Afternoon's like these don't come around too often anymore it seems. Perhaps it's my usual schedule that keeps me away from the house until after the sun has set. Maybe it's winter's slow but impending approach. The silence in the house is hinted with the somber tones of loneliness, yet there is a conviction to it. It's more than silence. Through the jaded facade, it's peacefulness. You just have to let yourself see it. Let yourself feel it. The late afternoon sun is streaming through the southern windows. Everything it touches turns to gold. Where the silence and sunlight meet, there is perfection. A perfect harmonization - union - of two forces that often go unnoticed. Our lives carry us away every second. We operate on auto-pilot for the most part. Too busy to take a minute and notice. Too scared to confront our fears. Too lazy to come in to the present and allow ourselves to just be. Too content in our miserable well-worn paths. Misery is comfort these days. There's too much effort that goes into doing nothing. Allowing ourselves to come into balance is tedious. Perhaps the force of gravity has been tweaked over the years and our whole equilibriums are in a perpetual state of flux and conflict and we could never find our balance anyway. I don't know.
My dreams have been consistent as of late. Memories from my past converge with the unanswered questions I grapple with today. I'm searching, searching, searching. Every night I come up empty-handed, and every morning I feel exhausted. "Just let it go," I tell myself. Sometimes in my waking life my brain rushes - surges - back and forth through old scenes. It zips back, speeds forward, juts left, angles right, and comes to a jarring stop just shy of any resolution. And while I continue to search for answers to some things, I chuckle during those moments where I realize that point in my life, in the grand scheme of things, was so trivial and fleeting. I almost utter out loud, "Now what was her name?"
I've waited through all of the transitions in my life since August when I returned from my solo bicycle ride around Lake Superior for the perfect thoughts to enter my head in order to write my final post to this blog. As always life swept me away, and in the chaos, every other unresolved thing comes bursting through the doors screaming, "Don't forget about me! Don't forget about me!" All this commotion and noise distract me from the peace (and misery) of that ride. As I have explained to people recently, it was the most awesome misery I could have ever imagined. Every part of me hungers for that feeling again. Unless one has experienced similar, it's hard to even put it into words.
The last year and a half since I started this blog has seen a tremendous amount of change. Change came in the form of new experiences, doubt, fear, realizations, epiphanies, heartache, heartbreak, growth, healing, health, learning, discovering, revitalization, remembering, honoring, emerging, balancing, resolving, conquering. I'm sure the list could go on. The point is, no matter how much I think about what it was like to travel back to my birth country in August 2009, or ride my bike around the largest body of fresh water in the world this past August, out of the moment, they are memories that cannot be captured in rewind. To try and "recap" such life-changing experiences would feel wrong. There is no summary. Instead, I sit in the dimly lit dining room of my house, typing out these last words of this blog, watching the fading afternoon light. Just as my dreams allow me to remember and relive parts of my life with such vividness and clarity, so too shall this blog provide me and whoever else, a glimpse back into the many moments that have allowed me to be born into this one moment of the purest presence and clarity about where I've been, and where I am right now.Tomorrow? Who knows...
