I start this with an unformed theme in mind. Knowing that these
words will be directionless, yet knowing as well that something needs
to be said.
These words want to describe the way the full moonlight cast itself
across the small ocean in the backyard of my small world tonight… like
the light of the distant fisherman’s lantern in the shallows.
The way the water cast its shimmering surface upon itself again and
again like new skin, or the way the sea spray cast itself upon me like
a caress. The way the lights of the homes on the hills cast
themselves out across the distance as though to speak their place and
significance in a small sky. Or the way my thoughts tried to cast
themselves into the center of something they can not nor could
never grasp.
But the thing that gets caught up in all of this is not the words
which too cast themselves out across the screen, the page, the empty
spaces of this small white universe. The words that cannot catch,
capture, grasp. Spilling out like the sea on the reef.
What is caught in the net of the night is what words cannot describe.
It is a fleeting sensation like the first glimpse of a sunset through
trees, or a cloud swept mountain, or the passing eyes of a stranger –
before the mind can register, before the thought: “Beautiful!”. It is
the undefined moment. It is the end of labels. It precedes the birth
of language. It surpasses it.
And I find myself in conversation saying: “It’s amazing how easy it is
to forget the little things like this, in the caught up of life.” The inverse echo of a theme: “In every moment there is such richness,if you only look for it.”
And in my mind I think: I do not stop to appreciate enough. And in my
mind I go back over those moments and places when the unlabeled beauty
of a place — a moment in the midst of an indescribable became the
everything of a life:
The shore of a rainswept beach where the river bled and the green sand swallowed
everything, the limestone waterfall with its easter egg rocks, the greek lighthouse in the night I lost myself, that swollen river hugging the firefly field. How many places became a relationship? How many moments define a life?
Back in the context of the lives we create, I find my keys gone. And searching frantically for them — happily lost — I remember in my frantic search what I had only just reminded myself not to forget.
I remember music. I remember the page. I remember words. The lines
of a favorite poem: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master. . . Lose
something everyday”. I lose what I’ve come to know. I remember what
night means before the word “night”. Or sea, or moon. I remember the
feeling of things. I remember passion.
Give yourself away. Lose yourself, lose yourself, do not stop! Leave
everything behind.
I sit here losing money over lost keys and losing words into a
directionless letter writ to no one and losing time into a small life
that was always lost, or always wanted to be.
The beauty is in the mystery. Your life is defined by the undefinable moments.
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