Waves Goodbye...

It's been almost a year since I've posted. I'm writing from Tsawwassen BC. I'm thinking about aging and a book I'm reading, The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit. I'm thinking about communication as a science, an act, an event and as art. I'm dreaming and running. I'm aching and yearning.

My visit home is almost over. Tomorrow I will board a plane which will bank into a broad curve out over the Straight of Georgia, 180° and head east towards my destination in India. Of course the prevailing winds may be from the East, in which case the airplane will take off inland toward the Frasier valley and the coast mountains.

I was recently asked why I would want to leave such a beautiful place. I firmly countered that there were many beautiful places on the Earth and I wanted to experience as many as possible. I felt it was a convincing argument at that moment, but now I wonder why anyone would ever want to board an airplane, to go rushing through the air in an aluminum tube from airport to airport, when they could be walking in the cool depths of the coast mountain forest, feet solidly planted on earth, moss or rock, or in a kayak on the water between the islands, scouting for orca, under their own power.

Then I think of lives of "quiet desperation" measured out in the zoo-space of grey cubicle walls, songs sunken to timid murmurs and freedom reduced to a consumer's choices, halved, halved and halved. People choose their own limitations regardless of context. Fear of freedom is paralysis in sunlight, the agoraphobia of starving mice in a field of wheat, skewered between desire and the deep blue sea.

So I command myself to use authoritarian control in the governing of my tentativeness, lest my hungry apathy sense a chink in my armor. The recipient of touch is sensitive like a dog sensing fear, discerning easily between hesitation and delicacy. So with the emotional tell, the slightest lag and the advantage is lost, dominance disintegrates, dissolves into itself like waves on a sandy shore, which are ever-redefining the area of contact. Their resonance lures me beyond the danger zone, where my confidence interacts with my fear, back out into the water to the open swell.


Now, however, I'm balancing on tippy-toe, flirting with buoyancy.