Ever feel the urge to just rebel against the concepts you have known and been known by? I have been feeling this way for oh….the last 20 years or so. There has been this need in me to let those who have known me since youth see a very different side of who I am. Sometimes, the reason is to keep the intimacy of friendship and being “in touch” very much alive when I sense a growing distance, or slow death. In other moments, it’s to send out a shock wave, hoping an echo will resound.
Everyone has noticed that when they hook up with their family members, or revisit their home town, something inside them helplessly, or haplessly, returns to a former state preferably wished to have been left there, in the past. We all feel like we’re five again, or in my case, I roll up like one of those ball-beetles. And we resume patterns that kept us safe, in hierarchy or order, then, hoping we’ll still feel safe now. Are we safe? Now? Really? Not if the fear of rejection keeps you where you are at.
In these rebellion “adjustments”, as I like to think of them, we’re testing the waters in the here and now, to see if who we are today can push the envelope of what we knew of ourselves then, to see if those who have been constants in our lives can relate, reflect or resound our new truths. Some can and will, surprisingly and joyfully. Others….well, not so much. Chock it up to distance, time and the other accelerating causes of the universal expansion. This is the Dark Energy of growth that comes necessarily of change.
As something flies away, ever further, the emanated light that tries to meet us progressively dims, our sight of it becomes blurry and diaphanous, surreal and eventually, non-existent. Unless we hone our sensitivity and increase the magnification of our view, opening even wider the aperture of our willingness to experience, the separation will occur and eventually, we lose connection altogether.
There is safety in distance, in not quite being seen so clearly that allows the beetle me to unroll and check if the world is still there. Most of the time, I allow the intangible version of me, the tenuous concept, the veiled image or the fuzzy memory to prevail as my presence. And for some, that’s enough. But if it’s light already emanated. It left the source aeons ago. And we choose to remain comforted by the surreal, impermanent sense of knowing someone, of “being in touch”. But it’s with a ghost from the past. No more than a residue, really.
I place my presence, with intention, into my work at that precious moment when it happens – whether it’s my writing, or music arrangements, my vocal overlay, even the splash of tempera that splatted just so on that corner of the paper. None of these things are permanent, even if the song is recorded on CD. Even still, once the song is done and you’ve listened to it, again despite the reincarnation, it’s faded in time, the sound waves dispersed in space to nothingness, consumed by the mystical langoliers. The energy of the splat happened in the past, even though the color splash emanates its energy. The words I wrote five years ago, even these words from five minutes ago, provide a residue of something that once lived momentarily in true aliveness and activity and presence.
I guess I’m rebelling against permanence and all the illusory truths that go with it such as control and certainty. As I get older, I can’t even rely on the memory of it. So I am resounding instead with the truth that all things come to pass, all does change, nothing escapes this universal law. And I can only keep with me the imprint of what remains indelible in my heart. -ABA
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