RSSSometimes you find just what you need.
Dec 11
Sometimes the world knows, and it gives it to you. It’s especially nice when you find it in one of the best books you’ve read in a long, long time. I just finished Ana Castillo’s Peel My Love Like An Onion, and this passage in one of the final chapters shot through me, dizzying and sharp. Though my life is good, if hectic, I’m still processing all the endings and beginnings this year brought and trying to figure out what happens next. I’ve spent a lot of time celebrating myself, berating myself, and analyzing what I’ve done and what I hope to do. I’ve struggled with knowing how to move my life forward and been annoyed with myself for what feel like cliche moments of self doubt and confusion, those crises of self that seem so popular. No matter how much I try to convince myself that those moments are mine and I’ve earned them, I can’t help but feel a bit trite when I’m wondering what I’ll amount to in this world, and so reading this felt revelatory, necessary.
It’s the details that count. Although sometimes you have to look real close for the tiniest sign of something green. Like a lotus that has grown out of the mud underneath water and blossoms when it reaches light and new life unfolds. I am a big lotus blossom, lovely and impermanent as everything else. In our own skin we can be reincarnated. You don’t have to have a baby, reproduce yourself for a new and improved you. You don’t have to die first. You don’t have to die at all.
You just have to face the music pay the piper dance to the beat of your own drum and keep in mind cliches aside all is fair in love and war.
So I’m ready.
I think I’m in love with Ana Castillo for giving me these words, and also for giving me the rest of her novel, which was gritty and musical and heartrending and wonderful. Even before I got to this passage, I would have adamantly recommended this book to just about anyone, so go read it already. (You can find an excerpt here.)