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TWO CANVASES OF MEMORY AND HOPE
Saturday Mar. 28, 2015
I try to understand.
I doubt my life will be longer because I search for understanding.
But better …
Not to explain to anyone else, but simply to understand. For me …
Explaining?
Not my job.
Understanding, knowing my own driving forces seems incredibly important to happiness, purpose, value and expectations – within myself only.
I feel no urge to find anyone else’s answers, no need for Hawking-esque universal unifying theories.
Just my own.
And you? Well, you should find your own.
What I know, AND what I don’t know – began as two blank canvases.
First?
I’ve barely made a dent. One corner.
The second I see, covered. Complex detail.
Close your eyes.
I’ll bet you see reverse of that.
Because we see ourselves as experienced, wise.
Second canvas, easily rationalized, painted at all corners with plenty between. As if having seen this world, learned of the world, is somehow knowing life.
In my last breath, 150 years from now (I’m such an optimist), I’ll still be asking more of myself.
What will you be asking for?
What is important – more doing, or more knowing? More talking or more listening, more feeling (what we touch) or more feeling (who/what touches us)?
Tranquility found, here.
In some stranger’s kitchen, looking out at property next door with warmth breezing over me reminds me of childhood summers, kool-aid stands, trees to climb …
Not a care. Was I six or seven?
I know it wasn’t eight, because that winter when I was eight, we moved from that place here I see that memory (I have not visited that one in fifty-five years, until just now).
Mark Kolke
P.S.: a little irony today. Earth day. And anniversary of Three-Mile Island meltdown …hmmm … Waking up. Pitch black silence, broke by crowing rooster. Magnificent natural alarm clock has awakened all the birds. Earth day indeed.
column written/ published from Paia, Maui, HI
morning walk: 16C/61F at 5:30AM – at first light I drove the road to Haiku and back, great colour on the water, on the West Maui Mountains; then I walked Baldwin State Park beach. Amazing, within such short distances, the sand and character of beaches varies so widely. Hardly anyone there, except for hundreds of massive (guessed by the size of their burrows) who took up residence on that beach as the tide went out.
Reader feedback:
CENTER MY UNIVERSE
Thanks for sharing the waves. I could almost hear them as the washed over the sand. You might have been a surfer in another life as it is the waves rolling in that matches the heartbeat of a surfer. There is something so universal in that action that makes one feel they are indeed a part of something bigger. GW, Bon Wier, Tx.
Hi Mark, I've been following your musings for a couple years now. You and I were matched on eHarmony and sent a few messages about writing, but since we were 600+ miles apart, we never connected. I hope you are getting closer to finding Ms. Right--from you musings it seems you would like this. Since I follow your blog, I thought you might want to look at mine. I lost my dad a few years ago and I know you lost yours more recently, so you might enjoy or relate to my first few posts at: jmaydaze.com, JM, Seattle, WA
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