APW: Giving Thanks

Well I’ll pick a planet and you can pick a star,
We’ll plot our points together we can travel very far our path is winding,
We can’t rewind but if we move with grace and speed,
We’ll watch it all again from depths we’ve never dreamed
 

Giving thanks.  Oh man.  That’s a big one.  I can’t think of a holiday I would rather celebrate and share with others than this one.  I reflect on this fourth Thursday of November how the years have come and gone.  I am writing about this holiday, as I have before in the past, only this time I am a year older.  I have celebrated this day with Americans and confused foreigners in Australia, splitting wood competitions with Mormons on a farm in Nevada, in Hana multiple times with the best of friends, and going back further, back in New York with my family, where you require a sweatshirt during the day.

Coming to the realization that five years have elapsed since I’ve had a Thanksgiving in New York helps validate the lapse of time and the extreme changes in myself that’ve taken place in this past half of a decade.  I have embraced many different cultures, jobs, residences, lifestyles, landscapes, climates in the last five years.  I’ve met innumerable amounts of people who have profoundly impacted my life, and have undergone experiences that I did not see or want to occur in such a way. 

There will always be sadness.  There will always be happiness.  And of course, there is the ever present gratitude and the all knowing goodness that bends, flows and loves like the river Time.

On this day, I will allow, which I haven’t recently, some time for reflection.  I will hold onto each memory I have shared with the people I love, and the people I’ve lost.  I will remember them and live the best as I can, care as great as they, laugh as hard, love and smile as much.

Cycles roll on like the waves and the moon, the playing cards stuck in bicycle tires and the quarters in the juke box, playing that tune that lasts longer than we remember them.

I’ve watched others come full circle, and I’ve experienced it myself.  I’ve experienced it with relationships and I see it in the garden.  Even the asymmetrical figures contain a balance.  I’m learning to live without expectation, to push myself without reward.  It’s all very simple.  If you’re grateful for the day, you’re better off than being resentful.  We have been given so much.  Thankful that I can now open my eyes and acknowledge that, and do my best in the present to give back to the future.

If we don’t stop seeking, we won’t stop finding.

Matt

When all in the mind is a blur

When all in the mind is a blur
When the irregularities of this existence
become staples of the waking hours
When the moon is so full
That the light confuses the owls,
When there is no time to consider the priest,
The forklift operator, the sculptress, the strawberry picker...

 

Events occur that have the power to change your life faster than a tossed coin reveals heads or tails.  Sometimes they are realized on spot, though the gravity tends to set in over low and high tides, the changing of the seasons, the graying of your hair.

Such an event happened unpredictably in my life, setting off a chain of events that influenced my decisions to lead me to where I am currently.  And now, after  10 weeks of neglecting a portion of myself in order to dedicate myself fully to work (which has become hardly distinguishable from life), I look back at old posts and reflect on what I wrote April 23, 2011, just over a year and half ago. 

My conclusion on wealth is this: You are as wealthy as the world you leave for the future generations. You can measure it by the smiles around you, the blossoming spring flowers, a crying child. I'm trying to do my part by building and planting and nurturing (maybe a little too literally), but why not join me in your own way?

I’d like to add to this.  Wealth is the ability to sustain yourself.  To sustain a relationship, a home, a job, a lifestyle, an environment, a community.  To sustain these happily, creatively, without wishing for something else.  For such a simple idea, it takes a lifetime to achieve such a balance.  Or rather to sustain this balance.  Or maybe the sustaining of this balance is illusory, for you’ll always be on one side of the seesaw.  Thank history and fate to be born in the era of the ‘evolved’ consciousness.

I wonder what I'll have to add to this a year an a half later.  I wonder if i'll still be on a rock in the middle of the sea.  I didn't think I'd be here now.  I thought I would be here, somewhere else.  What a silly thought.

All Pursuits Worthwhile: Wishing for Less Instead of More

 

I am a boy pushing a matchbox car along a winding cliffside road.

I am witnessing the boy.  He is smiling.  He has not yet fallen.

I am the emptiness of the sky above the winding road.

I am the winding road for the wheels and the feet to follow.

I am the driver, head down, wheels between the guardrails.

I am the passenger who forgets to look at the plants that line the road. 

I forget to watch them grow.  I forget that everything changes.

 

I do not smell the changing of the seasons,

The rotting mangoes, the fallen rocks, the perfect day

I am the driver, head down, oblivious eyes.

I do not measure time between breaths as the world slows to a halt.

I do not think of the last time I jumped to touch a roof.

I do not hear the world over the ringing of what I thought was urgent.

I cannot hear myself over the rain.  

I cannot hear the rain over myself.

I cannot see myself as the boy.

When was the last time I sat and took a breath.

I always thought I could handle solitary prison.

I always thought a superhero was imperfect when they didn’t save the world on their first try.

And now, I am having trouble with the day ahead of me.

 

I am the boy who grew up and still wants to push the matchbox car.

I am the boy with his head out the window watching the world pass by.

I am the boy who grew up trying to shift the wind.

I am the boy today.   

Today, I am not thinking of tomorrow.