It is drizzling out. The sky is heavy but in the gloom, the daffodils lining the chain link fence grow brighter. I thought they had been destroyed by early morning hail but it must have been heavy rain instead for they are jaunty as ever.
I read the news and within ten minutes, I stop and stare across the kitchen table, unseeing. Words course through my brain and I lose my self in them. The swirling words in my mind are moving so rapidly, it is hard to pick out one from the other.
I suffer from C-PTSD. It is not usual for me to disassociate. I often do so without noticing. The news is making me disassociate but I haven’t noticed this yet. I am lost within the funneling word storm.
My unseeing eyes flick towards the yard and the yellow in the daffodils’ skirts urges my self to emerge out of the abandon. The daffodils are calling me come back into the physical world. Anxiety, coupled with an internal deadness, start to slide out of my mind. I start to see but it is a struggle. Anxiety is a serious business and believes its cause is true. No doubt it is. But I have to let go because I can’t live here. No one can. I cannot have a self and reside in this place where words and images babble and scream. It will and is and has pulled me to pieces for years without ceasing.
I extend the trust that it is ok to come out of chaos and let myself look at the flowers.
We enter into the clear space together. The daffodils are my teachers, the illumination into a reality that has few words but is present in every line of plant, stone, green, sky, our very existence. It is a sort of “underworld,” a way of “seeing in the dark,” a place that poetry often seeks and sometimes finds, that other world associated with night and knowing. And here it is, in the heart of a daffodil, beckoning you and I out of mental hell, away from brains lit on fear and terror both for ourselves and others, making a space where we can regain the quietness that lies deep within the soul.
The daffodils were not shredding by hail this year. They called me away from dissociation and back into life.
