Learn to Chew

Learn to Chew

There are many supposed folk-remedies for a troubled mind. You hear of fumes and drinks that shake the globe and make it sparkle for a time. But the flakes will stick again, will hold fast to the glistening floor, needing a more reckless stirring every time until it slips through your fingers and is lost. Such it the convention, as many see it.

But the mind is not made from glass, no. Rather, it is plastic: A stomach. A stomach that is stretched and expanded much too far, to the ill advice of those with fattened heads. Your eyes, your ears, swallow the world whole. Every novel concept, each new experience - and all of the turmoil in between - is served as a single course, and makes you sick. In its desperation, the stuffed gut forces the banquet lower, undigested, into the bowel. Solid and barbed, scraping and catching as it descends, causing great pain. When it comes time to pass these thoughts and volitions, the process is slow, and punishing. Words of wanting, drippings of stagnate conflict and confusion, left to dry on a thin white sheet. It is this constipation of emotions, this retentive tendency to ruminate over the wrongs and the whys that make your life seem so unappetizing.

Some will suggest you allow the belly in your skull to swell with acid; to let it corrode your nourishment with ferocious inclinations, blending everything into uniformed paste. Others will say you need only hold shut the mouths that slurp up the bitter speech and unsavory sights - to starve yourself of all things until what festers falls away to dust.

But it is best, perhaps, to merely take small bites. To savor each flavor, as though you might never taste it again. To chew and make solvent, so that every refined line fertilizes the sterile page; giving way to a bountiful new place where others may seek sustenance.

- A.T. Buesching