Three years later

 In the season of eternal status, where spring would always give way to summer in the most predictable ways, as it was in the 1920s, the 40s, the 60s, and here today in 78, it did not seem to change. I got off the bus that came down the hill every day, and I knew what to expect. 

The summer pressed on. Inside of me however an awakening was underway. I could tell that behind the summer music, things were never going to be the same. A bouncy and complex jazz run had laced the airwaves and it boasted sharpness. There were signs that time was moving, which also meant that changes were in the wind. 

The late summer movies gave way to the atmosphere of the fall background. The smell of new clothing, and paper, and the hum of fluorescent lights overhead in a building constructed in 1906 gave way to gravity that could never be denied. In a moment you can learn so much about yourself. 

As the leaves changed color, we were mobile again for the first time in two years. The freedom brought about uncertainty. As I look back on this, I realize that this was a small example of a phobia that could return to me in 1991 and in 2022. Sometimes it takes a long time to find the answers to your questions.

I woke up, and things were new. I was new. I was in control now. I was viable and it was great and weird at the same time. In only 4 seasons such as this one, things would be more different than anyone, anywhere could ever imagine.

Three years later, we are on the 36-month merry-go-round. Everything always looks the same. But somewhere on the piano keys in the smoke-filled VFW hall, the player makes a fatal slip of the hand, and a wrong note echoes off into the night. With that, there is a shockwave promising change we did not see coming or even could have imagined. It will look like freedom for sure. It will write books and songs and people will be born. But it is not freedom, it is worse than death, and we will live to regret it.

Three years after this, on a subzero morning, reality is stifled for a moment and my brain even paints what I think I should see. Suddenly, the parachute opens and tears me back from my manufactured vision, forcing me to see how unfair the world is. Innocence notwithstanding, crushed you will be whether you deserve it or not. There it is, my ride is here.

The bridges of the Intercoastal Waterway slap the tires in rhythm with the music and the hot summer breeze. Everything is different. There is sand in my bed and sand in my dreams. There will never be a feeling like the one I feel now. Never. Here there will be nothing but bridges and they are everywhere. I would never trade this for anything. 

And then three years later, the sun rises over the severity of the Adirondacks and I see it as if it were my first time ever. I start the days slowly, resuming what the bitter cold day took from me back in 84, but soon, my impulse takes over and I am living nothing short of an action thriller, that sometimes I lose minutes or even hours of understanding about where I am or what I am doing.

Raw survival instinct kicks in and coupled with the life I have lived the last three years, I know I have something rarely ever imparted to anyone. The ride gets faster and more wild; that is when we jump and succeed. It is a new day and that is good, but things turn dark the following year and I find myself out on the fringe again, more than ever now.

It has been three years since I journeyed north, and it was time to go south again. The things you do when you have completely lost yourself and your mind. It was here that I was destroyed at the wall of creation in a violent blast! Rage coursed through me and revenge was all I could think of. But as the hours passed, I knew it was all me. The ride had to stop here and now, and somehow, it did. Big painful changes had to be made. There were so many of them. Some still hurt today.

What happened next defies who I am and yet defines who I am too. The one thing that I feared the most, the one thing I never did, denounced, and would never be a part of, I accepted, embraced, and watched it unfold like a novel that I was reading and not actually living in.

Three years later, Neil Young's Harvest Moon came out and in the notes of the music, I could feel that everything up and around the bend, was about to change. It changed in a very big way, forever. 

It was a very dark day three years later, standing at the bedside of my father learning that time was up, this was all we would have. It wasn’t right but it was happening anyway. The days that followed were even darker, I was sure I would never see the light of day.

Three years passed and I found myself in a whole new life despite not moving from where I stood. It was timeless and daring. Voices came in over the stratosphere warning that the end of everything was coming. We could never make it back. Suddenly I woke up in a dark parking lot, music was playing and change was in the air. As soon as I heard the music, I knew.

Three years later, Warren was gone, Johnny was gone too and I had a beautiful son. Everything was new and it made everything else that came before seem like it had all been a movie that I had been watching in a dark theater on a sunny afternoon. 

Three years later, there were two beautiful boys in my life. It kept getting better. Late in the year, affliction came knocking. Undiscovered country to navigate, to fight, and to survive.

Three years later, I sat in the hospital reading Are You My Mother to Noah hundreds of times, praying that he would be able to read it too someday. I walked the basement of the hospital with Liam exploring, spending time with him, hoping that soon we could be together again.

Three years later everything changed in the war. Where we were stationed, and how we were equipped. New normal. 

Three years later I am still climbing out of the mire of a life lived in a defensive posture. Never figured it out but I knew where to go.

Three years later I got perspective on the trails. I was starting to learn that discomfort is a diploma and one we should not deny. The biggest trial was coming. 

Three years later I fell on the dying grass that was recently only lush and green. I could not get up and I could not move. Everything that I was got turned upside down and spilled all over the ground. I did not know how to put everything together. A spaceship descended from the sky, and a woman got out and lifted me to my feet. She looked at me and asked, what would you do if you were not afraid?

Three years later I am sitting here writing this. I never noticed this unique rhythm that has played out here. Some days, I feel like I have come a long way. Other days I feel like I have not moved in 30 years.

Simple complexities of perspective

As I sit here with the Monday morning coffee I know there are many choices ahead this week. How deep will you invest every moment? How richly can you live? Being here now is a strange journey into surrealism. I know that when I put my ear to the track leading down to ancient lands, there were vibrations. I knew they were there.

Photo by Kulile M on Unsplash

It is hard in some ways to make things happen, on the other side I have such fight and an endless supply of energy in me, my days and nights can be filled with such richness. Distraction like time is a great predator and the one that I know. Scream! Go ahead scream! Do something that clears the debris from the path of travel!

Sensory variables find me stuck in 1971, 1976,1980, 1984. What is back there that holds the key to today? Below the surface there is a need to primally scream, to shake everything back into its proper seat. The time is here to kick it out. I have pulled over on a desolate road.  If I could see it, I would see it now., but I can see for miles and yet see nothing.

It is about this time that I wonder if my debris of yesterday, is the same debris I am raging inside to get cleared away from my path. It is laughable that there should be so much wisdom so far back, really. Sometimes you think you got it, when you really have nothing at all.

My friend and poetic storm of the north said at one time, "And the dealer wants you thinking that it's either black or white, thank God it's not that simple..." I dare say that it is and yet it is not. Herein lies the need for depth and commitment, and most of all, letting go of old ideas.

The puzzle gets solved when you simply change the viewpoint at which you are standing. The strife disappears as Jack writes the letters at the bottom of the page, tears them up into little pieces and allows them to make the sense they do.

Don't fall asleep

 There is a waste that I always lament. It is a cycle in which I cannot break free. It is there just as the seasons of the year are, and yet, it eludes me, taunting and mocking. Tied to my chair I watch the light rise out of the east sky and set on the west hill. Another day's lack of energy spent. Elle, I am trying to remember, but honestly friend, what does it take? It is no wonder society hides behind the fiction that ends on simple yet impossible resolutions. The goal of that is so much easier to achieve.

Photo by Megan Nixon on Unsplash

Right here and now, some things can be done that cannot be done later. Like a mantra,  I need to know that. 謝九星, I know you know, it is like watching a spectacular crash in painful slow motion. You know where it goes and there is nothing you can do. I am too angry to settle for this, and my friend, I wish that you were too. 

Every moment is an example. Last week I learned of the deaths of friends I knew long ago. 30-something years ago, they were very much a part of my life. They were fine people. They have been gone for some time now, and here today I remember them. Their lives seemed like warm summer days. That is how it is anyway, isn't it? I know I don't know much about how they had been in their last years, so I can only imagine. 

That growling clock on the wall. It echoes throughout my life. It is more permanent than the persistent sound of the cicadas that sound off in my head every hour of the day and night. In the style of a drill sergeant, I want to stand before my meager self and scream in my face to just do more, just do something!

Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, come on!  It is happening. Just like that. Don't fall asleep. Don't you dare fall asleep!

An unforeseen honor

 It was cold and dark in the dawn of days that I did not know would go on. I knew that summer days would come again, and these were new because until just weeks earlier, we were told that they would not. We were told that the world as we knew it, was over.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

As the final summer passed, I listened to warnings coming in from the sky and fortified my position. Every move I could make to prepare would only temporarily hold me, in the long term, if what they were saying was true, I would be swept away anyway. I tried not to think of it that way, because if I did, it made my efforts seem like a waste of my last days.

As I watched the clock, the new day began in Kiribati, the eternal land of tomorrow. Hardly a test considering a land that boasts the only one to exist in all 4 hemispheres. But, then Te Araroa, Byron Bay, Tokyo, Busan, and as the hours passed, yes here. There was a year ahead, after all, many of them! What would we do? What will happen? The sun began to rise and everything was filled with great hope.

To this day, as to the events in the world that have taken place since, I look at the aftermath and wonder if we won or lost that day. That however was different from what I was thinking about though. Our magnificent human tendency to become self-absorbed once again took over and left the deeper cuts of the world behind. In doing so, I rushed into an indiscriminate building and found myself outside the facade that we live in.

With so many intense points of self-absorption firing around me, I found treasures within the treasure, and of course, did not know it. In that, I learned about a warrior. Yet she was just one of us. If you looked closely, she had all the strengths and qualities we could ever want ourselves. She was a model of using those strengths, selfless, unsuffering, and bold. The warrior, was just there, with us, like she always was, is now, and always will be.

With all her honor, she guided and protected a village that no man could measure. She loved her life, always knowing, always sure, never wavering. Always moving forward, never visibly adjusting to the limitations slapping us all. She never broke stride, never let us down. We knew but, did not know, that she was raising and teaching us all. 

Just as it comes to pass for all of us and the great people before us, time, the predator calls for an accounting that none of us can pay. Our beautiful warrior even walked through this final storm with unparalleled grace. The finest brand of defiance is certainly a true and full heart.

It is only right that all those she loved be with her, never wavering, always there, never letting her be unaccounted for. It is something she’s always been. To be such a beautiful leader by the love in one's heart is a unique thing and one that is not widely taught. This was always her goal. She would never be left alone, for what she gave us would take years to understand and even then, how could we completely?

As she closed her eyes for the last time she knew that for all of those she left behind, they knew she was only sleeping. In a moment awareness will come and she will know where she is. Sleep well, our beloved warrior, you taught us well.

This is a hard piece for me to write. It reminds me of all of the people I have taken for granted in my life. We can be blessed in all the important things and still be clueless until a reckoning comes. I keep asking myself why, but my answer never seems to come.

All I have is what I had in the past to ponder and glean from hoping I apply it in her honor tomorrow. I still desire to listen to her tell me a thousand stories, because her heart is in all of them. There is boldness and great wisdom. It is about this time that I realize, the stories are in all who were there for her at the end of the day and scattered throughout the land. This is her story, this time, I need to be present.

The music starts to slow down and the house grows oddly quiet. A barrier in time weakens, allowing the passage across a line that is usually impossible to cross. The night we could never have imagined has arrived. What has happened in the last few months will take years to understand. In the end, we are thankful. Our warrior taught us so much and will keep teaching us because that is who she was.  Each of us in our own way will do our best to live up to how hard she worked, never wavering, always there, honoring her.

Things learned in a crash landing

 Is it a slow learning? 

Is it worse? 

Are you futile?

 Was failure already achieved? 

Do you learn?

Where are you?

Are you standing on the threshold as the sun rises or sets?

Who are you?

Why are there more pieces after cleanup time?

Why are you asking questions?

...

But I don't have the time that I used to.

There has never been a better time to let intensity shine like it burns inside. Time to make it all as fast and strong as it really is. Wherever I am, I am here, and with it, I am everywhere I want to be and can be. On March 4th, 1985 I sent a message forward, but it was so hard to understand. So many pieces had to be assembled to get here.

Photo by Thomas Tucker on Unsplash

Swinging the hammer with the full range of motion, driving through the walls of the opposers who live to sabotage everything as far as the eye can see. But there is an undeniable truth that defies the faulty reasoning that have held me south of doubt. Yes, my arrival unorthodox, split into streams of time and like words that hold fast backward and forward in time, is still unfolding and I realize how foolish it has been to resolve that what I have at any point, how short sighted.

When I came through the gateway, I was dropped to the ground. Everyone was looking at me and pleased I was there. Where I landed seemed very random, as I hear the voices in the under current, I realize, this was exactly where I needed to arrive. Obviously, there is a true mission within the portal that brought me here. If I was not giving full attention to where I am, and I continue to ask questions, I need to do nothing except shut up and listen. 

There was a man, who was given so much, and for a time, failed to show proper appreciation for what he had. I would not want to be that, ever. When the weight of the gravity in this day pushes down on me, I defy it. Yes, even my anger has a place. How incredible. How perfect. How surprising to me. As I contemplate this, stop and look at me track behind me, I see it is making a difference. As I look forward, so it is there too.

It would seem that asking for definition has happened with a great answer. The question is, am I listening? There is always immeasurable worlds to learn, even when the arrival appears to be a crash landing.