A Different Kind of Light

A new filter. A new renewed sense to replace dulled vision, muffled hearing, insipid taste and anesthetized touch. A “separate reality” as Castaneda called this out of the ordinary way of walking in the familiar world. That is what I need right now.

Why? I suppose there are a dozen reasons. I am aware of a few of the guests at my pity party:

The approach of summer lethargy and heat-related discontents.

The sucking vacuum and emptiness where the next writing project–blog, radio essay or newspaper bit–used to incubate.

The slack sails after Land’s Sake and feeling discontent about my part of it, though others appraised my delivery much higher than I did.

And there’s the surly dog (who has, thank God, finally turned the corner and is remembering her domesticated side.)

There is the sorry state of the world of men that make me ashamed to participate in humanity, with no real hope that we’ll ascend above the mud and slime and ever be who and what we might have been. And it really does not matter who wins in November, as they will only be the hood ornament on the CorporNation.

There are the crappy hands, seen in X-ray last week at the orthopedists, pointing to a second and this time dominant hand surgery probably in last September.

Point is, I’ve been inside this fish bowl before, seeing life through a glass, darkly, though never before at 64.

And always, eventually, something new and energizing has come along in years past to pull me back into the land of the enthusiastically living. A new challenge has provided a filter that made the ordinary interesting again.

I’m not waiting for it to find me. I know better than to think the world is going to fall all over itself to lay down a red carpet to success. But I also don’t know how to make such a thing, such a transformation, a rekindling happen.

It’s maybe a worse case of the blahs than most, since it has taken me two weeks to actually even write such garbage down in this journal. And how many times have I started blog posts or Facebook entries, and scrapped them half formed? I mean really, son, who gives a rat’s acetabulum?

So…taking the familiar view in this image, looking from the pasture back towards the barn and the barely visible house, and inverting the image–that was sort of fun.

Time flowed. I sat up a little straighter for a few minutes, while the dog snores on the love seat, the rain beats down on the tin roof, the room is somber in the gloom of thick clouds and showers.

I will relent in my quest for stimulation and do what comes naturally at a moment like this. Move over, pup, I’m coming on board.