Fort Worden State Park
(Jazz Workshop)
She came striding along the road on what appeared to be her morning constitutional. Her attention split between the path she walked, and the beautiful scene of a summer morning on Puget Sound. She noticed me – sitting quiet and still, cross legged in the grass on a knoll high above her .
“Is there anything more beautiful!?”, she half-shouted with effervescent gestures toward Admiralty Inlet as it sparkled in the morning sun.
“Not much.” I answered from my perch above her.
She suddenly stopped, mid-stride as if remembering something, and she turned to face me. “…and they say there’s no God!”
She remained still just long enough for me to realize she was expecting some sort of reply.
“Who are ‘they’?” I asked.
She smiled, shook her head and strode onward, apparently finding something humorous, ironic, poetic or perhaps annoying in my reply, I really don’t know. But she didn’t respond.
Anyway, I was right:
There’s not much that’s more beautiful. Except grace.
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Fort Worden State Park
(Jazz Workshop)
I am ruined.
Ruined for song, ruined for sight,
I am ruined for passionate trysts in the night.
Since you came blue is not blue, but a pale imitation of the wide open skies.
The sky is not so big anymore compared with the wide open space you have created in my heart.
I long to tastesmellsee – but it reminds me of how much that I just can’t acquire.
Oh blissful desire.
Oh sweet, sweet longing!
I want to be in it, and I want it in me.
Perched here on the heights – between death and life – wedged between the past and the future, stuck tight. Right where you want me.
We are all of us such sleepy players in your orchestra.
Blithely moving heavy, drowsy fingers over the strings of our existence. All at once making noise, but so disconnected from you and from ourselves, we’re not even aware of the sounds we make. Is it no wonder that “music” is so rare?
But then – you wake us up. Over 20 years of sleep-walking, and all at once: There it all is! The sounds, the smells, the other players…and there you stand at the podium, ever-faithful.
A life-time jammed into the crack between what I wanted to be, and what you made me to be.
Jammed in the crack…that’s funny.
It’s like that writer Sam told me about. Our existence is a stage divided in thirds and we live most of it stuck between apathy and anxiety, held fast, un-able to move at all.
As the Brazil trip approaches, there is an “expected” increase in anxiety. Here I am. Lord, back to the “fear” question…back to ALL the questions.
I guess I feel your tug toward beginning THIS journey now…overlapping the beginning of Brazil with the end of the Jazz workshop….this is what’s on my mind right now:
Finding the more detailed layers within the answers you already gave me last year. Not as “dramatic” I would expect, but who knows? Answers that will be even more internalized – less for anyone else, more for me…well it’s ALL for me, but things that are less articulate-able…a higher magnification. Things that contribute ONLY to my BEING – things that are not directly related to teaching or even sharing…only good for being.
My questions and the answers I have thus far:
- Q. What am I afraid of? A. Being a disappointment.
- Q. What do I love? A. Creation/Creating.
- Q. What’s my real name? A. Something like Sam-Wise