If you’ve ever cast in the dark you know we’re all driving a car with no brakes. The steering column doesn’t exist either but it’s more comfortable to think so and there are no second chances.
It’s all haphazard and random and accidental. And it’s all collisions.
Life blindsides us in everyway, like a fish taking in the night you never see it coming. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s so bad you’d damn every god in the sky; no life after death, just cold in the ground and forgotten.
But then I’ve stood waist deep in moving water for an entire night without a take; and an urban fireman lives tragedy that would make a soldier weary. A tour on the job lasts a career; in war a year and you’re home.
And I’ve stood waist deep in moving water for an entire night and had take after take and I never saw any of them coming I just felt their pull and landed them in my hands and in prayer.
Making sense of it all will drive you crazy so I’ve long taken to accepting things as they are and life as it is in the moment and on the moments terms, not those of modal verbs and the dreams of others.
So my dream has been mine alone, as it should. Like Harrison’s question of the dream being fiction or “that bruised and sorry word ‘reality,’ a condition we think we should chase and then trip ourselves over in the puruit”
Which ever it is, it is; and it’s beautiful both in its tragedies and celebrations. I’ve been partial to people and experiences I’ve loved regardless of the degree to which I’ve known them. And the tradegy witnessed during a career in busy Seattle fire houses has jarred me.
An old man in a rocking chair I’ll think with reverence on them all, even the ones that broke me for the oportunity to be broken open, as a wise friend suggested the heart shattering can do.
At its base it is an honest condition. In the dark without the illusion of daylight to confuse us. Without the myths of reality.
Led instead of leading.
Not waiting for a take but being available for it because when it happens, the take lasts forever.
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