I’m trying to change my perspective. A willful alteration of the illusion to engage a sense of vertigo. I want to convince my body that the waves are still and we are drifting past them on a massive motile island, set adrift and connected to nothing. Lke when the truck pulls off next to you and you have the feeling of your car falling into reverse. I want to be unsure of what’s in motion.
So far I haven’t managed it, but I’ve got all day.
Enforced spaces of non-interruption, of calm and appreciation for the things that are around me – these are rarities in my Life. And we’ve not one hundred percented it. I know myself. I’ve watched Save Yourselves. I have no interest in being completely cut off from the universe, but I’m cetainly eager to create the illusion. To set up the autoresponders and willfilly fail to reply.
Out beyond the Royal Oaks I’m pretending I’m beyond the reach of the anger and the culture wars that is everything around us today. There isn’t TOO much trash that washes up on our isolated bit of shoreline. You can’t hear more than one or two planes flying overhead or a distant motor boat or the occassional car.
Heather brought Fancy Coffee Beans with us and Kristen’s learned a Fancy Way to brew it. It’s good coffee, but too hot for me to let it sit on my tongue and truly savour. Shortly, I’m sure I’ll note all the exquisitie intricacies advertised on the bag, but for the moment I’ll enjoy the steam of it rising into a sunbeam.
I Love the way the wind rises here. A slow rise of white noise as it finds its way through all the pines. There’s no sense of a localized change in the air, but suddenly the SHUSHING sussurrus is all around you and then just as suddenly it’s dying away again. A slow rise and fall echoing the waves on the water, but slowed down 20 or 50 times. There’s probably a rhythm to it. I haven’t been attentive enough to grasp it.
Heather’s been talking a lot about how she’s worried our careers can never be what we want them to be. She’s worried that the derailment of COVID is just enough to stagger whatever momentum we’d built. And I don’t know how to assuage those fears. They’re my fears too – but I try to enjoy what I’ve built. There’s nothing else to do…
And so I was very grateful when she came out as we watched the setting sun and said something to the effect that – “music hasn’t brought me everything – but it’s brought me here” – we would never have been invited to this tiny, eroding spit of land on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, out in the pines past the Royal Oaks, but for our music. Susan wouldn’t have shown us the City Museum. Robin wouldn’t make us fudge. I wouldn’t have met Kristen.
My old coworkers from Glovia certainly don’t Live unfulfilling or boring Lives. Jerry’s done things (for better or for worse) that I’ll never do and Damian’s been places I’ll never go… they’ve been able to purchase sights that I’ll never see… and yet the way we are invited into less exclusives realms of the heart is invaluable and a very very human experience. Humbling. Perhaps more transient.
There it is.
I looked up and for a moment I worried I was losing my footing because the island was slipping in the stream of the water. Save the turtles and caulk the car… ilyAIMY’s being washed out to sea!