Jack Spratt

120816 01:11 why

. . . oh why am I awake this time?

I remember doing the samba with Joanne and then the sequence begins all over again ending with, not seen but imagined, her crushed broken comatose dying. The result of a drunk running over her car with a truck around Thanksgiving. Her children came to the door spontaneously and I cannot remember what I said. Or whether it was I or Susan they sought. Later Bob the husband and father asked, "How do I repay the kindness of the community?"

"Repayment it is not required, just pass it forward. Was there a "please"? 

Too many have I lost those I loved and still remember in prayer awakening in the odd hours after a moment or hour of rest and wonder why . . . and then . . . what can I do to make it better? And then I see the many facets of consciousness, a mind racing between the trackless void above starry or not in the night or the blue dome above with the night beyond the cloak of Mary -- day. 

At lunch yesterday with M the first in too long at time seeming months long yet not possibly more than fourteen days. And I've changed and scarcely know my new self now telling her we are the last of our generation who by common experience knew the totality of reality and how little I trust those who've never had chicken shit between their toes to which she said, "I prefer mud." 

I prefer bracelets to skull caps or pointy mitered reminiscent of inquisitional attire badges of authority and had given M one from the mountains of Tibet where the Nuns have been immolating themselves in protest the Chinese occupation.

She did say she preferred pebbles to gem stones. Something I'd written about unknowing whether she reads me or not!? And at that this bracelet was the second piece of jewelry after another from Darfur made by children and their widowed mothers from mud. 

In poverty now that which to them who made the jewelry would be wealth beyond imagining I give forth what I can for the children to follow us . . . not telling her I'd given Wikipedia two hundred fifty dollars; more than NPR even when I had the wealth mom left evenly divided between my sister and I.

I know the future short or long will be for them to deal with; the children need an education that we all belong to one another. 

Is that why I write?

or

"I dare say I am compelled, unconsciously compelled, now to write volume after volume, as in past years I was compelled to go to sea, voyage after voyage. Leaves must follow upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being truth itself, is one—one for all men and for all occupations." --Joseph Conrad  

Today I will lunch with Walt Whitford, a fellow Rhode Islander, who knows my love of seafood. We both know there will be none from the soon dead seas.

Be well -- I learned from Bob -- and beloved be Beloved of God -- I learned from the author. 

Amen

© 2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved