Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

...had to acknowledge, while snowbound at my mom’s house for the weekend...by the time I’d shoveled all the way to the road, was too tired to go anywhere...that an all too familiar and highly inconvenient wintertime guest had most definitely arrived, and was making itself at home...

...a good blogger friend made a request...
...if aaah leeeeave heeere tomooooorrrooowww,
wouldjoo stilllll rememmmber meee...
...actually, that wasn’t it...she suggested the titles and scattered themes of that previous post reflected the snowstorm outside...and might each be allowed to stop and grow...perhaps when the sky calmed down....but, as tends to be the case this time of year, my mind seems stuck in a different kind of weather pattern...more a persistent, turbulent mass of grey...occasionally letting loose a bit of sleet, hail, or drizzle in hopes of refreshing the landscape so something might take root...perhaps opening now and then to tantalizing glimmers of light...but not for long...making coherence difficult....though metaphors mix freely...maybe hoping for some hybrid vigor...

...then, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from all the yoga and mindfulness stuff, it’s to see all that more clearly...as not so much some mythical all-consuming force of darkness, but a lonely, wounded ghost...like Bruce Willis in that movie...and one perhaps I need to learn to talk to...

...using that Simon & Garfunkel lyric to title this post took about as much cleverness as I can muster at this point...really...but can’t look at it without the mind wandering off toward Dustin Hoffman walking through that barren airport at the beginning of The Graduate...homeward bound, to suffer endless questions about his future for which he has no answers...as well as to receive priceless advice...

...I just wanna say one word to you...just one word...are you listening? Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it...

...forty-two years into that future, there’s an island of plastic trash the size of Texas floating somewhere in the north Pacific...countless gallons of a substance wars are fought over crafted into a near infinite variety of colorful, disposable items...making me wonder just how many plans were executed, how much human effort went into creating this incredible mass of worthless and increasingly toxic crap...

...in more lucid moments...the spaces between lengthy periods of utterly pointless web surfing...have been reading, for something like the fourth time, one of the best novels ever written...in which a whole lot happens, almost all of which, ultimately, turns out to be pointless....Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth...

...if there’s a point to all that...and I think there is...it’s that there are many paths from nowhere to nowhere...that striving and productivity have no inherent value...and what matters most...what forms the difference between cultivating abundant life and cranking out worthless crap...is from where, inside of us, our thoughts and actions grow...