Then And Now

Time can't be bottled.

I had a nice phone call with my dear mum recently. She told me, reminded me about when I was a little babe. How I was always so happy. Always smiling. Never would cry. Always eating all my food, any type. Loving people and people just loving me. Everywhere we went, my mother had to happily endure strangers coming up to talk to me, play with me. Me, in my glory.

Recently reminded of this too. Met a gringo down here with a young wife and their young baby was just like me! So Buddha-like! I was so attracted. It was a strange and compelling feeling.

Thinking of my life, now many, many years lived - I find it strange that I never thought of myself as gregarious, social, free and at home in the world. But jogged by this conversation - I do see I was wrong about my own self-identity.

I am quite social. I love the bars and conversation. I invite people to the house and cook and host like a pro. I write and in writing - I embrace the world, all people, all voices, all beliefs.

My mother was adopted as a baby and only very late in life found and connected with her biological family. Father was from the Scottish Gordon clan. A drinker like me. Mother was from the Irish, a Gough. But that Gaelic, social side of me comes out a lot.

So where did this self-identity I hoisted on myself, that of the romantic loner - where did it come from? The nervous and bitter ubermensch, under the floorboards - bitter, enraged at the vile, illogical, surreal nature of life, humanity?

“There is always something hidden.” Ted Bundy, his last words to his mother.

Perhaps the answer is I am both. We aren’t one thing. We shouldn’t be. Life presses on us and makes us but so too, we remain an innocent babe in our mother’s arms.

The point is - we need to remind ourselves of who we were. We can completely forget that side of ourselves, though it is always there within. Who were you as a child? Where is that “who” now?

“It took me 4 years to paint like Raphael and a lifetime to learn to paint like a child.” - Pablo Picasso

Entropy

Nothing endures, all fades
Photographs yellow, stars burst
Even my lover’s pearly whites
Seem to be vulnerable to cavities.

Only those minute bacteria, those earth turners
That hold the world up on their shoulders
Seem to have learned to be.
They die over and over, thus live forever.

They have learned that the laws of our universe
Do not apply to the insignificant.