I sit here typing at approximately 9:30 on a Sunday night, feeling weary the weight of tired's suppression. The type of tired that makes you feel the weight of your very shoulders, heavy. In the distance blue thunderheads tower in front of a purple and pink skyline, and the nearly full moon stands tall, looking down upon all it reigns over. Sighing is the only sentiment that makes sense. Sighing for contentment and every other emotion of lesser stature combined -a sigh can be heavy with meaning. Heavy, heavy, heavy.
Heaviness that stands the product of much levity.
Two weddings in twenty four hours.
The first (Saturday Night) fanciful, with all the fineries that money can buy. The bride was the oldest daughter of long time family friends -a young woman not much older than my sister. The toasts were eloquent and the music was live; we danced the night away. A white church with an organ, a four course dinner in an Amway Grand ballroom, a well used open bar. Family everywhere, celebrating the miracles of optimism, youth, and promise -it seemed we were all family that night, bound together with the invisible ties of sheer potential and grand vision. We were adopted through our mutual joy and sense of accomplishment.
The other wedding was very different indeed. It took place on a Sunday Afternoon near a lake, near a bowl-shaped valley of Pine saplings I happened across that took my breath away. The ceremony was in a backyard, facing a field. The soft spoken groom was a long-time acquaintance and cousin of a best friend whose family I have nearly been adopted into. The couple seemed younger some how -two kids about to set out on an adventure together -to explore uncharted territories hand in hand. The reception was in the basement of a Conservation Club -a sort of rural fraternity that reminded me of the Grange Society that my grandfather in California is the president of. Finger food was served -and we strolled in the park-like back-yard next to a swollen creek, casual to dance and taking our time in the lazy way Sunday afternoon dictates.
Both filled me with wonder at the capacity of the human heart; at the inexplicably natural, freakishly abnormal phenomena of love. To love one another until death do you part.........
"The ancient rabbi's spoke of Man's eternal longing to be reunited with the rib that was taken from him in the creation of woman. And ever since her creation, Woman has sought to return beneath a man's arm, firmly by his side."
And sandwiched between all of this, tales are relayed from mouth to mouth to my ear about the ethnic cleansing that continues in Kenya. Certain aid groups cannot reach the displaced person camps because of unrest. Today over brunch, besides a pool teaming with splashing children, I heard of such unimaginable atrocities committed against a single family that my blood boiled and I willfully wished to commit murder against complete strangers halfway across the globe. Such hatred, such open rearing of Satan's head, such despicable...... but I digress.
I can feel the anger stirring in my veins right now.
And I know that similar acts take place across the globe on a daily basis.
Where does love fit into all of this? Optimism? The setting out on a great journey?
One wedding was afforded with unimaginable wealth. I have never gone hungry. The other took place with the gorgeous background of nature behind the alter. No bombs fell upon our heads, no doors were kicked in. Where do we fit in in our display of arrogance? The world spins on just as it had, despite the weddings of Rachael and Sean. The tides rise and the sun sets just as it had, despite murders in Kenya.
Once again I found my head heavy heavy heavy with too many thoughts to share in on coherent post. More to come, rest assured.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Saturday, June 7, 2008
torn asunder, severed in twain
I'm up late for the first time in a few weeks, and Pulp Fiction playing on VH1 doesn't afford the companionship I am craving. The only other alternative I see at this point in time is to consider the higher powers that be; to acknowledge the startling fact that we are never as alone as we think. Metaphysics once again serve as a conversation with an old friend we haven't called in a while -that sometimes calls us when we forgot their number was still on our contacts lists. They call us in the middle of the night and draw our attention away from both the infamous "Ned and Zed" scene bogged with "Deliverance" references, and previews for the newest Mike Meyers piece of garbage alike. Something tells me I shouldn't bother my mind with such trifles anyway.
I was down at festival tonight when lighting started flashing in distance, forking in the south and east, framed in the gap between two buildings. I was in Calder Plaza, amid the tents and pennants that call to mind Medieval carnivals of old. It's usually such a deserted place. On Sunday afternoons the clock towers ring and the tolls echo off the buildings and sculpture, causing a haunting sensation of a deserted city. To see it so uncharacteristically filled with people is a sight I am not accustomed to.
The lighting, or perhaps the rain who's coming it surly foretold, was the starter's pistol shot that hailed the mass exodus of the masses. As I walked back to my car, I thought of the lighting's power.
"The boundary between our world and the next is torn asunder!" I said to a friend, "It has been severed in twain!"
This seemingly exaggerated exclamation (as are in my nature to cry), caused me to dwell on the poignant potential of lighting. Many hours later, my thoughts once again turned towards it. I was smoking on the back patio of my apartment, sheltered from the rain by the deck of the Indian family who live above us. The lighting clawed all around, so large I subconsciously ducked, as if some missile was tossed at my head.
Here was my thought:
What if the boundary between our physical world and the spiritual world beyond us was much closer and much thinner than many of us are inclined to think? Perhaps lighting really is the cracking of said boundary -and for one instant we were granted the briefest of glimpses into the blinding, sheer white light of everything else we cannot imagine? -the tiniest peek through the door of the waiting room that is our life? And the thunder that follows is the deafening slam of said door, or maybe the incomprehensible shock of such an unnatural boundary being broken?
I know, I know. Lighting is just protons and electrons, expanding and the like, and the universal is much better hidden from our ignorant, finite eyes. But what if?
Each bolt is not just a crack, but an open window with no screen? The physical world we occupy is no splitting egg shell, it is a void with volume, and lighting occasionally strikes the ground, sometimes housed, trees and people. Then those houses, trees, and people are caught in the crack -feet in the door between the temporal and universal. Heaven crashing down, too much for our small delicate frames to handle, consumed in energy five times hotter than the sun. Fried in place, gold necklaces welded solid into skin.
Then I thought of those war movies showing men marching at night, with artillery shells bursting in the distance, causing flashes not unlike lighting just over the horizon. Maybe, just maybe, to be caught in the center of that burst is to be ushered directly into the next world too.
The end of the world is something like this snow globe we call a world crashing on the floor of the universe, and all the glass we call a sky shatters, leaving the city that was always there but without the water and plastic snow that flies creating chaos, blinding the citizens and and confusing all. All the lighting will strike at once, and in a blinding light that contains all the colors there are, everything that prevents us from moving forward on our due path will be ripped away leaving clear, obstructionless sight which we will find unrecognizable because we have been snowbound for so long. Then the Spring of the ages will begin -Aslan Style.
wishful, simplistic thinking.
the ponderings of a GRCC student just out of freshmen year.
God the creator of all would not be so easy -so trite- to comprehend.
Julius' quotation of Ezekiel is entirely fictional. Don't waste your time looking it up. Vh1 edits the movie thickly, layer upon layer, drowning in stew, bastardizing in until it's barley recognizable from the original; the xerox of a xerox of a xerox.
The motorcycle Bruce Willis rides away on is named "Grace." Symbolism can sometimes be cheap as well.
I was down at festival tonight when lighting started flashing in distance, forking in the south and east, framed in the gap between two buildings. I was in Calder Plaza, amid the tents and pennants that call to mind Medieval carnivals of old. It's usually such a deserted place. On Sunday afternoons the clock towers ring and the tolls echo off the buildings and sculpture, causing a haunting sensation of a deserted city. To see it so uncharacteristically filled with people is a sight I am not accustomed to.
The lighting, or perhaps the rain who's coming it surly foretold, was the starter's pistol shot that hailed the mass exodus of the masses. As I walked back to my car, I thought of the lighting's power.
"The boundary between our world and the next is torn asunder!" I said to a friend, "It has been severed in twain!"
This seemingly exaggerated exclamation (as are in my nature to cry), caused me to dwell on the poignant potential of lighting. Many hours later, my thoughts once again turned towards it. I was smoking on the back patio of my apartment, sheltered from the rain by the deck of the Indian family who live above us. The lighting clawed all around, so large I subconsciously ducked, as if some missile was tossed at my head.
Here was my thought:
What if the boundary between our physical world and the spiritual world beyond us was much closer and much thinner than many of us are inclined to think? Perhaps lighting really is the cracking of said boundary -and for one instant we were granted the briefest of glimpses into the blinding, sheer white light of everything else we cannot imagine? -the tiniest peek through the door of the waiting room that is our life? And the thunder that follows is the deafening slam of said door, or maybe the incomprehensible shock of such an unnatural boundary being broken?
I know, I know. Lighting is just protons and electrons, expanding and the like, and the universal is much better hidden from our ignorant, finite eyes. But what if?
Each bolt is not just a crack, but an open window with no screen? The physical world we occupy is no splitting egg shell, it is a void with volume, and lighting occasionally strikes the ground, sometimes housed, trees and people. Then those houses, trees, and people are caught in the crack -feet in the door between the temporal and universal. Heaven crashing down, too much for our small delicate frames to handle, consumed in energy five times hotter than the sun. Fried in place, gold necklaces welded solid into skin.
Then I thought of those war movies showing men marching at night, with artillery shells bursting in the distance, causing flashes not unlike lighting just over the horizon. Maybe, just maybe, to be caught in the center of that burst is to be ushered directly into the next world too.
The end of the world is something like this snow globe we call a world crashing on the floor of the universe, and all the glass we call a sky shatters, leaving the city that was always there but without the water and plastic snow that flies creating chaos, blinding the citizens and and confusing all. All the lighting will strike at once, and in a blinding light that contains all the colors there are, everything that prevents us from moving forward on our due path will be ripped away leaving clear, obstructionless sight which we will find unrecognizable because we have been snowbound for so long. Then the Spring of the ages will begin -Aslan Style.
wishful, simplistic thinking.
the ponderings of a GRCC student just out of freshmen year.
God the creator of all would not be so easy -so trite- to comprehend.
Julius' quotation of Ezekiel is entirely fictional. Don't waste your time looking it up. Vh1 edits the movie thickly, layer upon layer, drowning in stew, bastardizing in until it's barley recognizable from the original; the xerox of a xerox of a xerox.
The motorcycle Bruce Willis rides away on is named "Grace." Symbolism can sometimes be cheap as well.
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