i think people are trapped in specific seasons, even in seasonless hawaii. some people view the winter of things, preferring to feel the still and the quiet, and the way everything settles to its death and rest and quiescence. other people are perpetually in spring, seeing in each moment and in each passing stranger a bud of hope and opportunity just waiting to blossom. others are in autumn, a strange mixture of meditative solemnity and the giddiness of the harvest moon. and some, as the season is presently, prefer the lazy sexuality of summer.
myself, i'm a winter person. sleepy, perpetually being mistaken for a sadsack, or chronically depressed... in all the other seasons, and confronted with all other possibilities, the winter personality perceives the ultimate ending, the consequence, the path of settling. the skeletal web of time, frozen in a visible pattern of frost.
no other season, i think, values life more than the season of death. to understand how fragile all the seemingly virile expressions of life truly are, how tomorrow will take, gradually or suddenly, irretrievably away. it is to know life for what it is, just a season, and just a moment, a flash of light refracted in a single aspect of a snowflake...
***
i am trying to remember what it felt like to be alive.
the past is a stranger to me. i know what must have happened, because somehow i have arrived here, and i have a scrambled resume and a box of photographs and letters, but it seems to all have happened to someone else, someone who passed away a long long time ago, without a word.
hope, love, fear, sadness. i know these things now. but i also knew them before (i must have!), all of these things, wearing different faces, different masks. how could i have distanced myself, exploded so far away from who i used to be, to confront the artifacts and remnants of yesterday, as though an archaeologist, unearthing an alien civilization?
... there is a pulse quality in chinese medicine denoted as "scattered." in kiiko matsumoto's style, it goes by the somewhat more awkward description of a pulse lacking in stomach qi. in any case, the pulse in chinese medicine is palpated at the radial artery at the wrist, and is felt (on each side) in three positions, the cun, the guan, and the chi. in otherwise normal pulses, a consistent wave can be felt pushing through each of these positions, like a tsunami lifting and settling equidistant buoys successively. in a scattered pulse, however, there is no sense of continuity between the positions. as it is so eloquently described, the scattered pulse feels like "three birds pecking."
my life is like a scattered pulse. i am the third bird, the triplet to the wind-up bird, and the mejiro that taps at the morning reflection. i am pecking away at the circumstances of my reality, at the core of my understanding... but i am hopelessly trapped within my own moment, even with these wings with which i could fly (icarus style). i am scattered.
like a leaf without a wind.
***
am i hunting myself in the dream? or is the dream hunting me?
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