Archive for 2020

Have you crossed your “Grand Canyon”? NM

Tuesday, May 26th, 2020

Captain 9
No, the photos are not accidentally placed…

“The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation”
~ Rebecca Solnit ~

Captain 13

Have I ever had a “Plan B”? No, there never was. I have been reminiscing a lot these days. Images from way back Elementary School, the silliness and hair rising aspects of my teenage years, the start of businesses, marriage, the birth of Lance, all in a bit too vivid details! I can transport myself to those minute moments while physically and mentally feel them. I can touch that present past as fantasizing I am riding my own time machine.  Must be age, must be the idling I am experiencing. Lonely at times I must admit, routinely going on with my nights and days even though I cannot say I am bored. I am good company with myself and yet more would be welcomed. At times! Temperamental, stubborn, thoughtful too often getting lost in my own fog, while fortunately and respectfully with an open mind towards other’s opinions and directions taken as I always joke “who in the world would put up with me?”. It is quite a balance while constantly jumping from one scale onto the other.

Captain 7

This, now, must be “plan B”. Has to be as I am living it. There is no hardship per say. The physical kind to be more precise.  Home, car, food, clothing, medical care, tolerable aches and pains here and there. Some what I always call “good people” surrounding me even if from a distance. The mind is fairly sane… What more can I ask for? I am not greedy! Yet, I am always wondering and asking myself “is this it?”. I mean seriously. We pass on through the years with so many twists and turns, so many plans and dreams and aspirations never knowing, never guessing that they just might not realize for just plain and simple Life’s reasons. No other than that, as we try and try some more. Disciplined, faithful with work, filling ourselves with those values I have just a few days ago written about, and sometimes, in an instant, as changes only take less than a second of realization, the bottom drops.

Captain 10

We tend to make sense of it all by deft mental acrobatics, deducing what we want from what we get, only to realize, and it is never quite clear whether this is a deep truth or a deep delusion, that the strange and unpredictable outcomes of Life might be what we desired in the first place. Or was it? Did we suddenly change our mind as a shinier fascination passes by us and allows us to catch a glance of it? We are not the conductor even if we are given that sparkling title tag… our grip on the controls will never be tight enough to pass under the finish line of our ambitions and aspirations. The goals are endless as are also our cravings.
Lance’s passing away was and always will be the milestone in my Life. A new banner was propped up with its writing still a blur I cannot define. A miscarriage of Life, aborted path, a cliff which was not supposed to be. There always will be the before and after. There was not throughout that era any mental acrobatics. It was not the result of a want. Far from it.

Captain 8

There is a scenario that has often ran in my mind. A fantasy from years past which has never left my imagination. On a beautiful sunny day, I think of a rider on his horse, many Moons ago headed North  throughout the great Plains. Nice flat landscape, green forests, non threatening trails, an easy ride and suddenly…
…“X%#&@!!!” the Grand Canyon… Can you just imagine his expression? How he felt? How the depth and the vastness of this improbable obstacle left him overloaded with emotions never felt before. How his jaws dropped down to his knees? I faced my Grand Canyon years ago. That day. I am still trying to get across it. I don’t think I ever will. I will take that challenge to my grave unaccomplished, but not for the lack of trying.

Captain 5

I mumbled somewhere at one time years ago without much of a literary prose “I am okay with it”.
Am I really? Was he? It was that one time when without a choice the transformative moment was not a desire, a wish, a dream, but only it’s opposite. The path we live ahead is infinite. Not finite, as neither of us will circle the past to rejoin the left hand while the right hand was pointing in the other direction.

Captain 14

I can’t wallow. The graph does plunge down at times, that linear representation loses its uphill trace plunging into a depression era. Some days are always better than others and some feel as the props of this stage have been forgotten in their storage. Everyone has left that scene on those days, even Friends are absent. To crawl uphill we must climb, it is a realistic truth, and so the valleys do exist as otherwise peaks would not be called as such and the flatland would never feed us that tenacity we need to wear while looking up even if fruitless, trying to reach and grasp that left hand.

Captain 15
We all have our Grand Canyon. We all are trying to cross it somehow. Slowly the Eastbound and Westbound paths disappear only leaving the Northbound and Southbound ahead and behind us. The sheer granite walls plunging are often not even in our vision, we just know they are there, real close and we are running out of ropes to take us up and down again.

Thank You

As I said, it is never for the lack of trying…

Stay well, stay safe…
Ara and Spirit
[R.I.P. 04/04/2018]

Classic Spirit