busy?
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 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 – have you ever flown over Afghanistan and Pakistan, witnessed the wrinkled stillness of that 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, so what I said tonight, yesterday, or the day before will just go BZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz…
What a vaguely-guided 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.