Beginnings and Endings

Face to face with all my failings and disabilities. I am slow, and deaf, and no longer young. I think too much and take too few risks. There are very few people who find me fun, or even tolerable, to be around. I'm sad about that. I admire people who are fun to be around. They do a great deal to make life better. Me, not so much. Unless you like massage or fancy writing or dense self-deconstructing argument (with someone who can't really hear) what you've got, with me, is a large obstinate lump, which has to be fed twice a day and showered.

Which accounts reasonably well for my orangutanish preference for solitude. We all prefer to do what we're best at, and what I'm best at is making my way to the remotest part of the jungle and settling in for a long think, while the daylight filters in and slowly fills the bowl of the world.

But the forms of things! The pattern of the snow clinging to the black bark of a tree in the parking lot, like a series of alternating white koalas: the curve of a drift against the sky: my hands back-lit by the screen of my laptop, pausing, waiting for the thought to flow through them again, like paused and puzzled wolf-spiders. "Was it for this?" Wordsworth keeps asking, in the Prelude: the question persists, long after I have officially decided it wasn't for anything in particular. It just is, right? But the question will return. "Was it for this?" You tell me.

This is a bleak land, in winter under the clouds. Nothing is growing. Everything alive is hiding out, sleeping under the snow, or locked in its seed form. I am not at home in this harsh country. It's beautiful, but I grew up with the year-round green, the spring rains and the autumn rains changing hands in their slow gentle dance. My home maybe encourages one to postpone decisions, or question whether they even must be made: there are no real beginnings or endings there.