Pulling my head out of the now,
and just like that- the sun comes out.
Why am I here?
Experience is what it’s about,
Happiness, sadness, hope and doubt.
What’s it all for?
Love and fear, pleasure and pain
Would you appreciate the sun if there was no rain?
Would joy exist if suffering did not?
Do we needs these comparisons to know what we’ve got?
Haha, ah, poetry still isn’t really my thing, but it could be, so I’ll keep working at it.
So I've been thinking- what is the greatest thing about this plane?
For me it truly is experience- and I don’t cherry pick these days. I don’t think that only the 'good' is worthwhile. A world like that would be boring for me, lackluster. Maybe some people signed up for this play without knowing what they were getting into. I don’t believe that’s true for me. I think I knew exactly what to expect in terms of what we all consider ‘bad’. So I have a responsibility to myself and everyone I touch to be grateful, even in the midst of terror.
When I take a ride on my memory train I’m bombarded by sensations and emotions. It seems to me that most people tend to remember things in the third person, while I can put myself there in the first. For example, my cousin recalls that once upon a time we would roll down grassy hills. But when he describes it, it’s very much like describing a scene from a movie he saw long ago. When I go back I can recall the way the grass felt, the dampness of it when it was morning or the soft warmth in the afternoon. I remember how sometimes it was a scratchy texture while others more like satin. I feel the tumble, a little pain, and the complete and joyful abandon of letting gravity take me with no resistance. I lie at the bottom laughing uncontrollably before flipping onto my feet to race up and do it again. And I remember the smell and how I felt.
And this is so for any point of my past I put my focus on.
Some of that past was extremely painful, both physically and emotionally. During these painful times, particularly early on, I was much like everyone else, thinking that a world without such pain would be a place of bliss.
But there came a time where this mentality changed within me. Because I also experienced great joy and great love, great happiness and ecstasy, and understood that without their ‘negative’ counterparts they couldn’t exist, at least not in the same way. Everything on this plane requires a balance right to the ultimate of life and death. Perhaps laughing uncontrollably would still be fantastic if you’d never cried your guts out, but I really don’t think you could fully appreciate it, if you could even appreciate it- what would be the measurement?
When I came to this we were living in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, having decided to ‘drop out’ for a year. For three years prior to that my husband ran a big business in Florida, a very lucrative one. For a time we, particularly myself and my children, were so spoiled that going out to an expensive restaurant had become routine. So routine that we’d find ourselves taking a few bites of a fifty dollar plate before realizing we weren’t even that hungry and pushing the plate aside. My daughter’s room looked like every child’s fantasy, complete with a five foot tall gumball machine, a claw machine, a candy machine, and the list goes on.
My husband was on a fast track to burn out, and long story short- we gave it all up. Transferred the business to his cousin, bought a camper and leased 20 acres of land on the top of a mountain that was nine miles from the nearest house. We had money in the bank, but because of the lavish way we were living it wasn’t a great deal. Enough though for the building materials of an outhouse, a screen tent, a trampoline for the kids and a four wheeler. Four months into this excursion I will never forget my kids and I laughing hysterically after I bit into a cracker and said “Hm, a little stale” and kept eating it- still makes me grin! Not that we were starving. But at that point we did not have money for extras like snacks. And we hadn’t laughed hysterically together in a long time before the mountains, we operated almost separately for those years of plenty with our state of the art electronics among other things.
That year in the mountains was hard, in terms of work- everything we did required a lot of effort, from cooking to bathing…and it was the greatest time of our lives. So much freedom, and so much togetherness. Bonfires every single night, with my husband the bard entertaining us while we roasted a single marshmallow- and the sky full of stars and close enough it seemed we could climb a tree and touch them…
When we returned to NY we found a balance between the two worlds. But Oh My God, running water! Never gave it a second thought before that year- after that year? It was like magic. In a hotel room on our voyage back to NY my daughter and I turned the faucet on and off giggling profusely, flushed the toilet more times than necessary and spent a mind altering amount of time in the hot shower just melting from the bliss. All of these things we take for granted in the states- if you haven’t done anything like what we did, you just can’t know how incredibly spoiled we are here. And at the same time we are missing out on fundamental…realness.
I think of all of this as the world remains on pause, in a state of confusion and fear, unsure of its direction. Are we heading for the next great depression where all of the luxuries we’ve taken as par for the course will become a thing of the past? Remembering that year reminds me that even if that is the case, it doesn’t have to be a terrible thing, in fact it can be glorious. Even now people are spending more time with their families then they may ever have in their lives. Is this bad? Who’s to say what is good and what is bad. Sure there is evil out there, but in terms of good and bad it really is a matter of perspective. Many would think that having to exit your shelter and make your way in the pitch black night where coyotes yipped in the distance while a mountain lion screamed just to go to the bathroom is bad. I miss it, sometimes acutely. To be that close to the God of nature, He who makes the grass green, it’s indescribable.
I’m thinking I may start writing posts about specific times and days of my life. For the reason of my grandchildren, my great children and beyond. How cool would it be if I could spend some time in the lives of my grand’s and great’s?