Life in the Shadows.

The fabric of life ... sometimes frays at the edges
and it is all the little threads that slip away from us without even being missed
are the threads that hold us together.
when there are only a few, they go unmissed.
but then there is the one that makes all the difference.

1.11.11

1.11.2011
numerologist must see something I don’t
1.11.11 must mean something. And I have been so much in my own head today that I can barely get out of it. I feel that my soul might be leaking out of my ears at some moments soon so I have retreated to the solice (is sounds corny, but it is true) of my balcony. My cat has accompanied me, as she does now, not leaving my side since I went on vacation without her. Since my return she has lots to say and we carry on lengthy, if not intellectual, conversations. But I like her company. I thrive on it ,in truth. Her subtle companionship offers more to me than I am sure she knows. And in return I feed her, although lately that seems unnecessay. She is no longer the lithe kitten of her former youth, she and her stomach have settled in to her middle age. I suppose the same could be said for me. We were made for eachother.
The dusk comes quickly after the sun touches the hills, and the air is fresh. The song of a lone insect competes with the comforting constance of the river below. Some times it rages and some times it trickles, but it is always there. I wonder what the insect wants? I can’t seem to understand them. Sex probably, what else is there? Companionship? Food? He is probably not longing for a pension plan or a higher yield investment. Nor a bigger car, a companion insect with wing implants…
Colombia is an interesting place. And it feels more like home now than any place has in a long time. I was happy in San Franciasco, but really only remember it after I stopped working. I don’t think I was healthy there, and I wasn’t happy the way that I am here. The “manana” spirit that often drives westerners crazyis medicinal. I need an injection daily of that relaxed manner of this place. I seem to be the only person I have encountered in the last two years who has ever been in a hurry.
And so the light is gone, only the glowing screen, leading my fingers to the keys they know so well. In the nightly rhythm, The chant. The church that I alone worship in, the church that I create. A barking dog. A child’s distant laugh, the horny, hungry insect drowns out the rest. I cant hear the road a ways off. I can’t hear the car alarms; I can only hear the river if I listen for it. So we are alone. The cat, the insect and I.
Night has brought me to a better place. My ears will no longer leak, my head can hold its own and my breath has returned without my even noticing its absence.
I wish I knew what that insect wanted to say.
And I wonder how long I will be content with this life.
Right now there is no where else I would rather be, but I have given up so much to be here. So much that I will never get back. And I suppose that is the nature of life and choice. I can only hope that in 20 years I can sit with this same feeling of contentedness, maybe on a different balcony and feel the night air on my skin, and look around at all that I have chosen with confidence and comfort.
1.11.23 I will be a bit older, I supose we all wil be. I wonder where I will be, who I will be. I will be 44. What a concept. Time to make dinner.
Photo credit: Marissa Hutter Cartagena, Colombia.

Where Water Takes Me.

It just so happens that when the sun shines the roads dry. And finally today the rains have stopped. While I speak literally, I wonder if it is more of a metaphor. The clouds have parted. And while the heavens have opened up and dropped all they have on us, leaving some of us wading, some of us washed away and some of us homeless, there are the few left untouched on high ground. Moral, or physical. I have rarely been on either, but I am neither floating away nor running for the hills. Slowly making my way to the sea.

Although I have always done this on my own, I have never been alone. No one ever really is. I fill my life with love in many forms and friends from all over. I wonder if there will ever be a river that leads me any where but where I have always been going. This is a river that flows as a stream past a cabin in the woods of my birth. It is the canyons of red stone where this river tumbled, carving away centuries. It is in the ponds I swam in as a child, stranded on a rock stalked by a snapping turtle. It is in the puddles I splashed in with my pink rubber boots and it is in the rain that fell so gently over me in last night's walk with my new best friend (my chocolate ice cream cone). How could that rain, so gentle and romantic rip away mountainsides, came crashing down on homes and wash away roads. It is the water in my life that guides me. When I think about the paths that I have chosen and the choices that I make, I imagine that I blaze these trails on my own. I walk these paths alone. And that I have some control over this river I am riding. Yet today, I wonder why I have taken each of these turns and why I continue to come back to some of the same streams and shores again and again.

Is it the sound the water make splashing over the rock, the way my toes are licked by the icy cold water, the silence in the dark pools under the trees where the stream bends. Or is it the sand that warms under the sun. Where ever there is water weaving and winding between soft shores, I feel at home. I was born next to a stream nearly 8 inches wide. I bathed in a river across the road, swam in ponds and looked out over a glimmering lake from the top of a hill for years. I lived along side the ocean and then by the bay. Then I ran from the mouth of the Yangtze river to follow a path that even I couldn't see. To where I now sit above a gorge that carries the rains from mountaintops to the valley below and then who knows where beyond that. It is there, in the unseen distance, around that next bend that my path lies... even if it keeps brining me back to the same places, the same places that I keep leaving.

Words on the Wind

With a hand-drawn butterfly net and leaping free from gravity the way only animation can permit I sweep and swat at nothing again and again depositing what I catch into a woven sack. With each gasp at nothingness I hold tighter the sack, for what does not exist in the wind has substance and weight in my hand.
Catching hold of what is not yet real and making it into something brings out the mother in me, inspires something that is not mine, but yet passes through me. These words on the wind, sometimes only a breeze and at others like a hurricane, wash over me, drip from my eyes and squirm down my face, tickling my cheeks. Dropping like tears for sorrows never felt and wounds never opened, when I let them, words splatter the page and run.
Capturing what is not mine, making it in my image and then releasing it into the universe with shape and form; this is the only thing that makes me feel weightless, untethered. But as I drift I am often pulled back, a tugging at my ankle, like a mythological hand from below. I am returned to my sedation. I am not sure what is more comforting, the weight of my flesh as it contacts the earth or the lightness of my breath when I slow down to breathe in the wind of the ages.

Suffocating in most moments unaware of my bulk, by power and everything, I slide from definition to definition, relation to relation, hour to hour and nothing changes while everything is stuck, but time is walking in circles around me, stalking my movements and my oblivion. Only when I breath does life really exist.
Like the butterflies in my bag, something out of nothing wrestles to be free. When my hand can no longer clench the cord that keeps them trapped safe inside, in a silent fluttering they return, invisible, to the wind where they belong, but now they are mine. Or I am theirs.
*Photo: Petra, Jordan 2010 Sierra Melcher

The Roads We ravel

Radio silence is largely due to a broken camera, because apparently I don't have anything meaningful to say without photographic evidence. Although much has happened on the logistic scale, somehow none of it seems to to really matter at this point. The choices and movements that got me to this point seem hardly worth mentioning now. What seems to be the most relevant at this moments is only the delicious and familiar sound of my fingers hitting keys. The feeling that flows through me and quiets all the internal noise as well as the constant chatter outside my window: the rushing river below and the jingle of a cat's collar that is the only thing that gives away her every movement.

With a breath, the first in months, I breathe into my every move and my every decision. The lessons of late have been unexpected which is perhaps what made each of them challenging and so rewarding in the end. Of course these are the lessons that never end.

The road of Colombia are washed out. As I prepare to travel and many of the people I love are on the move too, I wonder about the paths we travel, the choices we make and the things that really matter in making these lives of ours what they are. Each choice, each move and each risk. Even the little things are little chess moves that advance or limit our options. I have never been very good at chess, but I feel that I am making strides in this game.

May all the roads in front of you lead you safely to the next adventure and lesson. With luck we can see them for what they are and not get distracted by the things that they are not. Travel safe; love yourselves and others well.
*Not my photo (friend of a friend- cell phone pic when the buses no longer pass on roads in Colombia people are still determined to get to where they are going. And the rains keep coming.)

A few moments in the Middle East

Blank

I have seen so much... and in this moment have nothing to say about it.