I embarked on a hunt through my personal archives this morning, searching for a half-remembered line from one of those rare moments when the words had emerged already so felicitous that I only had to set them onto paper (or its kin). My archives now are both paper and digital, organized and everything but, so it was fun to see my friends and acquaintances and myself figuring out these new genres (FB, Twitter, etc.) and ourselves within them.
We were lively with conversations back then, or so it seems still to me, and shared concerns and joys alike. Some of us still do this, but the tenor of our connections feel different to me now. As if we’ve all grown up more, possibly too much? Or perhaps the weight of the world and the heavy-handed commercialisms afoot have rasped and shaved down our rawer, happier, questing edges somewhat. Our numbers have shifted, too: unsure how to handle as many friends as I was getting when I exceeded 207, I thought about it for a while and went through removing people with whom I had had no meaningful exchanges (a fact that still haunts me, because later I realized this might have been offensive to some, if they ever even noticed). But people have done the same to me, too, just disappeared, presumably for what they believed were good reasons at the time. Others left in a huff, disagreeing and glad to be gone. Some said snippy things, then erased them, and left. (Burned as a child by a religion whose adults revised history regularly, and never in my favor or so it seemed, however, I, of course, have done a fairly good job of copying long exchanges into documents, so I have some evidence of what was and was not said. Why this matters to me, I do not know, but it does.) There is sadness and loss and great joy and companionship in these little archives now, a treasure trove of life lived full tilt and leaning forward, arms wide and unafeared and figuring out together how to be in this glorious and weary old world.
So it is good to go through these old records (even some which are inexplicably missing, such as a FB status I put up and then liked so well I recorded it on paper–lucky thing!) and to remember things I knew for a brief moment in time? And then forgot, whole-cloth, before the ink had even dried.
Here are three of those: two that soar and one that kept my feet planted on dirt.
The price of caring is feeling. The price of knowing peace is weathering storms. The price of being here is illimitable joy and pain and beauty and suffering and fear and death, cheek by jowl with one another and with you, merrily connecting your soul to all that exists every day. Let go and fall into your grand journey. There are no missteps, no mistakes, only lessons in being while here.
~FB status update, 27 June 2013
I am done with planning and planing the path ahead, knitting nets for the abyss. I won’t leave here breathing, rich, or worry-free, nor will I have done all I could. But from this moment forward? To hell with the rules of the road.
~FB status update, 29 June 2010
Parable III. I go merrily along, placing clean new straw in all the chickens’ nests. Get to end, look back to beginning? One little pearl leghorn’s comin’ along behind, Kicking Straw Out Of Every Single Nest.
~FB status update, 30 July 2010
Legs, done with the nests, dealing with this here
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