Between this and that is…
Now. I’ve been thinking of some longer writing. Like a similar thing once done that I published on long gone blogs. Maybe on ghost or wordpress. Episodes of slightly twisted things from my going. I tried to combine fact and enough fiction to make some folks guess if I were talking about them. This work got deleted in my so-called great purging. I took the deletion broom and removed cruft and detritus that stood or sat in my wake. It felt good. To simply say,
Let’s do a do over and a think over
I felt then and now I was right but I also lost words. Meanings. Ways. I have not forgot what Paul gave me at the coffee shop in Oakland three years ago. This vision of going. Yet not arriving. Slow steps Paul took with his sign when he walked away. Like Christian McCandless when he walked into the wild. It was never arriving in the wild. It was the going. I’ve felt I’d you asked him he would gently retort he never made it. Like he took steps and found some barriers. Some attractions. Some limits. Perhaps better meant would be walking toward the wild.
I’m also convinced the “wild” is different for each person asked. Sometimes the wild are the little alleys and side streets in Hanoi where one wanders for a day and longer finding coffee shops and beauty salons and little electronics shops. Or perhaps it is Tokyo where all things combine in waves of both natural and man-made beauty. All of the things bring is “into” but never arriving. We never get the true sense of the Hem in Hanoi or the subway in Shinjuku. It’s like the puzzle pieces were tossed in the air and landed all turned around with some somehow missing. Like I remember perhaps what RWR told me about the doing of archeology,
cannot excavate an idea
So all the wandering and going was like this excavation or this alley or this subway station. So mysterious and strange yet welcoming and delightful. It invites our inward hobo to take steps, not worry about finding or losing. Just go. This sounds so close to how I practice meditation. Just going and just being. Both give this sense of the loss of time and space in favor of finding nothing and not looking.
So in the roundabout method of life, I have Now. This Now with the big N. I told Alin I feel caught between two worlds when she asked how I could not be happy this morning. There is the expat world out there. People I kinda know. Then there’s the khmer world. More people I kinda know and one I love. But I stand between. It creates a sense of timelessness and forever moving, going, being. Not arriving.
So many times I’ve considered this but now I want to write this story again. Twist it again. Tell another story. Make it the same same but different.
When? That is always the question. There is no when to me. It is the rustling of words to this canvas and that takes as long as it takes. It makes the words become the same as my life. Never arriving. Not taken with things. Just going and being.
Stay tuned.