Dawning Luminosity

Each day, a cold wind passes, an hour or so before sunset. I might feel some silence, some stillness, then the faintest rustle and shudder as the hopes and aspirations of the day that is about to end are carried away. The planned tasks, the surprise meetings, the wishes from afar, the unheard voices, the broken promises, the repaired friendships, the re-done tasks, the unkissed lips, the unwritten letters, the air held in and scavenged… all: pulled off the frail moorings of intent and held aloft, distant to the horizon. Some hours later, accompanying the relentless sunrise, they are reborn in new and forgetful hope.

I often stumble into this wind if I walk in the late afternoon, laces too loose, feet too awkward, looking down and wishing difference, banishing mirrors, content neither in the city’s dead cement nor the country’s cold earth.

I expect that a few years before my death I will feel a different wind. A subtle, terminal wind of conclusion, leaving me enough time to ever more acutely hone the overpowering feelings that terrify me. A cruel wind, coldly reminding that voices will no longer be heard; that dreams will no longer be dreamt. And, fuelled by failure and inability, the wind will recall, with a slight gust, the luscious thoughts no longer spoken aloud, dreams and efforts pushed, both too late and too early, to their protracted conclusions.

This wind is closer than I wish; its path to me, direct.

Why have I not previously noticed how beautiful the freshly planted and now shooting through the ground green field of winter wheat through the window across the road is?

There was in the air, when walking back to the hotel, through the parking lot, a delicious sweet, warm, moist smell of pine needles, unlike the smells from this time of year at home: a more green and rich smell, suggesting life rather than hibernation and death.

And, if I can experience this, and describe it, and remember so many similar smells, some sweeter, some not, some more evocative than others, but all triggering a yearning for more (though that’s just another way of describing dissatisfaction) … if I can write this down, then maybe I can write more, again, sometimes … without every word feeling each like a station in an endless whine.

The pine smell, breaking though the plastic world of diesel and concrete and polluted water suggests that maybe this is possible.

Richly serenaded by crickets, guided by dragonflies and warblers, I am pulled past branches and leaves, through earth-air into the crepuscular world’s shadowy abstraction and unending, distant memories, now silent and unreachable.

The previous post was the 100th on this blog. The effort represented by these 100 posts surprises me. Why? is great question to ask, but not necessarily to answer. The answer to any why? results in a series of other questions / answers / explanations, like onion layers, each revealing more than the last but never quite getting to the core. Each explanation has an antecedent. Each story has an earlier story. We all came from somewhere. To misquote Marshall McLuhan: “You don’t like those answers? I’ve got others.”

I think that the core is not necessarily a desirable destination. Do we really want to know? Or, rather, do we really think that there is one explanation, ultimately. Would we not rather select the onion layer that suits our current perspective, our intention, our state of mind? Of the many answers to why? perhaps only a few fit with how we’ve placed ourselves in the world at this point in time. Is it OK to discard or ignore those that don’t? Should we prioritize knowledge over experience?

Similarly, and I’ve said this before in different ways, during our interactions with people it’s too easy to see the present state as an absolute. To easy to draw conclusions based on a moment’s interaction. The onion has many layers. Since our feelings are so thoroughly the result of our own experience, we can never know what someone else truly feels. We can empathize, but we can’t know.

We project particular personalities. What allows us to see beyond these in order to allow empathy? What allows us to maintain perspective and to choose to not draw quick conclusions, or even not draw any conclusion? What can afford us these luxuries, rather than not concerning ourselves with such subtleties?