Ever wondered why you go through periods of feeling disoriented and clumsy? As far as you know, you have never been visited by leprechauns, but nothing is quite as you left it. Maybe you notice that you’re walking into walls. Dropping things. Reaching for a fork and instead picking up the spoon that sits right next to it.

A life transition – even diving deep into inner work on a retreat – can shake me up. Raise better questions than I’ve become accustomed to asking. Disturb the location of my beliefs and prejudices. Bring forward what has been lurking in the background.

Integrating new understandings is a physical as well as  a mental process.

It can take my body some time to catch up with this beneficial mischief.

 

Mischief-makers

by Sara Eisenberg

 

I could say “Elves,” but it’s not elves exactly,

who stole into my house late Tuesday night

to make mercurial mischief of walls and many sticks

of furniture.

Nothing is quite where I left it. As I left it.

Certitudes, laws of physics, mirrors.

I knock the orange ceramic bowl up against the blue one,

shattering its edge: the space between hand and bowls and counter has shifted a little to

the right or left.

I pick up the glass of iced tea at lunch and generously spill it over onto my blue jeans.

My shoulder and hip bump into a wall that now extends where the kitchen door on its hinges stood yesterday.

Basic math is unbruised, long division still works.

But nouns and verbs, cause and effect have gone all wavy, bobbing along and trading seats.

Assumptions, beliefs, conclusions, doubts, all

zag.

You see how things are mis-placed, the rabbits are all out of hiding?

My clumsiness, isn’t it where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Rather, say what’s left of the original owner has been given safe passage

while my entire interior fields are ploughed under.