A few more weeks down the line I turn from twenty-nine to thirty years time in this world. I believe most things are in their right place… married to the loveliest, lucky to have good friends & family, & a pillow to place my head on each night in a top-floor apartment atop a tall hill in the center of a top-shelf city on the ocean. Other things are coming along… writing, writing, writing. Let me write until I die, until I understand.
I’ve thought a lot lately about how all the things we take for solid, ever-present forms are, in fact, crumbling or absolutely changing. The overriding sense I get is that we ought to slow down, slow down. No one is going to survive forever, but we’re all going to make it through. Get that? There was a kid I knew as a child who died unexpectedly on the bus one day like all the other days. We were in elementary school. I remember trying to reconcile his disappearance from this planet w/some innate sense of fairness, & failing. But, looking back now, I see he made it through. He made it through the same way I’m going to make it through, my grandfather’s going to make it through & all of our triumphant & tragic stories will make it through. So slow down. None survive, but we all make it through.
Change is the only constant in the long run. The tides that run over the Earth from shore to shore exchange energy w/the moon, slowing the planet’s rotation enough to measure & pushing the moon further into space. Dinosaurs had a shorter day by fifteen minutes. The moon is already five feet further from us than when American astronauts landed on its pockmarked & silent surface in 1969. Order is not solid, but temporary. A mossy forest of pine & fern once thrived on the Antarctic land mass. White was green for a spell, the proof of which now rests beneath a mile of ice… an entire mile of ice, in a part of the planet w/less precipitation than many deserts.
I’m getting on a plane in a few hours, too, which always makes me wistful. If you read this while I’m off being someone else, please dig through the archives for my past lives.
