from somewhere only we know...
"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."
- Wild Geese by Marie Oliver
in the end, it's all about stories. fairy tales of our lives made perfect by the authors. they write us into prose and song. the dancers, the prance across the barren stage in their soft jazz shoes. high kicks to punctuate the performance with accents. no, not the strongly spoken kind. those are meant to draw mental blood. i'm talking about syncopations. loud. harsh. wrecking. obliterates.
they are the unfamiliar ways we look at the mirror. at ourselves. and like the stranger that stares back into our eyes: we do not recognise. the familiar hands that touched our palms. they do not stand by us like the comrades that we thought they were. these images. mirages. imaginations. they irk our being. because they are the characters in the plot. woven with our foolish aspirations. they hope for higher things. things we know we cannot achieve ourselves. and we envy. oh! how we envy their freedom. this lukewarm applause we oblige them with. it comes from a place where we no longer care about. musty spaces in the empty promises that we spoke. unthinking. unfeeling whores to our own hopes.
and yet these stories - they keep us alive. they define our lives. they are the substance to our existence. the numbers in our summation. the product of our production. they are the mechanical hands on our clock that tick away with each second that passes. they indicate that yes, we are not dead. we are not standing beneath the wings of despair, overshadowed and broken. that yes, we have value. we have reason for our place here. that we are not hollow shells of things that were created much too quickly. we change. mutate. evolve. they call us higher beings. but that's only because they cannot vocalise why else we would be here. so much bound by these chains of logic that nothing works or moves without it. and they are foolish. because we are. we. so. are.
we stand our ground. we build our towers. and the walls, they climb higher every day. so tall they block out the sun. but keep the wind from our backs. we are refreshed by rain. we are self sustaining. but with it comes self loathing. that hatred of our own worst enemy. that shattered window, that thrown ball. the cry for help that never reaches another's ears. it is a mad rush for repentance. but never quite seeing the possibility of acceptance. self-acceptance.
that's what we'll never have - self acceptance.
so, i dot my 'i's and cross my 't's. in this special story i write. i am the author after all. some days i want to close the book. put down the pen. lean back. and sigh. relieve myself of the burden of writing. but other days i think of the promises made. the foretelling foretold. things to be done. to be said. to be achieved. archived in the long dead library. simply put, to be.
and maybe, just maybe, someone will learn to appreciate my story and read it. understand it. love it. remember it for all time.
DuaGu
"A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly..."