Sip As We Might, We Thirst For The Real
Where does the yearning, that is so deep within us, come from? On the surface, we can seem happy. We can be the ones with stiff necks, starched shirts and bleached smiles and everyone can think we have found the secret. Money. Relationship. Career. Children. Religion. It can all be there.
But really, we are miserable.
Mornings at Camp IAWAH cracked out like bending, mellow, tri-colour laser beams from a distant planet. You stepped out on to the warm green grass, and you felt like you were inside of a different existence. There was something special about spending summers, there. It was something that pervades the cheapened currency of our plastic lives - Something real. The smell of white, bar soap and toothpaste in the hot washhouses.
Ducking away from the pressures and anxieties of the noisy city - and falling asleep to the rhythmic and otherworldly sound of the loons. They called and cooed about something different - something beyond our mind frame. That was really something. We connected our bones to a deep vibration from within the earth-core that shook all of us ragged.
Laughing so hard with other weary life-travelers into the deep, dark night that we went hoarse. We scrubbed chicken grease from deep, slimy kitchen-pot corners. We marched together. Innocence lost.
We even fell in love.
Time has shown up in a nattering, nervous mess. He has taken some fellow warriors along the way. And he will take some more. He looks at me, and looks at his watch, and looks away. He disappears again into the envelope of his existence.
My mission in this life, if it was ever more clear, is to blow up the clock. I want to take away the existence of Time and stick dynamite into its main gears.
But I know that I can't. Time appears and walks through my being like the invisible agents in the Matrix. And I float on in the only river that I've ever bathed in. It ties me to the banks of reality. It's slow in the winter and almost stopped, but re-filled, bubbling and rushing in the spring.
Time will take us all and we are all going to go - so why do we waste so much time with bullshit?
The very roots of us need truth to sprout into something stern - something majestic. We need the true. We need the real. We thirst for it from a place we often ignore. We plod along, form our bodies of work and we are scooped into Time's never-announced carriage.
I've lost touch with friends and I've swam in and out of so many lives. Sometimes, I am a self-involved ass. Other times, the beauty is all around me, and all too technicolour, and hitting my mind through the lens of my life so rapidly that I barely have time to keep up with its speed.
To the dead, I miss you. You know who you are. Some of you, I only knew briefly (and only in one exchange of words and humour) but I loved and revered you while I did. Others, I lost ages ago but I am still fighting for your memory. I don't want to lose you. Please find your way back to my mind. Others, I didn't know - but I knew the light you gave to others. I know I'll see you all again.
To the lost friends, I miss you too. I'm sorry for anything I ever did to be a prick or if I overstepped my bounds or pushed the humour envelope too far. I can do that. To some, I miss you a lot. You brought light to the dying, dark cracks of this universe, and I should have celebrated you more. To others, I don't miss you. You were the pricks and you just need to get off your high horses of infamy and pride, and say you're motherfucking sorry, already. But I still love you. I don't forget but I almost always forgive.
In a recent trip to see a friend who lives on a close-by lake, I had a revelation. I realized that I don't have to do everything right. I can fuck up. I can take some time to figure things out. I can step back from the pressures that I've been corralled into. I don't have to seek every answer - I just have to seek the truth.
