“Make it simple, but not simpler.” - Albert Einstein. I feel good for doing something, like riding my bicycle each morning along the same route, not really exploring but seeing more and more each day. Perhaps it is like that with families, i don’t know because the “terms of endearment” for my own family required a fealty, i feel is insulting to my soul. I accept full responsibility for my decision and so live a life outside the bosom of belonging - it is so painful that just now i will interrupt this work to post Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” on the nazi utility - fb (i treat it more like a note in bottle, than any actual communications channel)· Hank was born on my birthday, and i was born on his birthday the year he died. My oldest brother once found a catsup bottle sealed with wax and a note inside petitioning a rescue by any Chinese Prince who found the bottle which washed up on the shores of Honeyman State Park, OR - 1960·something· after having been launched from a bridge over the Columbia River by a 13 year old, or so girl and her younger brother 70 or some years earlier.
As luck would have it, our family was camped next to another family who lived near the town with the bridge from which this catsup bottle was tossed into the Columbia River - when they returned they did some researched and discovered the 80 year old, or so woman who recalled the event, and who was astonished to find, rather than some Chinese Prince coming to her rescue, it was a post pubescent teenager from Orange County California with a sharp eye in the driftwood piles left from a tidal wave some years earlier who had discovered her “message in a bottle.” I could give a fuck if you believe this, for it is shared for no other reason than to confirm the “synchronicity” of a world we are about to be chased out from by a handful of amoral sociopaths with nothing more than profit on their minds to show for it - that my friends is sad beyond all meaning and definitions one might find in a world with very little but sad to explain its short presence in paradise.
So sad that the same brother in this story won’t address me to my face for the pain he cleaves to in his heart from an open-hearted discourse in the presence of our sire, which i understood to be for no other reason than a “clear the air, encounter” but for which he apparently found nothing useful in my gut-wrenching disclosure of the pain i felt from having been his next younger brother · nor is this discussion meant to be a come on con for us to be friends. I am hearing the farmer father next door working with his son to teach him how to build a bamboo door, and my heart is full. Not because the better part of my day was with the feeling of tears welling up behind my eyeballs with no place to go, but because my friend the farmer and his son have a chance at reconfiguring a world gone haywire and for all the loneliness i might be feeling - the reality is i sit very close to the very best our world has to offer.
We all do - that is what i learned from my father when i would whine to him about my misery · “everyone is feeling a similar suffering” he would say to me, and in the next breath he would point to a glass of water and ask the confused waitress to put her finger in the glass for him. When she’d ask “why” his reply was - “because it is not ‘sweet enough’.” We are each other’s keepers and i do not know how to convey to my own brother - “i am not damaged from your cruelty, i am damaged from my own cruelty - please be kind to yourself.” Time is short, and i find it a challenge to ride my bicycle, time and again over the same route, as though i might develop more patience or see greater meaning in my journey. I’m beginning to suspect, just as pop had pointed out “everyone is suffering” that everyone is searching for meaning that is right in front of them.
As my friends the farmers close up their life door, and the son has an experience to reflect on the rest of his life, i can hope for all who read these feeble phrases - there is meaning all around you, and our world is rich with purpose. It is not going to be found in the tiny screens beseeching you for your hard-earned attention, but in each moment you can find to share with your parent or your progeny. Each of us has a right to be at peace, and if you cannot make peace for another - the very least you can do is to work tirelessly at not depriving peace from another, be that someone who has deliberately and maliciously maligned or harmed you to the very core of your being, or to own the damage done to you by those you have relied on for support only to find an empty embrace or vacant place in your own heart you must take possession of or relinquish agency.
jts 15/06/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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