With his usual insight my friend and poet Jaya posted these questions to his Facebook page. Synchronicity once again, as I read this after having concluded a discussion about Paris as a tourist destination--a discussion that took place in a train station coffee shop prior to boarding. I was arguing against a recent newspaper article that said Paris was a disappointing tourist venue. My experience was that if you are a romantic in the classical sense, then Paris is a city of awe in which past and present line, and the ghosts of history mingle with the living.
But Jaya's post hit my heart in another way, reminding me of my own status as a "permanent immigrant," the grandson of migrants who was to answer Destiny's call to continue their journey away from the heart of Europe.
Spiritually, and we are all migrant souls, destined to move on when these bodies fail us. I wonder if you also can feel in your blood that there is another part of the journey beyond this seemingly solid reality? Have you, like me, always held onto a sense, a suspicion, that this physical corporeal life is temporary and also therefore amazing?
Firmly trapped in middle age I now reject the value of "progress," and embrace a positive nihilistic view of life. We are animal. We need to live our lives as animals. That gives a new sense of the word "survival." Survival is certainly the basic scrabbling to stay alive. But "survival" can also suggest satisfaction: the basic joy of being alive and seeing beauty in everything around us. It can be an appreciation of the impermanence of everything and everyone. That adds to the joy of recognizing the shine of life in a friends eyes, the smile on a good person's face, the laughter of strangers around us. It sharpens the mind to allow us to recognize the bird flitting among the tall grasses next to a litter-strewn sidewalk, or the humming song of insects in the rustling leaves of a tree surrounded by the concrete city.
Without completely abandoning ambition, I desire to live these closing years in a sensibility of "survival." Finances may never be a solid ground of security for me, but concepts such as professional recognition or fame within "academia" are now of little value to me. More important as I see a diminished future is love, loyalty, and commitment to friends, students, and the world of the mind & spirit (art).
Jaya's questions, posed upon his return from travel, now become mine to contemplate as I begin my journey southward to visit people I love but too-rarely see, to hear the warmth in their voices, to see the encouragement in their smiles, and to feel once again the strength of spirit shared with me through their confident embraces. I travel through this land that is home yet not home.
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