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Spirit vs. Animal

Hey Group Thinkers, I wrote this when I was feeling too in my head, not enough in my body. We forget when we're hustling just to keep on with our work and art to breathe, fall and be animals.

Resinous imaginations do not forget. Thoughts fly as lost objects, bits of glitter and dirt that make yesterday's suffering feel like a noble history. To be a spirit is to be here, there and everywhere. If I see entire universes, they must have existed a millennia ago. They would not be so vivid, otherwise.


Boundaries between longing and logic, devotion and discipline give me a false security. But in love, akin to the disintegration of burning trees, spirit takes on new forms. I am aether into another. I am here, there and everywhere. I forget to breathe.

Spirit and animal take us back to the drawing board, again and again.

To let you into my spirit, I first show you the animal. We draw upon each other's bodies with our eyes, passing looks we've never given anyone. We play, claw, crawl, bite, scratch and moan with abandon. Everything that lives in us–bodies, imperfections, confessions, accolades, unpainted masterpieces, continental divides, patterns, music drones, the future–disappears in sharp, punctuated gasps.

We remember how to forget.

When one is tended to, the other grows discontent. Spirit emboldens craft. Animal revels in simplicity. Ideas fire like arrows. You meet me here, and we run with it. We stay up until morning, we work, read, write and talk. We are in love.



Though my fingertips might type twice as fast, they've lost their ability to quell your mood. It's easier to watch augmented reality on television. These are computer days. Words and pictures constantly aglow in my brain. News feeds I'll never record to memory. No respite from information anymore.


Spirit cannot be contained, but it can settle, like heavy, dank air. I am getting better at reinvention with age. But plateaus scare me. They're epic waiting stations for relationships, until it is time to fall again. Fall into what? The fights, the unresolved issues. The exhaustive and continual game of ascent – descent. Eventually we must be animals, clawing, biting, scratching, falling down the side of that plateau. Words will show themselves as purveyors of artifice. Words won't do. And you can't read my thoughts. So we pull out a new drawing board.

Where our words end, our bodies meet.

Here, there, and everywhere, we are animal and spirit. Yes, we are falling, but it's so we can be alive.


For more writing like this, please visit me at http://hiwildflower.com/spirit-vs-anim… —a lot of my stuff for GT inspired its creation.

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