...paintosee...
...thoughts during a weekend spent working…
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.”
-Carl Jung-
In every piece of me I feel a piece of me.
I stretch and press purple latex into a millimeter gap atop of a fourteen foot ladder. My fingers have been slipping all day, transforming into maroon blisters and salted stinging stab holes. My hands and lips are chapped and dry, dusty spit on my tongue, scraped skin spiking across my desert palms.
The work is good.
It is hour four of what should be a twelve hour day. I twist two steel circles into the holed pole and feel the tiny ridges of two inch screws on my fingers. My feet squish sweaty into a pair of tightly tied peeled leather hiking boots, holding my heaviness against the ladder’s top rung.
The work is honest.
My age is showing in creaky spaces. When I stroke my prickled graying beard it's follicles flick into my finger cuts. Each tiny painful poke is a small reminder of a push too hard, a missed hit, an awkward rub on splintered wood.
The work is physical.
My lumbar pulses into overstretched gluteus pulling on too tight hamstrings tied to squeaky knees holding a pair of calves dense with strong tension. My left thumb toe has a twingey crunch from when I dropped a hammer on it right before water break. My mind makes any pause in action a reflection on what is hurting me.
The work is valuable.
There is a charley horse braying on my right elbow tip, sciatica sneaking a smoke a foot length up from my ankle, and my eyes welling tears to relieve their allergic itching. I push on my push spots for relief. I scratch my scratchy scratches. I suck on my oww.
The work hurts.
It makes me feel real. Physical labor is a mindfulness hack. I could be on a mat breathing self realization, mental relaxation. Awake on top of the scaffold, hands pressed holding objects I can’t let go of my awareness and focus are equally present.
Present in all my parts. Present in all my pains. I talk to the ouch.
“How do you do, numb shoulder?”
“What’s your name again, twisted pounding space, lower left back?”
There are places I haven’t touched in years touching me.
“Hey hairy, come here for a second.”
“When you’re not busy screwing around I want to talk to you.”
The pain lingers. I’ve got the leftovers in my body fridge. Frozen me-steaks. Pickled pieces of aching. Sore sausages next to trays of tenderness.
The work is nourishing.
I twist another screw into another hole. I knock another nail into the slab and stare across the hazy hall. I see hundreds of hands hurt and hanging onto objects they can’t let go of either. My head pulses and my awareness asks that I attend to my memories for a moment.
The tallest ladder I ever climbed went three stories high and helped me paint a stranger’s house camelback orange. My fingers press play on a boombox. Smoke drips from my lips, kissed paper holding spicy rolled tobacco scrap. I spent a summer getting paid to paint. Walking ladders up walls inhaling burnt relief, daydreaming poetry to write at night. My head angled resting on the end of an old style soaked couch. My fingers pinched on a pen scribbling us to sleep.
The work is art.
It might make a good painting, a painting of my painting. The pain of my present is a memory of my past. I originally mistyped that and wrote paint. And that’s true too. The paint of my present is a memory of my past as well.
The work is old.
I think about who made me. My grandpas aren’t around anymore but both were men. Army type men. Navy type men. They knew pain also.
One worked every stage of a meat processing plant, from kill to stuffing blended dead meats into their own casings. He painted planes in the military. When he finally slept his last sleep he had new knees and hips. His eye had been stabbed out by his brother. He drank until his family wouldn’t let him anymore. He had pains I never knew but that I continue to think about. At the bar my teetotal finger cuts rest on a table next to another man’s cold whiskey. It feels related. Did he make me or am I just painting this remembrance?
My other grandpa passed away when my mom was a child. He drew comics, wrote bawdy poems, and was loved so hard his hole never left the hearts of his wife and daughters. I know him as a chasm. An idea. A thought. A dream. Parts of my creativity are inherited from somewhere in his hands. Something funny he wrote might become a word here. I want to paint in his hat. I want to laugh in his story. I imagine we share the hurt of having never known each other.
The work is almost done.
My mind feels better when my body hurts. It forgets about itself. It remembers all of the pieces. I turn the final screw for this side panel. Padded sport bandages wrap on three different finger tips. They don’t cover blood at this point, just the pain. The tighter they squeeze the easier to forget what made me hurt.
This job will take four days to finish, and two to break apart, wrap up, tuck away. Then for a year it hides out stuffed in a nail tight crate in a lightless garage. Vampirically it rises for our hands to touch, break, cut and scrape on again.
The work is finished.
I’m resting at sunrise on a day break between jobs and in the midst of a migraine I slowly breath myself to sleep. The pain will leave me in a few days. I will ignore it now. And someday I will paint the memory of this work.
Fis...you are the work.
Such good writing... a small excerpt that shows just how good and constantly getting better of a writer you are: "My lumbar pulses into overstretched gluteus pulling on too tight hamstrings tied to squeaky knees holding a pair of calves dense with strong tension." Loved this.
Also couldn't agree more on point of physical work being a mindfulness hack. As a knowledge worker, I spend much of my days on a keyboard. But when I'm in the kitchen or garden or helping with my hands, life feels slower, more full, more real. Physical work is not just a mindfulness hack, but a hack for a better life.