Creating something beautiful and meaningful is hard. I know I haven't blogged in a while and it's no accident; I've made a few basic attempts and thrown them out. I find that whenever I "want to create something beautiful" I end up with rubbish, and it's only when I let the chaos take over and the order of the universe throw something beautiful in my lap do I have any odds whatsoever of coming up with something that someone else would gain anything from reading. Otherwise this whole thing, writing in general, becomes politics. "What can I say to somehow win people over?" It's all vanity. Therefore I must approach this whole business not like a general bent on conquest but rather like a meek child staring into the night sky, filled with all its' distant unreachable stars, shouting a verse into the universe in hopes of coming up with some meaning to it all. This isn't just a metaphor, I actually did this once, in the middle of the night with the new moon bringing clarity to all the sparkling stars and the peaceful riverside along the Nam Kading river as it merges so peacefully into the Mekong. And it was odd how such a scene takes the shouts out of my mouth and reduces me to whispers. And even if that's all I have to work with, here's a few whispers into the darkness.
I'm back in America now, and it's always a thing that causes me much inner wrestling; not so much the specifics of the place itself but what it represents in my mind. 'Home', perhaps, and many of the things that word might imply, but also the old self, the me I used to be. I walk down roads I've walked before and I think of the ways my mind used to work and what used to matter to me. The unimportant things I used as foundations for my decisions, the selfishness that seemed to cripple me. It's as though I find myself in an old faded photograph from a time a part of me never wanted to remember. There's this weird irrational fear in the back of my mind that the mystic properties of the place itself might cause me to relapse, to take a step back into the old me that was capable of such silly and damaging mistakes, to be so careless and thoughtless and foolish. I had these same feelings last summer when my entire world seemed to be falling apart, so I printed out about 40 pictures from better times in my life as a sort of a constant reminder that the past happened - even the good parts. especially the good parts. And it gives this neglected room some color and some warmth in spite of itself.
It's odd to me how a bedroom can take on a sort of mythical symbolism to it. It's "my room", this brick of space about 12 feet by 10 feet by 8 feet that's specifically designated to me. As one inhabits a place for a decade or two all of the charachter of it begins to bend to the character of the one who occupies it. The dings in the walls and the new paint job from when the 8-year-old version of me would have temper tantrums and kick the wall until it was brown. The old furntire, some of which was given to me and some of which was cast off by others, only to be rescued. I have all these books in my room. Stacks of them, and the sad thing is that I haven't yet gotten to most of them. I wonder if I'm really the best steward of them, wonder if I should give them away so they might get read and appreciated by someone who doesn't spread themselves so thin.
The old things intrigue me in a new way. What was once the future is now the past, and what once seemed so mysterious and dangerous and risky now feels conquered. This feeling that I made it to this point in spite of all of life's twists and turns gives me hope as I look ahead, into the dark speckled night sky that is our future, something that at once seems both so mysterious and yet so inevitable.
