Sliver

”Above all, we are water, mostly. It’s a com­mon fact, more than half. We are drops from sil­ver clouds far, far above, clouds them­selves that seem to have coa­lesced from noth­ing­ness. Bit by bit, day by day, through gut­ters and pipes and down­spouts, we are col­lected in rain bar­rels to become rip­pled, stag­nant, still, and unpotable. When the ves­sel ages and decays and its days are gone we will seep forth and seek again the low­est ground, the nat­ural path of our inher­ent humil­ity. With time, tenac­ity, and num­bers, we will carve canyons and shape worlds through our casual pass­ing. We will flow on, down and down, until the final drops of our egos join the vast and gleam­ing ocean, leav­ing us unmourned and unsung. At last.”

William Akin, What A Fool Believes (Blog: Smoke Sig­nals, http://​super​com​mon​.word​press​.com/)

There I am, lit­tle, chew­ing my banana. I am think­ing, I won­der if every­one who eats a banana tastes it this way? Maybe I am the only one? I would think that the retarded kid in my school (polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness had not retooled the vocab­u­lary yet) prob­a­bly tasted it dif­fer­ent, and I would feel a lit­tle sick imag­in­ing what his banana tasted like. I felt ashamed about it too, like I was forc­ing bad tast­ing food into his mouth.

Rid­ing my bike, pass­ing under the boughs of over­hang­ing trees, and the mot­tled light look­ing like the light that hits the bot­tom of the swim­ming pool at noon, look­ing like fishes of light swim­ming on the bot­tom, only this is on the road and it has a green qual­ity, and it is beau­ti­ful. And I think I am the only kid in the world who gets to see that and the only one who thinks these things. I feel happy, exhil­a­rated, and alone with the secret won­der of the world.

Great writ­ing or great pho­tog­ra­phy or great art of any kinds brings these fleet­ing images to us all, so that we don’t feel so alone with the stun­ning beauty of life and the world. Being alone with aching beauty is as hard as being alone with the dull pain of sad­ness. It is the being alone part that I don’t do well with, no mat­ter what the feel­ing is. This is true in spite of my ten­dency to iso­late. When I read Will’s blog (quoted above: by the way, you should prob­a­bly stop read­ing this imme­di­ately and go read every entry on smoke sig­nals. seri­ously, great), I had that moment of con­nect­ing, of know­ing that my crazy lit­tle moments of ”know­ing” some­thing were like his moments. He writes of our ”inher­ent humil­ity”. I know this is truth, because I feel it vibrate all through me the way I feel an open tun­ing D major on a gui­tar vibrate through me. Try it. Read the words above and see if you feel the right­ness of our inher­ent humil­ity, our same­ness in our pass­ing and becom­ing the water that runs through the pipes, cre­ates canyons, goes unno­ticed. If you don’t get what I mean here it is likely the result of my inabil­ity to bring the point to light. Maybe try this…go for a bike ride, look for trees that span the road and clasp their hands over your head. Look for the light that dances off your spin­ning spokes like sparklers at noon on the fourth of July. Hold on to that feel­ing and come back and write about it or draw it so we all get it and so we have a reprieve from the gray lone­li­ness of liv­ing in search of con­nec­tion and so that we get up and dance and feel alive because we see each other, for real.