My Own Knots
Posted in life on February 9th, 2010 by emmajamesI was so moved and inspired by Jeanne’s post yesterday at The Barefoot Heart that I decided to write about my own knots. I am full of them, mostly on strings pulled too tight.
The emotional knots have manifested into physical ones, creating pinched nerves in my back and hand, making it painful to even breathe or touch. Then there are the intangible knots, in my chest and gut, that grow larger and more entangled with rising panic, fear, loneliness and self-pity. These are the ones upon which I constantly break proverbial nails attempting to untie. They are bound fast, the seams of the strings on which to pull no longer even visible.
I wish I could just cut them out, all these knots, but then I’d be left with threads too short and hanging loose, aimlessly. I’m sure there’s some brilliant remedy in the folklore of community wisdom for how best to untangle knots, emotional as well as physical, but common advice hasn’t yet done the trick. I meditate, I breathe deeply through the pain, I take action to address the real challenges with which I’m faced. Hell, I even got a massage. The knots just grow bigger and more obstinate, it seems.
Which is why I have been talking a lot lately about the weather, and pretty things, and walks around the lake. I don’t know how to– no, I simply don’t WANT to give voice to the mundane aches and terrors that have me constantly, and fairly unsuccessfully, holding back tears. It’s a record I’m so very tired of playing, and the needle has already etched such deep grooves in the tracks that the story jumps and skips, losing any melody that might once have been there.
So I focus on the one external knot that gives me hope. The knot on my favorite tree. It might seem trite, that this malformation would lighten my heart, but it does. I look at it and think of all that it has withstood. I admire the beauty of its form. And I see that the tree still stands.










