random scribbles

I live in two worlds. Three days there, four days here. Each is as different to the other as any two opposites and to know one is to see the other more clearly. Each is a creation of choice or choices, decisions made upon assumptions unasked, unspoken, these silent shadowy jail keepers. But I know this. One can choose to say good morning, or chose to remain silent. And likewise, one can value and honor relationship not by proxy or thought or blood, but by the law of the farm, as significant as the food upon our table and the water in our glasses. Each day we choose by the choices we make and by the choices we don't. Each day the root of relationship either grows deeper, stronger, or withers and retracts. There is no carry-over. No roll-over minutes. No compound interest. There is only dawn and dusk and all the choices we make, each day, between the two.

So I say to you, this day: Do you know what you chose? Do you know what you don't chose? By your hand the rudder of choice guides you down the river. By your action you say what cannot be said and you build the life you live, whether you know it or not.

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There is this issue of effort I refer to often. Or, as I like to say, effortlessness. As with all language, where each word by way of tone and definition and context can shoulder seventeen different meanings, miscommunication is ever present, especially in the medium of the written word. To speak of effortlessness is not to speak of no effort. The universe is nothing if not a constant flow of energy, always in motion, forever not still. So, one could say, always in effort. But there is the natural flow of life living and there is the unnatural flow of effort efforting. The two are not as brothers.

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And too, there is beauty. To speak of it is to miss it, to misunderstand it, to debase into language, into note and space, what has no separation. The river is not a train.

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I can remember acts of kindness visited upon me when I was seven years old. That is forty years ago; and still, they live within me, influence me, affect the fabric of my day. Acts of cruelty too, I remember, and they too live within my memory going on four decades, and before long, half a century. To think of what is within me, I find humbling. To think I have a choice, kindness or cruelty, each day. And to think, perhaps in forty years, some child, now an adult, will sit as I sit, and write as I write, of one or the other, planted so long ago, by my hand, my choice, today.