To walk normal

Imagine one day someone takes your left foot away. Painlessly. Because you offended someone. There’s more to the story, of course. There always is. You didn’t see it coming. That’s part of the trauma.

You then have to show up in court. The best that can happen, at first, is that you eventually get permission to pay to have your foot back for a couple of hours a week. For months. In the meantime, you’re expected to find somewhere to live, keep working, and walk normally. The idea of this process is to make you acknowledge how shitty you were. You’re also not supposed to talk too much about your obvious predicament. Any wrong move, you’re warned, could mean losing your foot permanently.

During your penitence, you’re sent to a bunch of classes and treatments. People look at your missing foot, show varying degrees of empathy, then invariably lecture you on societal expectations. You get a lot of side eyes, build resilience. It’s a long journey, but eventually you get your foot back. It doesn’t feel quite the same. You’re often reminded that you should be grateful you didn’t lose both legs.

Some gratitude comes naturally. Mostly for birds, wind chimes, and things of that nature. Your foot is more complicated. I came away with the feeling that there’s very little room for that naturally occurring, organic friction. There’s a protocol for everything. Hurt feelings, bad judgment, cruelty, and danger get folded into one another. The distinctions matter. So do the consequences. Yet it’s all so mushy. Poetry backs me up on this.

Poor judgment and shitty impulses are universal. I'm responsible for what I do. However, pretending those impulses are avoidable is absurd, arrogant. Good and bad happen. Sometimes within the same afternoon. Actually in the span of minute for some of us. I would have thought a process meant to help us live with each other would have more room for that mess. Whatever laws or statics say, the ground keeps shaking under our feet. If you’re like me, your balance wasn’t great in the first place.

This is our world. Somewhere between to the iron law and the golden rule. A permaculture garden and an industrial hothouse. Still perfectly captured by Johnny Cash’s music. I can now appreciate how his music aged well, and not so well.