Saturday, June 17, 2017

Home


She never allowed home. Some skewed memory full of holes and misdirection pounced upon such a possibility. He continued it in subsequent generations not allowing admittance. Closed for familial business. You bit. Were sideswiped by indifference. Stayed in a state of lost. Delved for the deepest corners in search of voyage. A story told for self-flagellation.  Not caring elevated to a virtue. This was not your stance. In the beginning, it confused. Leaving, leaving, leaving. On the street corner. Oh, those times took their toll. Heartbreak almost extinguished the spirit left in you. You sought the most difficult path. In the end, you still do not know why when so much was expected of a life lived in brilliant wonderment.

The spark, though, was never fully extinguished. It burned bright that day when you resurrected yourself. A terrible incubation. How did you ever do it? Rising up to accomplishment. Battered down time and again. Some can respond in acceptance and rebuttal by never questioning or failing to be revived. Some roll over in the halls of discontent. And now, here, out on a limb, you realize you have never made home. You were always so easily interrupted. Your only mechanism a survival instinct. Effective to a point.

Now the refuge of studio is gone. Placement is good but as you peer into a burning hearth, you wonder if the life of being there is perennially somewhere else. Does it exist? Or is it something manufactured to convince. These realities shift with so much to consider. The distractions evaporate and you are left with endless questions. It is not a real fire. Not like the one in the Catskill mountains where he made a home out of heat and light. A memory from long ago nurtured for decades. There was magic in it. A comfort in the unexpected. Tentative but smooth in past tenses.



In another line of reasoning, our lives fill with junk and refuse. The world cannot hold it for much longer. Each person gathering all these things to create a home. Was it always like this? As the thieves meet behind closed doors to put more gold in the hands of the unscrupulous, we worry about our future, left on the side of the highway to lament the choices we made that lead us to this. We cannot give in to sorrow or retribution but ignoring the monsters in the counting house is not a safe bet either. So you sit with various conundrums hoping answers or enlightenment. You can scalp externals away to live in Zen deferment. That is another deflection in the form of an answer. Why must the world be seen as pure suffering? Even I know that not to be true eternally. Eternal is a damaging word. It does not exist outside a dictionary. A false premise in a world of constant change and renegotiation. 

The turning sphere brings joy and tentativeness, often in equal measure. You can create narrative to avoid all this or consider it to enrich the moments of natural transcendence. Who can believe the mind? If its mechanisms are left unanalyzed, we will believe in truths and finalities, which are nonexistent. In the stream of time nothing is lost. We track what we can and leave this world in the blink of an eye.