Tools

A few days ago, someone asked me what my New Years resolutions were. That’s always seemed like such a Cathy thing to do–eat less, weigh less, obsess over my bathing suit less, get my boyfriend to marry me. So resolutions weren’t something I’d really thought about. A few days later my friend Ashley, who is one of the wisest people in the world–a philosopher disguised as a woodpecker disguised as a butterfly disguised as a federal employee–talked about the new year as a fresh start. An opportunity allowing us to put our own mistakes behind us AND put the mistakes of others behind us. To forgive–ourselves and others and, “Start new traditions any time.”
I don’t expect to leave behind all the parts of myself I wish were better in 2014, but I am going to start some new traditions, to shift around priorities a little so that the things that caused me grief and made me feel less than I want to be can be reassessed. And I have to figure out what tools I need to succeed at that.

There are moving platforms on pulleys stationed around the outside of my apartment building right now, and I watch these folks lifting high off the ground to do their work at whatever height they need to be at for a given day.
I can’t always operate at my highest level, and expecting to sets me up for feelings of failure. I need to keep in mind that I can hoist myself to where I need to be for some tasks, remembering that there’s solid ground to return to, ground that I earned and cherish and can rest upon before the next time I need to rise and do some work that seems beyond my reach. I don’t always have to defy gravity. So putting my feet up, a kid under each arm is the place I’ll need to return to, and when I’m there I’ll try not to pay attention to the ropes gone slack, try not to feel like I’m wasting that waiting platform. I’ll rest and enjoy the ground as my primary setting. Happy 2015, my dears. What tools do you need on hand to build the best you this year?

The Roofwalker
by Adrienne Rich 
(1961)
–for Denise Levertov

Over the half-finished houses
night comes. The builders
stand on the roof. It is
quiet after the hammers,
the pulleys hang slack.
Giants, the roof walkers,
on a listing deck, the wave
of darkness about to break
on their heads. The sky
is a torn sail where figures
pass magnified, shadows
on a burning deck.

I feel like them up there:
exposed, larger than life,
and due to break my neck.

Was it worth while to lay–
with infinite exertion–
a roof I can’t live under?
–All those blueprints,
closings of gaps
measurings, calculations?
A life I didn’t choose
chose me: even
my tools are the wrong ones
for what I have to do.
I’m naked, ignorant,
a naked man fleeing
across the roofs
who could with a shade of difference
be sitting in the lamplight
against the cream wallpaper
reading–not with indifference–
about a naked man
fleeing across the roofs.

Rich, Adrienne. “The Roofwalker.” Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974. New York: Norton, 1974.