The Monster in Your Closet

Victoria (The Loneliness of Stay-at-Home Mother) is unabashed in sharing her earnest, loving thoughts both as a friend and as a blogger, no matter how far she has to reach to make sure they are received. She is simultaneously strong and gentle; in turn, quiet and vocal.

We don’t live close in person, but she is a neighbor of my heart. Whether I am ebullient or sad, I am always comforted to know she is out there brightening the world with her love.

Recommended post: There may indeed be a monster

For this I am thankful

Spoken word. Birdsong. Music. Laughter. Languages. Poetry and prose. Love.

These are things that move me; things I cannot live without; things I am certainly thankful for. But really, my thanks must be directed at something much more basic than even these simple things. Something elemental, so to speak: vibration; the pulse, the energy, the movement that brings all of these other things into being.

Vibrations help us rise

Yeah. Vibration. Can you feel it? It’s right there, inside of each of us, all around us. It’s a part of every sound we hear, every touch we feel and every movement we make. Every beat of your heart, every pulse of energy pushing blood through your body, every spark of electricity you feel when you see “that person” enter a room: those are a vibration. The sound of that smallest of birds flitting around the feeder, the hum of the power lines you bike past, the wind rustling the leaves of the poplars on the lake path: those are a vibration. It’s everywhere.

I remember as a teenager feeling huge raindrops thrumming down around me on the sand at my favourite beach, and then feeling the electricity burst out of massive lightning bolts, making the hair on my arms and the back of my neck stand upright. It was magnificent. Those were vibrations.

I can remember waking up one morning to the sensation that someone was lifting and shaking the foot of my bed – now this was the 80s and I was young and foolish – but on opening my eyes seeing that I was alone. When I went down to breakfast in the dining room (this was when I was at university and living in residence) there was a buzz of conversation .. “did you feel that?,” “wasn’t that weird?” Apparently we had had an earthquake and I hadn’t been imagining someone shaking the foot of my bed, it was just a different someone than anyone I would have been thinking of. My second earthquake experience was a waking one: I was in a small class at my second university; our professor was explaining some important passage in a book and those five of us sitting opposite him all stopped listening at the same time. There was a tremor, more of a buzzing, really, that moved through each of us; we all felt rising heat, blushed and released the breath(s) that we didn’t know we had been holding, following up with small nervous chuckles. Our professor and those sitting next to him on the other side of the small room hadn’t felt a thing. It was amazing. Those were vibrations.

I hear my son laughing, giggling and guffawing. The birds outside my window are arguing about whose yard has the best nest-building material or will yield the juiciest worms. The buzzer on my alarm goes off and blends in with the stop-and-go rhythm of the garbage truck making its rounds on my street. The wind picks up and I hear it whistling through the branches of that tree I still need to prune. I stretch myself out of bed and pull fresh air, fresh energy into my body. I am surrounded by vibration.

When I read or when I have conversations with myself (or others) in my head I sometimes like to speak aloud, and sometimes it only feels like I am. The sensation of the words passing from a pulsing spot in my brain through my vocal chords and tumbling over my lips makes me feel just that little bit more alive than I would were I only thinking quietly. On occasion those thoughts in my head are whirring around so fast that I can actually feel them: little electrical pulses that bounce around and around until they manage to organize themselves into tiny columns of marchers who move through my central nervous system looking for a way, any way, out; like the steam in a pressure cooker. If I can’t release that vibration, that nervous energy, I will blow; whether it will be implode or explode is never clear but if the channels are open then the flow is out my fingertips either on to keyboard or with pen to paper. That energy, that pulse, that vibration is what moves, in my humble opinion, every writer of prose or poetry, every composer, every artist, every creative genius.

The one thing that starts at my core; that is the very foundation allowing me to experience the hum and flow, the buzz and melody, the pulse and beat; that opens me up to the fluidity, the constant movement that feeds my soul and spirit: love. Love feeds all of these things, love grows all of these things and love brings all of these things to life. But what is love if not vibration? We vibrate with joy and with a soaring spirit. We vibrate and ache our way down into a pit of despair. We catch a glimpse of the future in the eyes of those we love and that vibration floats us right back up to level ground and shoots us to the stars. Love is the ultimate vibration. As Marky Mark said, “come on, come on, feel it, feel it, feel the vibration.”

Vibration. For this I am thankful.

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