romantic frame of mind

I surprised myself last week. I actually started enjoying the Romantics. It’s not so much their poetry or the diction, but the frame of mind from which the poetry is flowing; it is like a meditation with words.

Walking the park called me to be reflective, how perfect for the romantic frame of mind. I had forgotten how delightful it is to just entertain yourself with ideas. The heat demanded me to slow down. to think,. “Do not get too ahead of yourself Colleen, you might pass out” (literally and figuratively). The sounds too, and everything that is moving about, invited me to be present to myself in the moment. Sitting Buddha like at the center of my own universe—a wooden park bench, a tree branch, a blade of grass—thoughts and memories like a train pass through, slowing down to wave a nod of awareness but not to stop, the weight is too cumbersome for the time being. We of all the living things in this park have the ability to reflect and ponder, and when like a tree I can be still enough to detach myself from the weights of obligation, and observe, the reflection is most healing.

This weekend I was again compelled to reflect and write my own experience in slowing down and meditating, and I laughed at how “romantic” this was. I returned to Wordsworth, writing about the fragmented man. (yes I actually returned to Wordsworth…wow haha) He speaks so eloquently about the man divided from himself, from other men, and from nature, and how it was poetry that collected those fragments, and was able to regroup them. This struck a chord for me days after initially reading it, after thinking about all the changes going in within me, leaving home, moving to New Orleans, and starting as a student again. I have been more reflective and fragmented since moving here than I’ve been in five years, and the reflections turn to endless pages in my journal, just like the Romantics. HAHA! I eek out meaning and transformation from this writing, if it can be found, but mostly it is to understand more fully my ideas, my thoughts, where I am and who I am. I feel like a romantic! Haha! I am not seeking answers from these reflections, but I really do believe that it is through writing, that we piece our fragments together again, and feel connected to ourselves, and thus this literature begins to take on new meaning for me.

Right now I am nesting myself into this new environment, and I observe deeply the subtle movements of my classmates, the geese, the runners, and turn to awe at the endless life growing and changing and dieing and being reborn on every second on a cellular level. I am gathering myself inward to make myself strong. I am collecting all the pieces to create more fluidity. I am the constant on this continuum on this park bend under this tree. I reinvent myself. I am the thread at the center of the large rope at the center of the universe; other threads dance around me like a meditation. Small cracks appear in my exterior life, and through those cracks I invite my poet to reconnect with this sensory reality, tiptoeing back into terrestrial life, healing a fissure between sensation and obligation.