Along for the ride

It has been a while since I have read anything challenging. You know what I am talking about. Someone out there who puts thoughts and words on paper that just grab your eyeballs, yanks your neck towards to screen and pours like acid into your brain, all while generating questions, informing you and making you re-examine your own perception and fundamental acceptance of life as you know it.

I have to confess, it has been a while since I wrote anything here that I would find challenging to myself. I know that life has different seasons and rhythms, the patterns that we all fall into with our schedules, work and social activities have a way of lulling into a certain sort of mental complacency. While this at times might be comfortable and soothing, it is the times of self discovery, or the seeing of the "other" that can fracture that thin shell of normalcy and open our eyes and minds to something completely different or formerly unknown to us.

Something I realized at the moment, is that I am speaking on the collective tense while actually, to be more accurate and polite, I should relate these words and thoughts to myself individually. Perhaps you are all living on the scintillating edge of discovery each and every day and find your lives too full of new possibility to search out the unknown, confusing, mysterious and noisome spectacle that is occurring all around us at every single moment of our existence. I find that a bit improbable, but I can accept that possibility.

At times, it a movie that can grip us. A story told in words, pictures and music that moves us and make us rethink our world view, examine our own choices and imagine the possibility of circumstances, lives and concepts completely out the frame of our own limited experiences. For me, I find these mini-epiphanies movies, in books, while listening to new music, in nature out of doors while exploring or camping and in the daily activities that I turn to while not working or being engaged with people. I would say, by and large, that they are events that happen when I am by myself. Maybe in the silence that is created in the absence of others, a space is hollowed out to let me truly hear myself and authentically hear the "other".

My life is changing again. Somewhat more rapidly than I am comfortable with, but isn't that always the case? All growth brings with it some type of pain. While the largest event initially may seem to be the car wreck of last week, looking back over the last year has shown me that I am undergoing another sort of metamorphosis into the next chapters of my story. My priorities are changing. I can see my social groups becoming different as my interests move over the vast sea of choices that is available to us. The names, faces, phone numbers, activities and places I spend my time and effort and once again shifting. Over the course of my life, I have become used to this rising and falling of tides. I cannot begin to list here quickly all the different versions of me that have come and gone in different spaces and places. Looking back it all seems incredibly too much to have packed into my relatively short life thus far, but I would not change one day of it. All of those life experiences, relationships, discoveries, travels and endeavors have made me into the complex though simply motivated person that I am today. I think the largest difference that I notice these days is that I am no longer trying to hold onto my past and force today to be in some way similar to the ones that have past. A dear friend once put it best in an old worn post card that he mailed to me from another coast and ocean in this world. He wrote,"Be as a hollow reed on the shore of that just tossed upon pond and let your life flow through you, like the wind."

I am slowly beginning to understand what he meant on that day, so long ago. I still have that postcard. I still have everything ever written to me.

These are all just rumination and thoughts in my head at the moment while I listen to some beautiful music as the sun sets over the trees to the West. It has been a while since I considered myself. It is a good habit to be in. I am looking at two days off of work and I have decided I will fill them with the things that I love and enjoy. They will be solitary days. I will read, play piano, listen to music, spend time out of doors, walk, drink coffee and watch the people pass me by. I think I am trying to tell myself something. I sense it. I just need to become quiet enough to listen and to hear. I'll be in touch.

daemon