Having lived on this dusty rock for forty one years now, I've, the past five years, stopped to ponder a few times, what endures? Having gained wisdom from studying books and experiencing Life for these forty plus years, I begin to ask, what survives?
Personally, I'll start with the existential.
My red hair survives. My arched eyebrows survive. My high cheekbones, long, too long, horseish face and my big, too big nose survive. My crooked, too crooked jaw survives. My long torso and short legs survive. My scars, both incidental and surgical survive. My adolescent acne survives.
My dad always, and I mean always, has said, you gotta take the good with the bad, always in that order, and I've only recently picked up on the irony and sly humor of his phrase.
From my list of physical traits, you can see some are good, which I gotta take, and some are not so good, which I also gotta take, but they
endure, making them vital parts of my self, me carrying around all these accidents the way I do!
Graduating to the soulful, I begin first and foremost with my love of music. My dad is a very good trumpet player and my mom is one heck of a piano, organ, and accordian player. I heard the strains of Gospel originating not only from the record player, but from
my parents while growing up, and have always enjoyed music in all of it's varieties and venues. When I came of age, my maternal grandmother sat me down at the Hammond organ and taught me how to play the blues in the key of 'C'. I had already discovered the drums and was equally impressed with the percussive beauty of the piano. And we sang. We sang Gospel at home, pop music in the car to the radio, and later Abba, Floyd Cramer, The Silver Fox, Mahalia Jackson and so many others to my dad's eight tracks. Music has always had the power to change my mood in an instant. I could feel melancholy one instant and bright and chipper the next when listening to the a.m. radio as a child while doing homework. To this day, artists such as Van Morrison stir me in a way that most people only reserve for religious experiences.
Finally to the Spiritual. Quiet. The still, silent voice I was made cognizant of as a child by my mother and my sunday school teachers has endured. Through the worst crisis of the soul I've experienced to date, I was aware of an inner rational voice telling me my thoughts were wild and my emotions were dishonest. No matter how chaotic things have gotten, the rational has stayed intact and has been an abiding foundation without which I would not have survived.
So Life has it's ups and downs, you're told when you're too young to understand. And later you find it also has it's moments, and it's thicks and thins, and it's demands, and so many others you can only understand by experiencing them.
But some things, even silly ones, endure. Everything else can be changing violently and being shook to the foundations, but magically, some things
endure.
Rolling hills, flowing valleys, delicate fibonacci-swirled rosepetals, the flowers of Georgia O Keefe, the wind softly bending ears of corn, deep caverns, recesses cool in the earth, the arch of tree limbs in the forest, meeting each other in trigonometric curves, deep pools of water, the ocean, the Moon, the planet Venus, lush forest trees covering over their saplings, the understory of the woods, the curves of flowing rivers, the quiet monotanous swelling of wave upon wave, the whisper, all of these hints that Nature has that feminine principle, flirtatious hints that a mystery is afoot. No wonder they call her Mother Nature.
