It is a world of wonder. The day opens thus: the clouds have cleared over Los Angeles. The sun is bright and the air is clean. The birds are singing. The squirrels are playing in the palm trees within feet of my window.
Everyday I wake up is a new day to think about what life has to offer and I am all at once terrified and enchanted.
I frantically tidied the house, put all the clothes that were stacked in my room in their correct places. I remembered to fold my teeshirts and not put things in draws that were inside out.
I have to move the car at 9am so I don’t get a parking ticket. The little dog is looking at me expectantly. We need to walk, we need to take the trash to the building dumpster. We need to go to yet another 12-step meeting and rip my heart open again and again.
I want to smoke cigarettes. I want to lay in bed and not feel. Please.
Right here, right now. That’s what John A says. Reminding me to stay right here right now. Not yesterday or tomorrow. Right here, right now.
Everything happens for a reason. Collating the artwork made me take an essential inventory. It seems that there is more value in what I own than I first suspected. The choices I made for 20 years have been good ones.
Everything happens for a reason. That’s what they say. That’s what they tell me. That’s what I have come to believe. The plan is set, the dye is cast.
I felt sickly last night, too sickly to leave the house then spontaneously decided to visit my friends Anna and Melanie. Driving through the heavy rain the little dog and I arrived in Silverlake and ate slow roasted pork, black beans, plantains and lemon sorbet. Chatted to my arty filmmaker friends and loved every minute. Drove home, lay in bed waiting for the anticipated thunder but none came.
Silverlake, Los Felis, Arcadia, La Canada, Flitridge, Brentwood, Malibu, Santa Monica, Pasadena, the map of LA unfolding like an old linen backed map in my head. The freeways, the concrete LA river, the Pacific Ocean all wrote in Indian ink.
I once owned a 17th century map of Venice that I found in a library in Dorset when I was a boy. It was folded into a marbled envelope and each painstakingly hand drawn section of that map remains engraved in my memory.
Venice stretches across 117 small islands in the marshy Venetian Lagoon along the Adriatic Sea in northeast Italy.
For a moment this morning I remembered that map and wished to be magically transported to the saltwater lagoons that stretch lazily along the shoreline between the mouths of the Po and the Piave Rivers.
When I die the various maps of many cities will be lost. I think often of that. The many and various maps of all the cities I explored that will be lost along with the smell of fresh snow, the taste of my lovers mouth, the unmistakable sound of my own childish footsteps running down warm unusual, sunlit corridors.
5 replies on “World of Wonder”
Good morning Duncan. Have you ever tried to establish a regular mediation practice? It might be something that helps to clarify things, ground you, give you peace.
Speaking of peace, and civility, I spent a day in downtown Vancouver last weekend, walking with the crowds to see the Olympic flame and some of the exhibits. Thousands of happy people surrounded me, smiling, polite, excited, and speaking many different languages. It was wonderful, the kind of thing I think it is important to seek out.
Take good care of yourself today.
That would be meditation, not mediation! although…
When we die, our maps get re-filed in the libraries of consciousness of our loved ones. If we are remembered, they are not lost.
(I posted about a poet-lifesaver, and about driving far, far away lately.)
the last paragraph grips me. the sadness of what is lost, the emptiness of death, the beauty of the simple pleasures. lovely.
I read somewhere that the more your heart opens, the more pain you feel — old pain to be released, new pain to move through like walking on hot coals — and joy, that brings tears and a heart filled with golden Light. I agree with Moira, a daily meditation practice might not be amiss. It need not be sitting and stationary. There are walking meditations.
Have you thought of drawing or painting the maps? Creating music that captures for you the smell of fresh snow or the taste of your lover’s lips? What you said reminds me of the last words of Roy Batty, played by Rutger Hauer in “Blade Runner” to Rick Deckard, Harrison Ford’s character: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those… moments will be lost in time… like… tears… in rain”. How all the amazing, unimagined, beautiful/horrible things that he’d seen off-world would die with him. “… like… tears… in rain.” Perhaps we give back to the oceans what they gave to us in our blood, the water and salt.
Blessings.