for longer thoughts

The end of summer just comes, doesn't it?  Fall remembers being well-liked, so it doesn't bother to knock.  It dims the lights on the evenings that have been running marathons into the night.  Those sunny afternoons which only give way as they hand-deliver illumination to the stars. And the stars, they're not ready for summer to end.  So they hold on to that light in a tug of war until the late fall morning uses its considerable muscle to grant the sun its purpose, albeit later, because we all know how stubborn star strength can be.

     The end of summer is a battle between freckle-salted shoulders and red-apple cheeks, slightly stung by air they didn't realize would turn cold so quickly. 

  I'm not sure why a person would worship any deity other than the Earth.  Who knows us better than she does?  What God in whose sky knows that we need the slow wind to blow a little into our lungs after a busy bee season?  After a few months of too much movement?  The birds fly lower to the ground this time of year.  The pressure to soar slows, and the air curves into a downward slope.  Lazy saxophone dusk.  Meditating trees.  The last roses with their their desperate fingers splayed, grasping for the fading warmth.  They're not ready, either. 

  Oh, but the lovely pensiveness of fall!  What better a time is there to examine your own changes than those few months a year when the leaves understand you?  Summer is not a time for thought.  Since school, we have trained ourselves to keep our summers as hands-free as a beach cruiser ride on the Cape.  Summer is made of lemon zest.  Summer is made of mica flecks.  Summer is thin, and summer shimmers, 

  

  But the delicious fall demands depth, and care.  Fall does not have time to watch us shimmer.  Fall wants us to glow.  If you pay attention, you can feel it brush the salt hair out of your face so that you can see.  

  And I'm giving in.  It's time to turn in the cut-grass perfume and remember bath bubbles and long thoughts.  It's time to catch my breath and fly closer to the Earth with the September birds.  

  Thank you, summer, for freeing my skin and for wide-sky mornings and for thinning it all out.  But I suppose you can go now.  

Definitions of Ambition

  So, let's talk about ambition.  Just for fun.  Just for something new.  Just to breathe words into an idea which has never held much of my own air.

Ambition.

I don't talk much about my career on this little keyhole.  I talk about the past.  I talk about the gorgeous uncertainty of the future, sometimes I talk about love, and mostly I talk about beauty or the quest for beauty and the soul-fill of finding beauty where I have felt it lost.  This blog, being a fairly decent reflection of what I find to be my ultimate goal in this wrinkling life, is about beauty.

   And ambition is not often beautiful, is it?  Career goals are not sheathed in flower petals.  They are not soft.  Their edges are harsh, and their veins pump fast, and they do not care about the hammock you used to dream in when life had a very different focus.

Ambition.

I have had an interesting summer.  While I won't go into the nooks and crannies of it here, I have had a summer which has thrown like a fastball the word "ambition" dead at my face.  And this girl, usually so adept at dodging career questions, has been unable to duck.

"Where do you see yourself in five years?"  What an easy question.  It is one you sell yourself with in job interviews, and it's really just pretend, anyway, isn't it?  Where do I see myself in five years?  If you have asked me five years ago when my housing was not a house and my job was barely a job and that hammock was the goal of every long, sticky Caribbean day, I am more than certain that I would not have told you that in five years, I would be living a life bright with street lights and busy like a bee hive and falling heavy with the leaden question of, "ambition."

So the five year question doesn't count, isn't real, fades into city air like man hole steam venting from the exhausted underbelly of lives lived on the fast track.

But I have been asked very recently quite a different question.  I work for a movement company.  One that invests in its people, and one that wants from you what it will show you you are capable of.  It is an exciting place to be.  Truly, it is an enviable place to be.  And for me, and for those like me who show their faces slowly like flower-topped munchkins from Oz, it is a terrifying place to be.

  I was speaking with someone who means a great deal to me about this idea.  Ambition.  And he said, "James I don't care if you do not have goals, as long as you are happy."

As long as I'm happy.

But wait a minute.  Hold your quick-kiss tongue and wait a minute because don't you get it? (Side note here-- he does.)  Doesn't anyone get it?  Happiness is the goal.  That's the whole thing.  So what he said doesn't make sense.  It can't make sense.  Because the words he said move backwards, and happiness is not a backwards motion.

It is as bad a habit as nail-biting and white-lie-telling to live only inside one's own understanding of things.  And just as hard to break.  I am guilty of this, to be sure, and walk a constant trek to remedy it.

The whole stark-white truth of it all is that I spent my twenties enveloped in and, indeed, enveloping a life very much outside the normal progression of those absurd years that inhale between 20 and 30.  Ambition was a four letter word.  Ambition was spoken about in whispers and condescension as a neanderlithic concept, abandoned in past lives as futile.  Ambition?  Our ambition is to forget about that world and use our business cards as coasters and bike spoke adornments.  But thank you for asking.

The goal is just to be there.  To be grateful for every moment for exactly whatever the hell it is.  To know that sixty passing seconds are sixty chances to thank the universe for putting clouds in the sky and for the softness of sea glass and for red lipstick with a little black dress.

Everything is perfect.  All of the time.

All the sages of the Caribbean, dressed in sun skin and smelling of salt water have reached the simple nirvana of gratitude.  And THAT is ambition.

Explaining that to a movement population in a movement workplace in a movement city may well be a task I do not have the ability to conquer, and that's ok.  Who am I to judge someone for growing in a straight line, when that is the color of so many aspirations?  And who am I to feel like I need to defend myself for walking in the curves?



And I guess that if you were to ask me where I see myself in five years, this post would be your answer.

Messes and Mermaids' Purses

Oh, the midlife crisis.  That silent moment when you realize that you have quick-crawled your way through half of your walking years, and you stare into the mirror with your apartment life reflecting behind you and you wonder if this if where you're supposed to be.  Personally, I never wonder if this is where I thought I would be, as I've not been in the business of thinking about the future much.  There are benefits to having no plans, not the least of which is never being disappointed about my current station in life.

    And you know, I have been accidentally falling in love with this city for three years now.  I have found, in surprise moments when I haven't been looking, that the city will tap me on the shoulder when it is time to see the heartbreak graffiti that lines 13th street, or the noisy glow inside a downtown apartment at midnight, or the ultimate sense-shock that everything that is beautiful here is beautiful on purpose, and there might be a depth to that which does not belong to the wildflowers. 

All of that, but I still walk barefoot through green park grass. 

    I have said it in the past, and I believe to the very core of myself that we, as creatures, are not so evolved that we don't need to feel the wind.  We need the sun, we need to stretch our arms out to the falling rain, we need to watch the clouds pass, we need to say hello to the dragonflies because we are the same.  

  And that is the trouble with this city life, I think.  Or at least it is the trouble I am having,  

  I am not meant for a life lived indoors.  My argument would be that none of us are, but I'll skip the self-righteousness, and just say that I am not mean for a life indoors. So, there is my crisis.  Its bricks are twilight ambulance sirens that drown out the evening crickets,  and its architect is this thing I have climbed into called a career. 

Writing so much and saying so little.  The truth is that I am a mess.  It is my natural state.  I float, irridescent like a soap bubble, from moment to moment, avoiding the gravity that would turn me more solid.  And I LIKE it that way.  I am in love with everything at once.  I make friends with ladybugs and I overwater plants because I'm afraid they're thirsty.  I smile wide with crooked teeth, and I like when the bottoms of my feet are black with dirt because that means I have interacted with the earth today.  My flaws are many, and they are loud, and I work at them tirelessly.  But not the mess.  Not the mess.  I will keep the mess.

  And in the end, if I cannot keep the wild alongside this life of structure and schedules and car payments, then the mess will win, and I will find a breeze to ride back to the ocean, where I can walk the waterline and steal mermaids' purses and feel small.  

For Nova and Sean

We hear that love is patient.  That it is kind, that it does not boast, that it is not proud.  We hear this, and we think of love as gentle.  As a cloud creature dispersing back into the sky without a whisper.
   
   But love is also fierce.  Love is a soldier.  Love takes into its arms all of the things you are proud of and all of the things you are not and love says to the world that it will fight for every square inch of it.  Love does not close its eyes to flaws, nor to weaknesses.  Love patches the holes.

Love is stubborn.  It is not interested in your reasons for not believing, because love is as real as the way you have memorized the flecks in each other's eyes.

  No greater a chameleon is anything but love, turning cool on hot days and waming when the air begins to sting.

And love, more than anything, is strength.  Some days, it is two hearts doing the work of a million and some days, it is two legs doing the work of four.

And love between two people- this wave, this search, this movement about which everything is written and sung, this hand holding, this dream sharing, this gift of two souls reading each other as if they had written all the words- that is the truest of all things.

The answer, and it is not simple, is that love is everything.  Love is the only beginning that promises no end.

Paying Attention

I've been looking through pictures of my life for two hours now.  Nearly 70 albums and ten years' worth and I sort slowly and flip through the captions and think about that day.  When I took a photograph.  When I posted it.  When I labeled it as what I thought it meant at the time, when I gave it, in gloss and newly cut edges, to the world so they could see what I saw and maybe feel what I felt, if only by imagining what a day in that coconut life could have been like.

    Some of these pictures I knew I was taking for the sake of the me I am now.  I knew that one day, I would be living a very different life.  It was fine then, and it's fine now, but I did not want to forget.
   
     Move on.  Move out and move away and move on and buy a shiny car for a shiny city and learn who you are when your life is big instead of small and move on.  But don't you dare forget this.  You will not get, nor will you deserve, the Universe's forgiveness if you forget that karma place which turned sleepers awake and matched the blue green irises of your eyes like a Postal Service song.  That place is gone, and its only hope is for everyone who loved it to remember it in their own colors so that all possible angles are covered.  So nothing is left out.  So that every single board has a creak which belongs to someone who gave their soul to that hill.

Do. Not. Forget.

But there's this thing about pictures.  You take them when you don't need them, anticipating that your future self will be so happy to have that photo of a ghost crab clacking through the night-soaked mangroves, when what your future self will really need is to remember the way the beach smells when the sun turns in its day, and how the midnight air hasn't quite learned how to be cool yet, so it opts for total dark in hopes that you'll feel or maybe just imagine the difference.

   Your future self will not need the pictures of you pretending to be the air in a Grecian windmill.  Your future self will want to taste the sticky warm of fresh baklava, and the ache of ouzo frosting a tall glass, turning water to sin and tourists to dancers,

________________________________________________________________________________________

      So.  I wrote that last night after a picture binge (ill-advised, after a twelve-hour day worked in the concrete wall basement of a downtown hotel monster), and much of it is valid.  But I found that I wrote it doing what I always do, and this is the biggest part of the problem.  Not that I will forget the spray of a Dominican waterfall on my face, or the way the Northern Cape air tastes in the fog.  The simple truth of this, and of a life lived a thousand ways, is that I probably will forget these things.  I would venture to say that I have already forgotten a great deal of any fat number of things about each past life lived. This is growth as much as it is sadness, and sometimes, those two things are the same.

     The problem is focusing so much on all those old photographs that I forget to take new ones.  This is a life, too.  This one that's happening.  Right now is my life right now, and while I'm living inside coconut pictures, the city sun is trying to tell me that it matters just as much. It's up to me to pay attention.

 

Rooms with Pictures

   I have spent some time thinking about happiness lately,  My own, or the happiness of people I love and the people I used to love and the people who just want to be loved.  I wrote a little while back about happiness being as simple as living in the moment.  That it is about accepting where you are and what you are not and opening your arms to your life as it is.  I was onto something, but I think I got it a little wrong.  Accepting what is as what is might be contentment.  Not happiness.  Despite the two seeming to be interchangeable, I have come to understand them as very different creatures.  Contentment is a goal, to be certain.  And happiness, I think, maybe or maybe not, and maybe it's different for every wistful soul, happiness is a choice.  It is a thing you decide on.

    You sit down in a room with pictures of your life lining the walls and carpeting the floors.  Some of those pictures are sepia.  Some of them are too blurry, many too sharp, some with soft and rounded edges, some with harsh corners.  Some weigh more than others, whether that is fair or not.  Some of them deserve to be underfoot and some belong where the mirror should be and some are just transparent enought to let the sun come through. But you decide that.  You decide where each one stays, be it eye level or hidden behind the ceiling fan.  And that is happiness.  Designing your minutes- your rightthissecond- around what will be easiest to see.  Keeping the broken heart pictures in the room, but choosing for your own sanity to place them a little bit in the shade.

    It's not simple, this.  You can't save the damsel who loes her distress and we do like to be sad sometimes, don't we?  Brooding.  Wounded.  In need of a white knight that we will eventually send away for reasons we don't understand.  Because we haven't yet talked about how we have to save ourselves.  I am not totally sure why that happens.  Everyone is allowed some cloudy days, but I suppose it's up to you to growl at the rain or find some puddles to jump in.

   How obnoxious to make it sound so easy. But is there a chance that it actually kind of....is?  That true, actual, palpable happiness is up to you as much as the jeans you put on in the morning or whether you decide to thank the sun every time it rises and sets.

The Cost of Restlessness

Having a moment of wanderlust in a life that is finally stable and real. I don't know if this post helps me or hurts me on that front. But I do feel it all the way to my fingertips, so I will set it down here, easily accessible and asking to be remembered. 



Oooh, I found a big intense entry in my travel journal. I didn't date it, but it was definitely written while on some other land mass. Probably Dominica, since I talk about climbing waterfalls. In fact, it must have been Dominica. I think I was sitting in the hammock outside our room at the Hibiscus Valley Inn drinking a Kabouli while Erin took a mostly cold shower. We had just come back from one of our waterfall days, bruised and muddy, exhausted and exhilarated. Jack and Scottie, our puppy companions, were under the hammock, keeping watch and once in a while getting up for a pat on the head. It's the same rambling as always, but it doesn't sound like my inside voice. Must have meant this one, and I'm kind of into it...


I am tired of writing on purpose now, and want just to write. We'll see if my brain and hands want the same thing.

To want to explore, one has to have explored. Ignorance is bliss and all of that and you will probably be perfectly content with all that you are handed if you never look up. If you never look out. So, record setters are always looking to break their own records. Scholars are always looking for another degree. Travelers are always looking for the next place.

What the hell does "contentment" even mean? Is it more admirable, more attractive to want exactly what you have? As you climb, do you forget to look down? It seems that wanderers often land in soft places and find refuge alone. Many age in gardens by the sea, or on white beaches and dune grass. And alone. So often alone.

The more things a person sees, the fewer people there are to relate to. "I have been here. And also here. There as well." "That's fascinating. Did you see what is on TV tonight?"

And so it goes. Many people's minds can only travel as far as their arms have stretched. This is not a rule, certainly, as daydreamers still stare at desktop globes, but it might be fairly safe to call it the norm.  

So you can tap the brakes a bit, and hope to the clouds for someone else to catch up. But you could wait forever, fidgeting, restless and wondering about what more there is to see and the time that is being wasted. 

Or you see only green lights and you rip out the rearview. Slowing down for very little. Stopping for nothing. And the hairs gray, and the skin wrinkles. And old, well-worn knees can only handle landing in soft places, can't they? And no one ever caught up.

If you had never climbed to that first waterfall, you would not be obsessed with climbing another. Pushing is not a stagnant act; it comes from momentum and spine strength. Movement begets movement. If your spine goes out in the middle of a push, you fall backwards. If you overestimate a push, you lose what is solid and steady and you fall face-first with nothing to hold on to, as you have shoved it all away from yourself.

And how can you expect anyone to catch up to a fall? Maybe the best you can hope for is someone to be there at the very end. Not to catch you, but to pat you on the back for landing mostly in once piece and then to reacquaint you with firm ground; to teach you how nice walking in a straight line can be.

And you still look up, but less, maybe. I am left hoping that eventually, looking at what is in front of me will be all that I want.  

I don't even have a bad case of it, to tell you the truth. I am not sure that I've got the stomach for it, nor the guts. The threat of addiction is often good motivation for moderation (I liked "tions" in this sentence, huh?). And to venture more deeply into this likely means leaving most everybody behind, and maybe not being able to stop. I love to love more than that would really allow. Closeness, affection, depth of relationships. Things I think I have chosen. I don't want to be seventy, living in the rainforest alone. Even if I am happy that way, and even if it means getting to have a mango tree.

Tapping the brakes.