I haven't written so many poems. Nor have
I penned a single novel, though there is one waiting, and behind that one,
who knows?, maybe another. I have been blessed with a few songs. I used
to draw well, a lifetime ago. I am responsible for a half-carved Buddha,
who patiently waits inside a few inches of wood for some courage and deftness
of my hand. I have several recipes I created which really come out well.
I was partly responsible for a couple of beautiful kids, who are still
beautiful but hardly children anymore. I would say "half-responsible",
but in the accounting of my marriage their mother would probably not agree.
I have danced a few times with enough
grace that life flowed and left time behind. I have climbed a mountain
or two. I dove from 30-foot cliffs in northern Minnesota into 60-foot waters.
I have been around the world twice with almost the entire world not noticing
(but I noticed -- oh my goodness, have you every flown over Afghanistan
and Pakistan and seen the incredible darkness of that wrinkled land?).
I've made love enough times when it was really love, that I am happy to
have been alive. I am waiting, like the Buddha inside his block, but with
decidedly less patience, for a piece of land to build a community, so it
is easier to be still, and more fun to cook and play music. I am working
for a salary, practicing enough yoga to perhaps be "proficient",
writing words that (due to the medium employed) will sooner or later simply
vanish in a cloud of dissipating electrons, teeny bees leaving a teeny
bee convention, taking random and disconnecting paths, and what I said
tonight, yesterday, the day before just go BUZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
What a mess!
Some live a more directed life, at least
it seems they do. I tend to persevere in a general direction, but the winds
have a tendency to blow me off the previous course onto the Right one.
So, no book, no CD, no Buddha, no restaurant, no painting, no flag on Everest...
you have to wonder, if you don't throttle life but allow it to whisper
to you, whether perhaps you haven't done it quite right?
Well, it could be argued, and in reply
I would have to shrug. I guess even the ones I feel got it very darn close
to right have had to make the same difficult choices; or biologically or
psychologically or politically or geographically had those choices made
for them. I see great teachers wonder "How can you choose to have
children?", because of the demands involved in raising them. How do
you succeed if you stay engaged? How can you give 100% to the world if
85% goes to your family?
Maybe you are not successful, but still
you succeed. Maybe what I have accomplished (with so many stumbles that
I say it with all humility, knowing my unpolished surfaces too well) in
all of this wandering is a deep and still deepening love for the faces
and facets and things of this world. Then Cat Stevens was right: "Love
is better than a song", even while he lived to sing and life sent
music through him. What a mess... but a beautiful, precious, delight-filled
one.
busy?
