Solstice

Dec 29

An old man told me there was an old story that during the winter solstice time stopped.  Creation ceased and the world was merged once again with eternity-and conjoining with the infinite verities of timelessness, all things came to a standstill. Then, when the sun passed through the last hour of the night, it began to return to the world and as the first rays that were longer than before were shed, time began once more.

He told me it was an old story because obviously this can’t be true. The earth orbits the sun and seasonal markers such as the solstice and equinox were due to its procession. He told me it was an old story so that I would listen and ponder its meaning instead of writing off as a bunch of nonsense people believed in a less scientifically advanced age. His trick worked-I did think about and thought about it for a long time and often since he told me.

I usually think about it during the holidays that attend the solstice. Slight moments of reflection amid celebrations:; in between feasting and drinking and gifting. While gathered with friends and family. Outside the warmth and merriment, the sky is a sheet of hammered zinc. The trees are naked, revealing as they sleep disrobed all the space that was between them. Bare stones, brown grass. Life has descended into the earth.  A thing can be true without being literally so and in fact this lends it a greater and more relevant presence. As shortest day of the year arrives at its final wane and before it begins to fulminate once more, all things meet: what was once before and is remembered exists again, what has yet to be though undecided shows itself in all its myriad potential, and the present exists in the midst of it all but unknowable.

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Peter 1 comment

Open Ended

Sep 05

A story changes you when you hear it or read it or see it. It reaches inside of us and lets us see parts of ourselves that were always there, waiting to be seen. Another facet on occasion given light, sometimes, a hidden or lost coin within our souls, something of immense value brought into the field of our awareness. I’ve always loved a good story-both to hear it and to tell it. Whether it’s actually historical doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. When we go through good fiction you have lived it and it has been and is part of who we are-we are the ones who have lived and are here to tell the tale.

Good stories keep memory, telling us who we are and what the world is around us. The tale unfolds and its backdrop is reality, sometimes explaining itself, more often, it is, simply landscape, but no less beautiful for it having been so. The story is predicated upon what has preceded it, keeping up what he hold today, it will change again before tomorrow and  in its river like body, course on through to other times and places. The story keeps us going and we live inside of it. and are parts of it.

And so telling a story is a great responsibility because it defines-if only for a moment-reality. I’ve written events and seen them come to life, the print a strange talisman summoning forth through its letters and intention a cascade of people, situations, outcomes. The greater the story, the more the magnitude of what it becomes, opening like a vast blossom, a universal rose. Open ended, we all participate in what we’ve written and the stories that we were and become, shared are who we are.

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Peter 6 comments

Interconnected

Jul 09

The world around us makes sense if we look at it-but the question arises, did it make sense before we examined its parts and whole? We know the stories of stars, how they came to be born and how they will die. All determined by our exquisite mathematics in linear progression but there are always surprises and thus new iterations of the same old story.

Our lives no less than this. We find tales within ourselves, a meaning inside of events that on the face of themselves are a fusion of design and circumstance. I learned a long time ago that humanity remembers mythology but not history. Are our own lives, history in the personal, events in the small, no less? It is a difficult thing to extract narrative from event and to look at what has happened, is happening, will happen without our own projections, to stand aside and not only see matters from another’s view, but impartial, outside, like a Deist’s divine watchmaker who observes events without precipitating cause or outcome. Perhaps what happens in our lives, the world and the universe is both of a personal and impersonal nature. An extreme causes the appearance of its opposite. Things happen by accident but everthing happens for a reason. We foist meaning upon life when there is no inherent value aside from what we choose to see-but upon observing, the witness causes a shift, a change occurs and suddenly it is full of meaning. It means something to us, and that is of the greatest importance.

Everyone carries a universe inside of themselves, a personal reality shared when it is spoken of, written about, its likeness painted on canvas. The shared efforts converge and become a common reality, one in which we see ourselves and everyone else reflected-not always acurately, sometimes as though in a fun house mirror-and from this the world is made. Given this, surely the most important thing in the universe is each other-by knowing others we can know ourselves, a greater story of who we are because it is written by another, even distortions give insight and pause for reflection.  And so, everything is interconnected by our thoughts and our words.

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Peter 2 comments

Leaves Rustling In The Wind

Jun 02

My blog is a narrative of things I’ve done, seen, thought or experienced. I think it’s important to be sincere in expression. It makes the words flow in the order of their experience-which may or may not be linear. Memory and events are cut up some times, a montage of events because we think that way, connecting songs to memories or smells to experiences. It’s not in order of occurrence at all, but in order of impact with the foundations things that we may or may not, in fact, recall. And then we interface with other matters of our stories, myths and fables and secret identities (not just Clark Kent, but the Prince disguised as the pauper, the Princess enchanted into something else), destinies and callings. A fish brings a ring to us at the shore of  a lake, speaking clearly it lays whopping fates on us. We’re kind to old ladies who reveal that they are beings of great power. These matters are equal in value, and their memories overlap, whether they happened that way or not isn’t important, it’s what they mean to us.

But there are times we find not fit to blog. Omissions are made to spare the living, to spare the dead. There are so many things I would like to write about but decorum prevents me. The tragedies of others are unfit for strangers to bear in the pages of their texts. When someone anonymous dies, should we, in fact, try to make it pertinent and relate ourselves to it? When Memorial Day came and went, I wanted to scribe my own feelings on war, to say what I think about current conflicts and about the sordid past of man. But it seems a small thing to me-my own views, that is-I’ve never fought in a war. There’s nothing wrong with having an opinion and voicing it, in fact, it is admirable when people do. But I’ve read old essays and articles, editorials from before and after the fact. The men and women who have thought actions against other human beings were justified, only to find later that their words collapsed under their own weight.

The same holds true for other affairs. To be critical of the world means, all to often, that we spare ourselves subjection to the microscope, like a photo taken up too close where everything that is out of sort is there to see. Only-everyone looks that way through that lens. To that end, rather than engage in a matter offensively, I’ve often tried to keep a cool head and stick to the facts, to not let emotion bleed in and remain inviolate. Certain core positions are unassailable: the sanctity of human life, the transcendence of nature, the highest expression of love. And so, instead of throwing out my political views or religious beliefs (they’re mine, not anyone else’s after all, and surely everyone is entitled to their own) I want to share things that make the continuum of being, a common language that, being the property of all, is poetic in nature: a gibbous moon, the language of birds, leaves rustling in the wind…

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Peter 5 comments

Radio Tower

May 24

Writing in my blog I’ve endeavored to be honest, even when it’s painful, embarrassing. The revelations of personal weakness and failure along with bewilderment, fear, the emotions we all feel but would rather not admit to. I’d like to try and say it’s cathartic, but really, I get a secret wonder when I receive emails from others that have undergone similar rites of passage.  I try to write relevant things-that is, matters that are worth writing about. More often than not I fail to really get to the pith of the moment. The words on the page occasionally get close, but so many more times after I’ve written a post I feel that I came short somehow. My fiction even more so. Brilliant tales unwind in reels before my eyes, but when I sit down to make a commitment, to promise the story to memory for others to read, it fails to achieve the ideal formation that I feel it deserves. The story has iterations before its done-different versions of itself, alternate endings, evolutions of character. For reasons that I can’t understand I seem to be able to write memoir reasonably well-well enough that people will actually read it. But when it comes to fiction, I can’t seem to render the mundane and always have my heart in the fantastic. But life is fantastic-even though it’s mundane.

Case in point: A story came to me once, to write about two young men growing up in a small town. There is an intimacy and an oppression that comes with village life. Everyone knows you-but that’s the problem, you have an identity you can’t escape from. You always are who you once were, not who you are today and with that sort of binding you will never be who you really want to. I’ll admit it’s a little autobiographical, and its nuances strike home all the more for me since Facebook seems to have brought all the dramatis personae from my hometown back into my life, even if I’m not friends with all of them on FB, I see their profiles on other people’s lists and remember the weird and now poorly understood conflicts and drama from so long ago. The boys grow up in fractured families-the sort that would have been solidly middle class if their parents had stayed together, and in the confused daze of adolescence find their parents apart and sliding down the scale economically at the precise age when status and identity become so entwined. Like most youth, they take it at face value and with little reflection. Perhaps a little nihilistic self-destructive behavior like bad grades and mild substance abuse finds expression. That and raucous music and outrageous personal style.

Eventually, of course, the two boys go their separate ways upon adulthood. One leaves town. The other stays. During the course of their coming of age, they live together in a borderline bad part of town, living demented bachelor lives that feel more like those of feral lost boys than how young men were in times now past when people seemed to know themselves better and have more control. The borderline part of town abuts an industrial area, and a feature of the story that was to figure prominently was the flashing red beacon of a radio tower in the distance. A light like an all-seeing eye, a part of the landscape even though it was mand-made, the thing is somehow a silent witness, mute in its testimony it observes everything but does not judge. They’d wonder at it occasionally on late nights when they were out of their head. When they were younger and everything had to be funny, idiot joke stories encompassed its meaning, but as years pressed on, it became something more profound. All the more because no one else seemed to notice it but them.

Years later, the young man who left returns. Visits. They go out together and talk about old friends who are dead, or what happened to other friends-where they were and how they were. The women they were interested in once and what they looked like, who they wound up with or were without. Some of it is happy, a lot of it is sad and both have their own parts of melancholy regardless. Stories about school plays, the eclipses of the sun they remember over the years. The past is strange and familiar, the present strange and anonymous. It’s not all that bad for it being so. There is a sense that with the passing of time, things have flattened out, and even if we aren’t who we thought or hoped we would be, nonetheless, it was alright for what it was. It was, it was just being. That night, after carousing and the quasi guilt that accompanies it, he sees the light in the distance. Still there after all these years.

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Peter 4 comments