As I sit and write this from Taipei, Taiwan - I’m struck at how being a writer mostly consists of openess, awareness, being a kind of tuning fork for some force of nature. So, here I sit, many floors up, convolescing, a hacking cough, no energy, unable to do much. Here I sit and take in the beauty of so many others around me.
{after writing this - I started getting some life back in me, as the video suggests. Thank God}
Mostly they are people just going to and fro, lunch, work, shopping. Most have their eyes on their phones. But in between these frames of instacolor are the true colors. The smiling faces, the flashing eyes that catch mine, the guy lying on cardboard whose hand brushes my pant legs, two young kids poking and laughing at each other.
It’s a caucophany of sound, textures, images, thoughts, spirit. My mind swirls, I’m dizzing with the beautiful humanity of it all. My antenna is open and alive to the sensemore world. I wonder, “Why am I here, right now, here right now?” But then the thought disappears into the junk bin where it rightly belongs - why be anywhere else than where you are? Isn’t nothing else possible?
I’ve 2 weeks to last here. I have no passport, visa office has it. So, I think I’ll wander the streets, the river pathways, the small mountain trails - if I can find the energy and my life within returns to meet the great life force without that energizes me.
I’ve got two weeks of time to just think. Maybe also write. So fortunate.
Time for R&R, reading and recharging - I brought some Camus along. Time to put this broken world back together, the together that it always is, its brokeness being just my own temporary transgressions, a processing error.
The evil of the world cannot triumphant because ultimately it is not of the life force that propels us forward, onward … Life is growth, even the destruction we see. The Kabbalah I once studied, I’ll have time for that again too. The mysteries of this universe are multifold, we drift through life blind to most things but what we do touch in and with spirit, we make sacred.
"With each experience we grow and become more aware of the inner beauty that lies within us. Ultimately we are truly our own leader. We lead the connection and flow of life that is our inheritance.” ― Rabbi Yossi
As always, I’ll write poems throughout these two weeks of exile. Here is one, tapped out, letter after letter, here and now, naked and alive.
P.S. Heading out of the big city by train for 3 days in a smaller coastal city … let’s see what that reveals.
Death’s Door
Death is a door you walk through backwards.
There is no facing it.
It just comes up to you from behind
and swallows you whole.
You melt into it
like a wicked witch,
like a virtuous vicar,
all returning to all
the primal ooze of
a never changing law.
The sin is not that death comes.
The sin is how blind we are to it.
We are all going to die and
that should make us love each other
but it doesn’t.
Death is a door you walk through backwards
Covered full of band-aids for much that never would heal.
Distant Thoughts