a mouth with tongue to taste the colors; no fingers to touch the sensuous wonderment of all that surrounds me, no arms or legs to move about this astonishing world; nothing just bare naked, sterile thoughts running frantically as if to make meaning.
Yes, thoughts, ruminations of regurgitated experience masquerading as life. The quest for healing, a frantic attempt to hold back and stop the blood flowing from the opening of an old wound, the blood merely an illusionary confirmation of a straw surrogate's attempt at pretending to be me. Let it bleed, I say and let the life blood flow, because it too is an imitation, a putrefied liquefied illusion, dyed red by fear flowing through cracks in the straw. The dying straw man merely last gasps of an old belief falling away, as the king marches homeward to reclaim his lands.