the almost unbearable lightness of being in time

Everything still feels really intense right now, as if I had been walking around in my sleep, and suddenly woke up and opened my eyes for the first time. Everything still feels fragile, but in this really beautiful way where I can take each moment for what it is and then let it slip through my fingers like grains of sand. Yesterday when I was walking home from work I was looking at the sunlight breaking around the passing clouds and falling through the leaves of the trees, and the joy I felt at being alive and witnessing this was indescribable. It was filled with sorrow too, in not being able to hold onto it, but for perhaps the first time I was able to look at that first hand and be able to bear it. To paraphrase Castaneda in Journey to Ixtlan, the art of being a warrior is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive. To be able to look at all the things we have lost along the way, and all the things we can not control now and in our futures, and to smile at this though tears threaten to break in every moment. Because that's all we can do.

I don't know why I have always been obssesed with change, with the finality of endings and the unexpected unknowns of beginnings. Maybe because that's really all we can percieve in this world, the small differences from one moment to the next, and how our own actions are inextricably tied in with the world around us. As Octavia Butler put it in The Parable of the Sower "All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change." Permanance is an illusion, our experience is one of coming togethers and falling aparts. And admittedly that can be a frightening thing to try and recognize head on. Maybe it's because I grew up in a dysfunctional family near the dysfunctional city of Washington DC, reading too many myths about the apocalypse and noticing too many of the tragic endings that accompany living near the country's psychotic center of government. Certainly things have only gotten worse there as time goes by. It looks the same on the outside, but it is falling apart day by day. Hell, even our bodies are falling apart on a daily basis, the skin cells shluffing off and collecting in the corners of our rooms as dust. Thankfully our bodies regenerate, at least until they don't anymore. Our society doesn't seem to be blessed with that ability, and has been rotting away since they wrote up the Constitution.

"Things fall apart, the centre can not hold." (Yeats)

I used to lie awake at nights as a child and imagine what it would feel like to be dead. The utter horror of it was that I realized I couldn't imagine not being able to feel anything. So I put it away somewhere and tried to forget that one day I too will end.

In the one year I attended college I took an honors class called "thanatos: the many meanings of death", which looked at how death is one of the biggest taboos of our culture, utterly played down and yet we are desensitized to its overexposure in the media. There is no mourning and no learning process for our dead and how to face it in our own lives. And if we were to learn to face it for what it is we might be able to take our own lives head on and live them literally as if the next moment might be our last. Because it just might. Beyond asking us to keep a journal of our emotional content, which was the point when I started writing regularly, our teacher also said that if we are doing something in our lives that doesn't make us happy then we shouldn't be doing it. Even if being in class right then was boring, and we felt we had much more exciting and worthwhile things to do at that moment, then we should get up and walk out of class and go do them.

To paraphrase Castaneda again:` I insisted that to be bored or at odds with the world was the human condition. "So change it." he said "if you do not respond to that challenge you are as good as dead."

And so I did, and walked out of going to school and living in Dead City as well. I can't say I've spent every day of the five years since then living my life fully, and there have been some major periods where I was most certainly not happy and didn't try to walk out of it because of some illusion of stability, but looking back now I can't say that a single moment has really been boring. I think I made a pact with myself that day when I stood up from the table and said I'd be much happier going down to the river with my guitar than sitting in class that I would try and never be bored again. That life is too short and too sweet to not live it passionately and intentionally. Why else do I believe in magic and hopeless romance, and play music without ever recording it, and write so many stories and poems, and wander aimlessly at night watching the stars, and do all the things that are there to be done and give my life meaning and fulfillment? Even walking down the street from work has to be packed full of the utmost feeling, because I am there feeling it, and may not be again. The wind on my cheeks and rustle of leaves in my ears could be just that, but it can also be the sighs of the world knowing that it too is falling apart and moving on, and my acknowledgement that this transience is almost too beautiful to bear. But just enough that I can blink back the tears from the corners of my eyes and laugh.