I'm atrophying, freezing, fossilizing. The only thawing I'm doing is through my tears. Warm, salty tears. Other than that, I can't move a muscle, I can't take an step; I'm stuck, stagnant, stifled. And it scares me. I'm terrified that I'm dying - on the inside. I don't think Darwin only wrote about physical survival when he said "Evolve or die", or maybe he did. But it seems just as true for survival of the spirit. Can I become extinct even as I'm alive? Is this how dinosaurs and dodos felt as the earth was icing over, enveloping their warm bodies until they became ice, frozen, and eventually fossilized? Did they fight to survive? Did they run as fast as they could to stay warm and alive? Or did they surrender themselves to cruel Mother Nature as she killed her own animals to extinction?
But Nature isn't cruel. It just is. It's just a matter of life. And death. And yes, eventually extinction. So why does surrendering feel so sad? Maybe because I'm not surrendering in my spirit, but only in body. I stay here, day after day, receding into myself, boxing myself in within walls of cold, barely moving, not knowing if I'm hibernating - waiting for spring to come warm me, or if I'm solidifying into a flat sheet of frozen nothing. But animals seem to have instincts - what happened to mine? My intuition seems muddied right now, giving me no clues about my direction, no clear scent of right or wrong, no sense of danger or freedom. So I stay petrified - like a deer in headlights - neither hibernating nor happy. Just stuck.
And if staying stuck is my strategy, for lack of anything else, for lack of instincts or wisdom, I guess I can do it as well as any deer can. Yes, they get killed, but death is afterall written into life. If I can't evolve, can I at least die without hurting anyone else?
It would have starved a Gnat --
To live so small as I --
And yet I was a living Child --
With Food's necessity
...
Not like the Gnat -- had I --
The privilege to fly
And seek a Dinner for myself...
To Gad my little Being out
-- Emily Dickinson
~
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