Friday, November 20, 2009

Meandering


It's funny where your thoughts take you when you don't even know you're going anywhere.

Last night I woke up to a crash of thunder so loud the whole house shook.  I sat up in bed expecting the sky to turn red with a nuclear flash, and felt a strong twinge in my heart for the little boy in the room next to mine who would never see the rest of the world....
"Its only thunder", said my friend, lying in his own satori next to me.

Later, walking down my road, i saw the sun reflected in the storm-made ponds in the field, and there were gulls around the the puddles, and their sound made me stop and breathe in, and I could almost smell the ocean (small oceans in the corn field) which took me back to so many places......
yesterday I had three (count 'em, three) messages from the past.  A man who I'd travelled with in my youth, another old friend whose wife had died suddenly last week, and a cousin I haven't seen for years. These voices all gave me pause to think about where I am, and where I've been.  A man who hasn't seen me for over 30 years......what do we look like to each other?  A man who's wife was here one day and gone the very next, and she was my same age.  A cousin who has travelled a parallel life to mine, probably the same inside but very different on the outside.  What are we, floating bits of atomic matter, made up of circumstance more than anything else?