Knowing Everything

Once I was desparate to know everything. Information was all that I had to feel safe, to understand, to make sense of how things worked.

Once I came to know myself, the need to know everything dissovled. I am safe. I understand. Everything makes sense and the universe works.

--me liz strauss, Letting me be

Clever, Not Really

I used to be clever.

If I wanted attention, all I had to do was show how clever I truly was.

Books were something I never had to read. I read them, devoured them, but I found them uninspiring. Rare was the book that offered me a thought that I'd never seen.

To be fair, I was quite clever. New thoughts were quite rare. I discovered the Pythagorean theorum before a book showed it to me. I connect dots most people couldn't see. I figured out things about people before writers wrote them in places I read them. I deciphered the mathematics of poetry and the poetry of mathematics, musically.

I was clever. It sure got me attention rapidly.

Deep inside, it felt like a magic trick, a gymnastics routine. "Look at me! I'm clever. Watch me do this! $10,000 if I'm not alive!"

Circus girl clever.

I didn't realize that wasn't the attention I needed. It didn't bring anyone closer to me.

Clever was clever, but I wasn't nice or reasonable.

Clever wasn't so clever, not really.

--me liz strauss, letting me be

Heartfelt

She said, "What color is the place where you keep your feelings?"

"Black and indigo like a moonlit night," I answered. "Close and safe, like a womb." And I felt myself, as I spoke, inside my feelings, as if I were inside a living cave.

"Where is this place?" she asked.

I formed my hands like two sides of a circle 10 inches across and positioned them in the air to the side of my left hip.

"What would happen if you moved them inside you?"

With that question, I was transported back in time softly, instantly. Looking out the window on a moonlit night in my past, I was realizing how I had pushed away, pushed out, set aside my feelings. From that past to that present, I had carried my heart alongside where no one could find it. It was close and attached, yet separate and alone.

I moved my hands to put my feelings back inside me.

In that moment, I knew the meaning of heartfelt.

--me liz strauss, letting me be

The Road or the Railing?

When I got to the bridge, the sun was in the mid-morning place, where it's warm but not overhead. It's never quite so golden and hopeful as it is just then.

I'd been in the forest, wandering from tree to tree. I didn't know I'd been lost. I'd called it exploring. Yet every detail had distracted me. Every birdsong had stolen bits of morning. Had I been exploring I would have enjoyed it. I would have wandered with lust for the tiniest bits of color. But curiosity hadn't been who pushed me forward. It was a need to move without the corresponding direction to be going.

Then, I decided.

I simply decided.

It was a moment of standing in quiet reflection -- no mirror, except my own opinion. The answer was time to leave there, time to go be a person, this person. It was time to forward to my future.

And turned toward the sunlight I saw the bridge with the perfectly raked dirt road and the exquisite iron railing. It was bathed in the golden sun of mid-morning and it offered a luscious decision.

Take the road or take a moment at the railing.

--me liz strauss, letting me be