Today I longed to write...inspired by a Poe, but not of Edgar Allen status, yet of a status i would far prefer since the macabre is so banal, so far as my spirit "fed" standards. Poe wrote of his ways...the way he thought if just a bit, and the way he lived, and the way he moved about the country. i enjoyed the flavor of his writing and he caused me to wonder if it was all truth or some fiction or a smattering of each, and well...some of it was just conjecture, to be sure.
Nevertheless this Poe fella, he made me decide to come here and write so here I sit and gladly. I recalled afore writing how I had sorta semi-vowed, as one might do, half-acidly, to write more for my own pleasure and catharsis and then if seemingly acceptable, to one day expose it all "to the world" meaning the few who would chance to choose my words and thoughts over that of the next person...to spend or waste their good time with. I realized that my half-hearted vow to write every day as good writers do to hone their skills was not kept in check and how it meant that i am either a careless wanderer in my own body, or that i am still an "effing" rebel to my own wishes at the riper age of 48 years. and how even that hardly phases me...I just let it Be, as the Beatles well taught me, along with all those hipper folk my moms hung around with. So...if anyone cared or does, i will probably go on and stick to that ideal of a private place to write and well, it's your own dang fault that you are losing me here, because not one of you dared approach me with one even slight stroke for my soul, not one sweet poke to a bruised ego centric girl like me. So Be It!
Well on to the subject of story that I sorta, kinda had in mind. Poe had written a little ditty of a tale about a teeny part of his life and times and i liked it. Decide to write something along the same lines about myself, since we are apparently somewhat kindred in certain ways with the traveling about from here to yonder town. So this is for you Poe Ballentine who wrote something that appeared in June 2010's The Sun, for George Ledbetter. I hope George appreciated the glimpse into your days and ways at least as much as i did. Also, mon freir...thank you for getting me back to my writing.
Here We go Again...for Poe Ballentine, (a long lost brother from another mother?)
I always knew that it was coming before the announcement...weeks, sometimes a couple of months before. You could sense her restlessness, she became sort of a prickly pear of contradictions...she had more reasons to yell at us. She was kinder too certain moments, the dinners came more often, the food was better. She took fewer lovers, or more than usual. Her eyes glazed over in a different way when she was talking to someone from someplace distant. Then she would just up and let us in on it, I'm thinking about moving to _________. Then the reasons that we should move may or may not follow. We already knew her and she probably knew, that we knew, that she needed to move. For whatever reason, and we would be carried along on that wave of wherever...and so we accepted it and steeled ourselves, and over time that moving on becomes a part of you. You just don't know what permanent means really.
People come to have a sort of more tangible simplicity, they may seem to be complex to some...but in your psyche you begin to be able to sum a lot up without the usual needed talking about everything. People mainly appeared to be subjects of their passions, and a sampling of what human nature actually was, personified. They were soldiers of their inner warring, angels of anarchy, dukes of their own destiny or slaves to the winds of change... they were part of a crazy quilt of existence that was unfolding with and without destiny, with and without God...with promise and with failure. With heart rending and heart mending, they became the family I left behind, to travel on, a little bobbing boat alongside the ship my mother felt herself to be, carving her way across oceans of places and time, her little floating rafts by her side for security. Friends became the part of you that you would never get to the end of the story about.
The minds eye works in mysterious ways. Instinct is honed by the hurt or sensitive for protections against what will inevitable come to pass. things you experience become the things you will begin to regurgitate in thought, the circumstances you find yourself in the back story of your life, the life the self, the self a pallet of colors to mix and play with, or rather the "clay" born of stardust, that you eventually mold into a being you can appreciate, using your talents, ethics, senses, and thought out ideals and ideas upon...the molded person you make, you call your soul ...whether it is truth, or lies, is what makes us whole, or broken.
Besides, the names you give to your particular soul, that energy "inside" that you hone while passing through trials and perdition, through a life of places, and kin, lovers, enemy, and friend, those names are malleable and can always be changed. One changes them with "meaning" or for whimsy's sake, in this... the life experiment. Sometimes when in deep thought I would catch myself acting in ways that did not align to whom i felt that I really was. The "authenticity" was askew...so I would gather my thoughts and transform my actions to meet the newer me. Shedding my souls drives. Shedding her stations, like a snake shedding one of many skins. (When noticing and needing new names for who you are, remember it is alright to spiritually move along, and to mold your own soul until it aligns to that which we call our true inner nature, and to let your inner nature speak to you about who you are becoming, whence your spirit be open to change.)
Realighning your soul to become more authentically "you" is very important to your evolutionary growth. To this growing as a whole spirit, and to eventually becoming the person you set out to be, at your best. The part of becoming the person with soul that you always deep down knew you would be.
Having a good soul to call my own became important to me very early in life. I will speak more about that in time. But for now I will carry on with my thoughts on moving from place to place over various amounts of time, and how that might affect one...for it has gently permanently affected, effected, erected myself. You see this moving thing appears to be (at this point in time) a big, a kind of huge part of who i am, or am becoming...because at 48, I find that there is still some fairly consistent moving about. The length at which I'll stay in one place changes, and I appear to be able to tolerate places longer and longer, but the urge to leave may forever bear down on me...to be more challenged by difference, I yearn for more variety. The yen to move on was developed by another but became a big part of me.
So that while these odd "points on the globe", the various regions that I have found myself in
have been a home base, these cities, towns and rural outposts, and their people been my peers, kin and friends, the loved elders, the (subtly adopted) children of my heart forever...these people of my life, these places and people having held sway with me and my soul, they are never enough to quench a thirst born of movement, and flux, and change...perhaps a need for growth...perhaps spurred on, or given flight by the very experiences, that have given me sus. Loving people deeply has made me want to leave them as surely as to stay close. For who will it be (who's as lovely) around the way? Who will I chance to meet that will be the next changer of my life? Whom will it be next, that spur's on my spiritual growth or stirs my heart to new heights. What town will bring me even more joy than the sunlight sparkling on this particular desert town. Which way do I go on the journey to myself?
I love people who have never left their hometowns, as surely as i love the Brit and the Italian, the Norwegian, the South African and the Hawaiian. I love people from Manila, and Japan, and China, and from Portugal, I know and love folks from so many places now, because I have moved not to those places but to the places where they have chosen to set down roots. People are the same I tell you...the similarities are so apparent while they will tell of all the differances from one tribe to the next. The places they hail from make them not much different. They are cloudy and light, with a chance of rain...they are thunderous and they make champions and they create chaos, and they fall. They leap over obstacles, encounter demons, dance the night away, or stay home cloying up to a fire, a book, a lover some laughing children.
The people who move about a lot, are much like the people who stay where they are. Those who chant to Buddha are very like those who call themselves Christian, and those who profess with a glorious gleam in the eye, that you cannot prove to them in any manner that any form of God actually exists. You are the same kind as the rest of us. You decide to have babies and you decide against it, and both for good reasons. You eat and drink, you sweat and sing, you meditate while noticing that your in meditation, and without noticing, you really have strange dreams in common. Everyone alive has strange dreams. I know this, a fact to be unrustled with! You make Science and Skeptisism your Gods as surely and devoutly as another makes their favorite God...their lifelong Love.
So, to close this chapter, with some sort of semblance of balance to my ending, I want to say, that travel for me appears to be a form of growth in action, as to stay in one area appears to be growth in action, as well. That We are in flux, no matter how long we stay or how quickly we move on. Changes occur and we adapt to them, allowing for a new perspective. We are human and we live, we move in short ways and long ways. We meet the same people over and over who cause us to be who we are, or we meet different folks over and over which again influences who we are. Permanent residences can be very cozy to ones soul as moving about can become a balm to certain hearts. Moving about allows us to meet certain life experiences, and staying put other similar life stuff. You just cant get out of being human if you are reading this. your a species and a genre that are more similar than different...so, take care of that idea. Nurture your human nature and that of your human cousin next door, adopt a human, when you meet someone you think you might be good for. Nurture your ways and days first, and theirs next. For there is some thruth in that we must love ourselves before we can love another. Live to stay and live to leave.
Keep in touch and fall out of touch, let things slide, and take a stand for a cause or a sister or brother in life. Live and let live, and live and let stale relationships die. If people don't move you to joy, maybe they are not your best person to hang out with. If they drive you to madness, might be time to move along...or begin the work...work to transform the relationship...moving toward a goal of balance...some joy, some madness.
What I believe too, is that what might have truly affected me the very most (with all of my moving from place to place as a human person), is that we aren't very good to ourselves and not that often very kind to one another. That we as a people are suffering too much, struggling too much and living at times a bit to wrapped up in outer appearances, wound up a bit too tight with our truths and lies, and that when you meet an egoist, you might look deeper, and when you meet a selfless person, look deeper...that people are PEOPLE, and even with all the bravado many exhibit daily, much of it is often just ballast in the sails of a person who actually deserves much better from life, who has a hidden worrier, who has hidden fears they keep deep within. They just don't know who they are yet, and they rely on bravado and pretention to get by. They might need your touch, your words or example for a bit to help them get to a better place in thier life.
The places you live in and around will affect (and effectively mold you), inasmuch as you mold your own person. And people with their influence will cause you great changes. I tend to like the unusual person, the milder climate places, the strange or mystical in art, the softer and sensitive (mainly) in music, the thought provoking in books, the spiritually animated (and smart) in my film viewing. Yet, what I like most is this life and how I have learned about people from moving about here and there. How Hawaiian, Portuguese and Asian folks are very much like my hometown "Hillbilly's" in their way, and the way Californians shrewdest corporate, computer chip stock-holding shipping magnate, still calls his auntie every weekend to say that he loves her and how she always cries, and sends him five dollars as if he were still seven, kind of phenomenon.
I love how as an "American", I find Americans are equally both patriotic and sometimes also pacifist and sometimes both at once, and if you ask deeper questions, you will find that each human has a different if subtle way of explaining the way they became that way, and it's lovely to know that about them. That...is why your country the best damn country ever, because countries are not all that different...how can they be with the people all having the same ways of being? I love how persons from other countries may have the same exact story about their country of origin. About their own partiotic heart and their own rebel soul.
I come at this end... to this conclusion I didn't even surmise that I would come to...but i like it. That life is a rich cornucopia of experiences , and we share many of the same feelings and living situations, no matter where we live. And that Life is for living... now get out there you silly monkeys and move about in it, love people and leave them to love again.
I have to go look at some websites about New Mexico, and Costa Rica, and decide if they are better than moving back home to Tennessee, which almost seems like pure paradise, if i am having a bad moment in a day. After i have looked at them and dreamed of how that might be, I may just stay here, where i am, it is surely nice to have that, as an option.
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