life

As far as it goes, so far, life is indecipherable. Common as air, or the dust from which we came and stand upon. Knowable only in the sense we define it for ourselves as either good or ill. Suffering is inevitable but from it we grow. Awakening from agony making gold of common lead.

Of myths, portents and omens I’ve had many. Ever vigilant towards the chaos of my parents behaviors, I became a journalist. At first merely recording the surface events of collective and personal history. A helpless witness to the time we inhabit. It was not until now that I began to understand that the journal I keep of my transmutation from victim to what?

The rest period behind me was annotated with a quiet sense of these closing days, then hours within the shelter I once considered home; the only ‘home’ that was mine, first and last. But my true home is myself, obviously moving forward toward a synthesis apparent, rendered clear by every sense within me, save the fears that I wring out hourly. Well past the apogee of my lifetime swiftly descending towards the abyss I am learning to fly.

While fabricating the above paragraph I remembered a swimming hole over which I train once passed, the tracks and bridge long gone. The buttress remained from which I, once-in-a-while, would leap, naked into a pool filled with youth of a range and gender astonishing to me now. Laughing they taunted me into it, now glad they did.

“All learning has an emotional base.” - Plato

“Familiarity breeds contempt”

. . . save in this instance, it is my familiarity with my life as it had been and now expected going forward. To stay would be to die. To go forward will be to die to my stasis . . . There was, for a time, a sense between us, Pam and I, that I might stop writing. Disproved during my two weeks with her in Vermont by the continuity of my manic cyclic sleep. Up shortly after midnight and writing for a time, collecting quotes as well; cross pollination of a sort coupled with affirmation of dream content. I sense change in what I write and how; more deeply personal, sincere and less didactic.

07:03

Exhausted I return to bed humming with concerns over what is next: items and artifacts, go—no go. Alarmed that I may have missed an important Annie Dillard book. Unable to sleep. I lay semi conscious and then arise to flog the keyboard again. Realizing the effort, writing, has become a life ring in the chaos of my life. This time is traumatic and unexpected. But then I realize had it not happened, sooner or later, I would be found dead before my computer.

During the night an ambulance raced into and up the complex; a frequent occurrence. My neighbors seem, by gossip, to celebrate that I am going, not to the hospital, undertaker, or assisted living; but to a new life. My age seems to have crept up on me announced in many small and large ways. Significant, difficult, but not impossible, yet.

130625 MDT 06:28

I am oddly aware that when Pam says she loves me it’s the real-deal. In so many times past the love others gave seemed conditional and I would distrust their statements. Not the source but the listener, since I had no clue what it is like to love one’s self; until this morning. The trauma of this move, one amongst too many, has wrung out my fears. Latent from childhood and now I will go forward fearless, clean, newly reborn, defined and confident.

130624 MDT 01:03 life

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved