Walking Backwards

She was sitting in her room. The overhead light was off and just a tall floor lamp provided a slight glow to the quiet chamber. Soft light illuminated her white naked legs, her black and green tattoos that coiled around her thigh and calve. Her thin fingers held the pages of a red-covered book open, its pages a pale yellow, its words in deep black.

“I will stop making efforts to remain asleep.”

The words went through her like waves of truth. They wrapped themselves around her, plunging deep into areas she left dry and untouched.

She sat still on the soft bed, letting the sentence roll through her, letting it resonate wherever there was space. She held on, letting the next sentence wait.

She actually made efforts to remain sleep. She took steps in the opposite direction. She turned her back on the path every day, walking backwards, throwing stones, doing all she could to remain asleep, to remain where she was.

Every argument.

Every eye roll.

Every long tangent of jealousy that held her down like a drowning girl in a shallow pool.

Every reaction of jolting anger.

She sat with the book open, her hands still, her eyes soft and unfocused while the words traveled deep, coiling around the sinews of habits and pride.

“I will stop making efforts to remain asleep.”

This is what she did, everyday, perhaps every hour, as rage poured through her heart, dropping her far from the mountain she was climbing. She remembered sitting on the same bed earlier in the morning, staring up into the aluminum covered piping that ran through a part of her room. She sat there for nearly five minutes, staring into the foil, finding shapes and faces and reliving the comment she heard the day before. The four words that pierced her, the four words that she holds onto for hours, holding on o them, letting them form more bubbles of anger and reaction.

It was what she did, she found ways to remain asleep. It didn’t just come naturally. She made an effort. She actively put her attention on things she could not control. She didn’t focus on herself, which would have been the one place it would have made a difference and instead focused on every misstep of those around her.

“I will stop making efforts to remain asleep.”

Could she actively relax and let go of those efforts? Could the anger just fall away like old skin? She imagined herself on the same bed, still and calm, a slight smile on her face while rage just dripped off, falling to the earth and turning into green sprouts and vapor.

Her machine was trying, actually making an effort to remain in the dirt, to keep as far away from the mountaintop as it could. It tried everyday, reminding her of pain, of pride, of the way it all should be, but was not.

As she held the book open, her eyes softened and she took a deep breath, allowing the exhalation to cleanse her. Moving her eyes slowly onto the next sentence.

The Climb

The question came in little gasps of breathy exertion:
“How…. much… longer…. is this….. going…. to take?”
He could barely get the words out, his body felt like lead, his breathing was so heavy, it muted the sound of his feet on the worn mountain path. Sweat covered his vaguely wrinkled forehead, the red shirt he wore had long since turned into a damp rag clinging to his shoulders. His heart pulsed, sending huge waves of blood through him, like dams about to burst. His heart was like a drum, pounding, pounding…
With each step, the muscles in his legs seemed just a moment away from ripping. It was pain, more pure than he ever remembered. He kept moving, as though tied to some sort of invisible rope that kept one foot following the other, endless, repetitive movement. He told himself that he couldn’t take it much longer, with each step he repeated the same thought within like a mantram. He imagined himself falling over, pushed too hard and for too long, soon the end would come.
There was a small laugh, it came a few feet ahead of him and traveled lightly on the wind till it found his ears.
“The path is the path. There is no end.”
Another light laugh followed, somehow finding its way to him over the sound of his heart and breathing and heavy footsteps.
His body reacted to the answer. He felt a sudden coldness, though he saw no wind moving the tree tops. Everything ended. There must be some mountain peak somewhere in the distance, there must be a point to the climb, something that they were trying to get to, something he was supposed to see.
Maybe a shrine? An old mountain hermit? A cave with paintings hidden within? Wasn’t there a point to this? There had to be an end, a place where he could rest his back against a tree and fill himself with slow deep breaths for hours and let his heart rest and his shirt dry.
“But I… can’t take…. much more of this,” his voice sounded desperate, “the… climb…. is almost… vertical… from as far…as I can tell… I’m… going to… fall… over… soon!”
Again the small laugh, almost like a bell, so light, filled with such melody. He didn’t feel offended when he heard it, it was not mocking or harsh, it felt like the sound of a child, innocent and open.
“Don’t worry, you’re fine. One step. Then another. Then you will need to take another. Feel the chain that binds us together and keep breathing. Keep moving.”
For a moment he felt nothing, no pain, no heavy breathing that burned his throat, just a calmness that seemed white and smelled of flowers.
“ahhhhh,” he moaned. A ripping pain in his legs consumed everything. He looked at the tall pine trees on either side of the path. He envied them. He wished he could stand still, adding his shape to their ranks. Just a moment of stillness, a moment to let a cool breeze wash over him and wipe away the rivers of sweat. He wanted to scream and turn around. He wanted to walk downhill, anywhere but up. Down to where he could find a car or a ride or a drink of water, perhaps a ham sandwich. He wanted to close his eyes and take a nap, to let his body rest and recover from this incredible strain. He wanted to do anything but this, but he felt the chain, he felt it wrapped around his heart, and he put one foot in front of the other, following the sound of bell-like laughter.
“Keep coming, the path continues this way.”

The Attempt

The school is closed on this early Sunday morning. The imposing shapes of the administration buildings stand silent in the background, and just a vague sense of silenced authority finds its way to the parking lot. On this weekend, as with all weekends, there are no cars in the lot, and the recently paved black asphalt is the perfect floor for an education without curriculum and standardization. This is the self-created flat-land of trial and error. The place where there is only will and peer pressure and broken bones and the decision to try it again.

Two dozen teenagers are gathered on the periphery of the asphalt, close to the sidewalk that wraps around it like a thick barrier. They stand there, patient and attentive, but with their hands on their own skateboards, ready in an instant to step into the sacred space.

In the center of the lot are metal rails and obstacles meant to be jumped onto or over, or coasted against. They have brought them here, carried in backpacks and bicycles, easily assembled and built for the moment. These are self-imposed obstacles, and they’re here to be used. To hit, to land, to wail against.

In the center is a young man. His slim-fitting black pants do nothing to prevent him from attempting another trick. He has tried it over and over, weekend after weekend. Sometimes he gets it. Sometimes he pushes himself with his right leg and rolls over the asphalt gaining speed until he is just a few feet from the metal bar. Then he puts a little more weight on the back tail of the board and uses his right foot to push the wooden board up just a little higher. Sometimes he gets it. Sometimes he makes it to the rail and then falls off. Sometimes he makes it to the rail and grinds the bottom of his board against it till it ends. Sometimes he even lands on the ground with both feet on the board. Sometimes he falls off halfway through. After all the attempts, he has still not got it quite right, not enough to be consistent. So he tries it again.

His loose black T-shirt billows with the force of the wind. This is the moment. The gathered on-lookers watch him, and though he has made it to the rail, nearly to the end, he looses his balance. His arms are still out to the sides for balance, his right foot tilts awkwardly on the board, just about to fall off the platform completely. His right foot is bent and raised slightly towards his chest. He knows what’s coming, and he smiles.

The trick has failed. There will be a fall, he will have to roll as he always does and duck his head, and just as he feels his entire body shifting with gravity, he smiles. Another attempt that has failed. But after the fall, he will try again. There will be a line of guys, they’ll attempt the same trick. And he’ll be standing there, watching them, as they watch him now. As he waits for another turn, he’ll watch their footing, the speed with which they approach the rail, the timing and pressure on the nose of the board. He’ll watch it all, looking for another subtle movement to use and push him along. It’s balance, timing. Above all, it is will. There is so much to remember and execute, he has to do it within seconds. If they are watching him from the sidelines, they’re learning from his mistake, just as he learns from them. He smiles. It was a good attempt, another jump into the unknown, taking all the knowledge he could remember and use. And though he jumped, though he ground the wheels for a few feet, it just wasn’t right. When he falls, the sun will still be shining. The clouds will still be scattered. He will be one jump wiser. If he can just remember it all, he can try it again.

For the brief moment, he is suspended, not quite the victor, not quite the fallen. He knows his mistake. He smiles and waits for the crash.

The Question

There has been a lifetime without understanding. A simple word. As though words were simple. As though a mere string of letters could ever begin to describe the shifting of something so subtle. Uttered, spoken, shouted with disgust, thought of with envy. A word. The simple word. The complex word. The question remains, what is it? The study has given me more questions. The statements, the answers, the thoughts, the ideas…they have all fallen, one by one. 2,4 ,6, 12, 16…the understanding has fallen, there never was an understanding, just the knee-jerk recollection of the letters.
How many more words are there? How many more ideas…how many more things that are stored up with no real study, with no real questioning? There is a lifetime of rusty accumulation. A lifetime of words, a lifetime of supposed understanding and usage. I ride the wheel and I am left holding an empty bag. The wind blows and I hear an echo. I truly don’t know. I have never known. Each thought is an elusive grasp into the fog of truth.
For what is truth? What is understanding? What is power? Traces run along the ground, I run my fingers along their trail. But where do they come from and where do they go? I look forwards, backwards, I call to my friend… “where are you?” there is no answer, just another gust of wind.
I have been listening to the sound of wind, the sound of dust hitting a window over and over. I have listened to its bell for three decades. I have called to it, played with it, danced with it…I have never known it. I have never looked beneath that skirt, never studied the shape of the long first letter, the curve of the last. And I haven’t looked in. I haven’t felt the muddled ball that whirls in a fog of letters and symbols and blue and black. I think I see traces, I think I can poke it…and maybe, maybe…but I look into the distance with squinted eyes. I look out and know that the earth is covered in fog and letters dance in the wind and my fingers are covered in slime and my mind is coated in an even thicker sludge.
First, I will need to scrape the green ooze off. First, I will need to sit with the stillness, the evaporated shapes, the missing thoughts. This is not ignorance, this is the understanding that I have never held between my fingers.

Octave

She was in the 400 quad, a cluster of classrooms in the shape of a square donut, each room’s door facing the cement courtyard outside that was marked with small patches of green grass in the process of turning yellow. It was the quad for math and chemistry, the quad where she had mostly learned to tune out and endure with open eyes but shuttered attention. Inside Mr. Payne’s classroom were six rows of steel legged chairs topped with a single piece of plastic that acted as both backrest and seat bottom. Six rows began five feet away from the blackboard and six chairs behind it stretched towards the back wall. Whether chosen or assigned, the chairs in the back tended to be filled with the failing and apathetic. Whether by design or happenstance, the tendency seemed to move through those back chairs like an angel feeding on determination and understanding. It was in one of these seats where she sat, just two chairs away from the back wall. It was true, she did not want to be there. She did not want to be in this small classroom, not in this sprawling school, not chained as she felt she was. She wanted to run through open fields and chat with runaways on the streets of Venice and splash in the ocean that beat against quiet rocks only an hour away. But she was complicit in her own constriction, driving everyday to this place, walking her body to each required class, coming back after lunch, the same routine each day until she couldn’t stand it and she would purposely drive past Indian Hill Blvd and keep on going till she hit the 10 freeway, then she let intuition guide her along cemented veins and to the strange encounters and mysteries that were waiting in the distance.
But most days, she found herself in Mr. Payne’s classroom. She occupied her time in many ways, but always aware of the slow moving second hand on the wall. As always, the man wore black running pants to school and paired it with a white T-shirt and unzipped running jacket. The material of his pants made a swishing sound as he walked and the elastic waistband accentuated his bubble butt. On top of the pants, around his waist, he accessorized with an overstuffed black leather fanny pack that bulged in the center and drooped down at a point, looking like a extra large penis. She saw him pull something out of it only once, she watched him curiously as he dug in deep for a calculator. It was his teaching style to turn his back to the class and work out math problems on the blackboard, mostly talking to himself in a slightly louder voice that if she paid attention, she could understand. But she didn’t care enough about it to weed through the gauze.

She had come back a few months ago from six weeks in Italy and she had been electrified ever since. Although she sat like a self-imposed prisoner, she let her mind drift and her hand draw. She brought her sketchpads to class, Mr. Payne’s and others, no teacher ever asked her to stop. She did what she called, “stream of consciousness” drawings. She was in the habit of using either blue or black ink pens and she would start by putting her pen to the paper. She would allow her hand to move, making a mark. She would just watch her hand, like watching a foreign object with a mind of its own. The pen would touch the white and it would all begin. She let her hand expand on the ink marking. Her mind would quiet and she would watch it all, her hand moving with quick intelligence. Lines turned into bulbous shapes and then those bulbous shapes expanded into other worlds. For many months she had let her hand move and work, turning mistakes into shapes and two dimensional movement.
She had done it enough times that she realized a particular process would always occur. She would begin the drawing, then at a particular point within the life of the piece she would come to the “uncomfortable stage,” the place where the drawing was only a rough outline of what was to come. There were forms, but none were finished. Sometimes she would step out of herself and look objectively at the paper. Seeing it this way, she would see scribbles and lines and messy ink markings. But this was also the stage of profound trust. The stage that always came but which also ended. She would dive back into the piece then, watching her hand, letting her body carry on, moving as it wanted, marking as it liked. She knew, very, very deeply, that the uncomfortable place was part of the process, a place to travel through that would end in delight and something she could never have planned.
Time and again, she would reach the uncomfortable stage and she would keep drawing, turning the page to the left or to the right, sometimes turning it upside-down until she saw a form or shape she recognized and then her hand would start expanding on the vision; and when there was nothing recognizable, she was content to create shapes that danced and twirled in on themselves. The uncomfortable stage was never the end, it was just the small hurdle, the gap that required patience to swim though, and for many years she trusted that knowledge.

But like a stone battered by a single drop, she eventually forgot the process, forgot the necessity of the uncomfortable stage, the same one that would occur over and over with each piece. Sometimes she would still draw, but she would hit the uncomfortable stage and get stuck. She would look at the piece of paper with critical intentions, through the eyes of another and she would see something ugly and unclean and unfinished. At this stage she would stop, thinking once again that she had failed. And she hit the wall over and over, always thinking that she had forgotten something. That she had forgotten how to draw or had lost inspiration…but she had forgotten the process. She stopped picking up pens and looking for paper and letting her hand take the reins, she thought that drawing was something that had come and gone, just like the force Bob Dylan had talked about in an interview she read a long time ago. It was something that had come in, from another place, from a place without words. It went through her, and now, she could not get back there.

And after many years of wandering a desert made of angst and tears and open questioning, she learned again about the uncomfortable stage, she learned another way to understand the gaps within the process. She looked at the intervals within the octave, the places to easily fall and be derailed, and she remembered that she had once recognized this interval when she had no name for it, and she had intuitively known that it was something that needed to be crossed with passion and zeal. And now, with a new language, she could begin again. It would all start with a new DO.

Climbing Aboard

Staring brightly into the sky, they dreamed of rainbows that never ended, of colored trails that flew around the earth like great open freeways of possibility. The singular road forked with smaller trails and disappeared over bridges and down pixie-dust covered tunnels. Rainbows arched in the sky like Becky had once described over a pipe of psychedelic grass and created concentric circles that looped back in on themselves before branching off into the distance that was lit with the hope of red and green and purple. The roads moved like pretzels and clovers and dove in on themselves, leading to other planes where rainbows were called by other names and seen with different eyes and painted with other colors. They stared at the rainbows from the ground, their necks pinched and eyes wide with the energy of amazement. How would they ever find a ladder big enough to reach the road?
They just needed to get to the lowest point on the road, but even that was close to the hawks that coasted the sun drenched sky. Until now, they had only heard rumors of this road, great yarns overheard in pubs and simple lines read in old books. But the storm clouds had opened one morning as they walked home in the quiet hours of a new day and as white gave way to the awaiting blue sky, they saw the rainbow highway. They stood at the bottom, standing just under the lowest dip of the road they could see, the spot that they just might have a chance of accessing if they could figure a way up. Bright speckles of light moved on the colored current.
There were large wooden ships and nearly invisible shapes that expanded and contracted like dancers. No one spoke, but they all wondered how to ascend. Just how did anyone get started? How can you get from here to there? From where you stand to the place of your dreams? From present reality to the farthest goal, to the unknowable without shape? To the places where dreams smoke and speak in other tongues, where creation is in the simmering pot, the golden cauldron tended by a silver spoon. Just how do you get from here to there?
Out through the black hole of a sparkling tunnel came a ship. There was the silhouette of a person, a young man along the side of the helm who looked to the landscape below while his right hand was raised to his eyes, blocking the gleam of the sun. His head was slightly lowered, scanning the ground patiently and then looking out towards the horizon. He looked out as though expecting nothing, as though he had looked out into the distance for a thousand years, seeing nothing but birds and water. As he passed along the lowest dip in the colored road his body twitched as he saw them, “Do you want to come aboard?” he shouted to them through cupped hands. “Yes!” they shouted in unison. They didn’t know who he was, they didn’t know were the ship was headed, but as the boy threw down the braided rope, they grabbed a hold tightly and started to pull themselves up using strength they didn’t know they had.

The Boy Who Couldn't Read

He came though the door angry. Right away she could see the annoyance, not hidden at all behind his brown eyes. He didn’t make eye contact with her and he sat down with 18 years worth of sleep in his bones. While she had waited for him in the small, windowless room, she looked at the inspirational quotes and life suggestions taped to the wall. Probably hung there by another person who was a shadow of their own truth, a shadow of what they had allowed to die decades before. The quotes were truths and good advice, like “never give up,” but they had the mark of store-bought supplies, simple institutional decoration that came without the faintest hint at how to achieve such a noble goal.
The room in which they now sat was just slightly bigger than a closet, able to accommodate a small rectangular table and three plastic chairs, the hard chairs found in institutions. Each day she sat in there, the room always seemed too small and dirty, always smelling like old banana peels and wrappers stained with ketchup and a place whose standards were close to the floor. This was an institution, a school hidden in the far corner of an industrial park, where teenagers came, after failing out of every other public school. Its rooms were filled with people one fight away from juvenile hall. They were kids who screamed “Fuck you, man!” down the hall as they walked to the bathroom, kids who acted like they were being wronged by every teacher and administrator there. They came with attitudes and chips that had knocked over their shoulders and the assumption that they already knew everything, that this was just a place that they had to endure. The spark of curiosity had vanished, long ago, it had laid down and submitted to more simple plans. The guys wore large white shirts and baggy pants with the price tags still hanging from the seams, the girls sat on benches next to the basketball net and watched the boys play. They could hardly walk in their high heels and tight pants and looked like they were just waiting to be fucked, as though their only benefit to humanity was the hole between their legs which was waiting to be filled.
The small room had a student-painted mural of the golden gate bridge on one wall. It had smears of dirt and speckles of an undistinguishable substance covering its lower half. High above, close to the ceiling, were pictures of the cursive alphabet and more inspirational advice. She wondered if anyone ever looked up and read them. Did they resonate with anyone for a moment before being quickly forgotten?
The boy next to her certainly did not resonate with the message. He was just over eighteen and still struggling to read words like “was” and “should” and “through.” He had a medical condition which caused both his eyes to twitch, they moved like little ping pong balls stuck in his head, and because of this, he had a hard time reading. And even though he couldn’t read and even though he needed all the help he could get with his vision, he refused to bring his glasses. Each day he would arrive at his tutoring session and say he forgot them, just as he forgot his entire backpack and little notebook. He held the books an inch from his face and he would still mix up letters. She wondered what motivated him to come at all. Why did he get on the train and ride for twenty minutes each early morning?
He struggled with almost every word of the first sentence of the short story. Four words into the first paragraph, he had already uttered “I don’t know” and thrown up his hands in an expression of annoyance more than a handful of times. The words he couldn’t read were ones they had begun practicing months ago when she got him a small notebook of flashcards so he could study the sight words at home. Since the day she brought it, he never remembered to bring it again.
After trying unsuccessfully to sound out the fourth word, he excused himself without looking at her. He left for a couple minutes and she drew a small curving doodle with her pencil as she waited, it looked like the inner frond of a fern. When he came back, he brought a small Styrofoam cup of water with him and placed it on the table. He started reading the first sentence again, already forgetting the first couple of words he had sounded out. He made another gesture with his hand, as if to say, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” She leaned back in her hard plastic seat and looked at him, he stared at the page.
“Do you want to learn to read?” Her voice contained tinges of skepticism.
He looked up. “Well yeah, I do.”
“But I can tell you’re not practicing at all, you still aren’t remembering words we went over months ago, the ones we put in the notebook.”
When she had first given him the notebook, he had been very appreciative, he had carefully written down words in his neatest handwriting, he acted like it was precious and thanked her again and again. But it was obvious he hadn’t looked at it since, maybe it was lost with his glasses and backpack and anything else that could actually help him.
“Because, you know, I can come here every week and we can read for an hour and a half, but it’s not enough, you’re really not going to learn unless you practice and memorize the words on your own, it’s really up to you. Right now you’re acting like you don’t even want to be here. I’ve only been coming because you said you wanted to learn to read.”
“Yeah, I do, but it’s hard, I read sometimes with my social worker, but we do different things all the time. And hey, I thought you were supposed to come on Monday!”
“Well, I couldn’t make it Monday, but that’s why I’m here now…and what do you mean, like sometimes you practice reading and sometimes math with your social worker?”
“Yeah, lots of different things, mostly math.”
She didn’t understand what he was saying exactly.
“Well, all I’m saying is that it has to come from you, if you don’t want to learn, it’s not going to happen, no amount of help or tutoring will help unless you practice, it has to come from you. You need to want to learn and make the effort.”
He looked at her. “You know, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. I’m sorry, I don’t want to waste your time.”
He looked at the short story with a small burst of renewed interest. It took them an hour and a half to read two paragraphs. He had had bouts of enthusiasm before, she was not confident any pep talk was going to make a difference. She would know next week if he had problems sounding out the word “found.” His effort, or lack thereof, would be obvious then.
She knew that there was a part of him that really wanted to learn to read. Maybe it was the part of him that made the effort to get up with the sound of the alarm and put on some clean clothes and get to the train station. But the rest of him, the other 99 percent, got to school and sat down and was angry at the teachers, rude to the other students and made a day of possible learning into a failed effort. He let his days slip by and, when it was time for a tutoring session, he came up with reasons to be angry and annoyed and resistant to practice. No matter how much she wanted him to read, the true desire and effort would have to come from him. It was his journey.
A guide can do nothing without a sincere and constant effort from the voyager. Without such an effort, all help is precious seed poured into a gaping hole in the ground. Nothing will ever grow. Nothing will ever flourish.

Skeleton Memory

I saw the skeleton in her face. Blue eyes turned into black holes of the dead. A skull in a cave, resting on the long lost path. She sits in front of me now, breathing, moving just slightly. In the left eye I see something strong, in the right, something more caring; as a whole, when my eyes relax, there is something else. Softness.
And the skeleton emerges. And I feel the enormity of death. The ever-present that can shift this space in seconds. Every breath, a precious gift that I never respect. Every tear shed in identification, a wasted moment, a bit of energy expelled in clear ejaculation. But the tears slide down my cheeks. In identification, in understanding, in fear, in relaxation. I see myself, a girl, sitting in a garage, looking at another girl.
Nothing ever has happened.
Nothing ever will happen.
They are looking at each other. They’ve been this way for a while. Thirst, sore limbs. My head feels crooked. My nose drips. The skeleton. What will I feel on my deathbed? Held down, moments from my last breath, will my mind worry about the roommates, the sex, the jealousy? Will I go over and over the pains? The suffering? The weirdness? What will be the regrets?
The wasted time…the wasted time…the wasted energy…the un-given love…the useless ideas and thoughts I used to distract myself from the Real. The light comes. The darkness arrives. Where is my place? My numbers…are they shifting? The body, the vehicle for the unseen, it holds all of the Real in its withering, useless grasp. The kisses, they were wonderful. The beautiful chance to learn something beyond the normal circles of consumption and death.
Why, as I’m alive, as I’m breathing, do I choose to liter the path with the glittering junk of machine waste? The path is silvery and elegant, yet it passes through the most difficult of lands. Through jungles of wicked forms, through the dirtiness of a consumed mind; into the depths of purple sheets and slithering leg-less animals. I crawl, simple and mute. To death, I crawl.
Each day, a chance at something high. And each day, I push us back into the land of machines, pink and brown, pale and slimy…this must be the landscape I desire. The realm of my birth. Ahh, but a voyager in the hollowed space of a small Jewish girl. She cries often. She worries and frowns, finding herself in the strangest of places; where the fog rules the weather, where men love more than once. Where the energy of the city is still palpable in the moist night air.
The woman that laughs, high and explosive. The man that makes her smile, that pushes her into tears. She takes the bait…each time, she takes it and swallows. Diving far, fast, into the murky water, blue and dark. Thick with ocean weeds and colorless fish. I go, in search of mermaids. They told me she was there. Waiting on a golden rock. But it is you, beautiful love, with your black curls and dark knowledge.
Allow me to love you, if I know how. Permit my ugly childish ways, for I know nothing. My death is near, I fear its greatness.
Nothing ever has happened.
Nothing ever will happen.
I fear the nothingness that I sense. My numbers…endless? Or just definite? This body, easily squashable, you know what will remain. I almost grasped it. I stared out the window, no words, no thoughts, just the strangeness that swept over me…the numbers, the unchanging code. Can I surrender? Can I sacrifice myself to understand? Can I let go so I may begin to truly learn? May I keep breathing, so I may try again tomorrow.

Effort

"...'Cause I’m a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride, and I’m wanted…wanted, dead or alive…I’ve seen a million faces, and I’ve rocked them all."
In a famous monster ballad from the eighties, Bon Jovi declares rock n’roll triumph. In a moment of time, he was the king of a legion of fans.
But it’s the slightly high pitch voice of a little boy who’s singing today, the old song brought to his attention by music-oriented video games. He’s open enough to sing in front of his older brother and thankfully the judges of American Idol aren’t there to comment on the vocals; but I was…and it was horrible.
To be able to put every ounce of attention, emotion, and effort into every note of a song creates MUSIC. I saw a little boy slouched on the couch, holding the microphone up on his stomach, reading the lyrics off the TV screen, and that’s how it sounded.
He sounded dead, flat, and uninspired. It was as much effort as he might spend kicking off his muddy boots.
As my beautiful friend says, "anything worth doing, is worth doing right." This goes for singing karaoke, washing dishes, brushing your teeth or a thousand other activities. To do anything well, one must put in effort.
The result will probably not be perfection, but it will be a thousand times better than with none. Glasses will be clearer, teeth will be cleaner and notes will have a better chance of being hit. Intention is good, it’s a first step, the boy wanted to sing; but intention needs to be followed by effort, it’s what carries intent into a state of action.
Heart-full action can be felt, it has a quality that is alive, vibrating and full of energy.