Monday, July 02, 2007

"a dream may be the highest point of a life"

Here in the backwaters, all we do is sit and hold out hope for rain. We are always drinking whiskey out of plastic cups and looking for nature to even the score somehow.
I have found that you can never build on anything in this life; the sands are always shifting beneath our tenuous bedrocks of hope. The moon continues to haunt us through the night, long after we close our eyes and try to sleep. It seems like everything is marked only by loss, and in the end it is the only constant thing we know. I have a great suspicion that in the end, all of our dreams will be as imaginary as the band around the equator.

When the sun falls from the sky all I know is emptiness and disappointment. There a thousand bad tastes in my mouth every time I even start to think about the overwhelming sense of loss that permeates anything good that seems to have happened in this world. It’s not depressing, not the end of the world, just simply the way things rest at the close of the day.

I was riding my bicycle along the beach the other night, with the full moon shining over the Atlantic and following me like an arrow across the water. Right now I just want to be anywhere but where I am. If I could hide from God right now, if I could stop believing that there is something that can transcend all of this loss, then I would take the last train to nowhere faster than you could sell me the ticket. Facing the darkened sea that night I realized it looked like anywhere in the world but where I was, and that feeling sort of hit me just right.

God has us all, from the skeptic to the zealot, from the mystics and fools to the capitalists in their steel towers. In fact he is in all of them, bringing them closer in that unity to the pacific fury of the Eucharist. God is a dying leper in India as surely as he is anything else. I want to forget all of this loss, all of this emptiness, and just be content with the million unrequited loves that slowly paint the masterpiece that is my broken and uneven relationship with the world around me.