flight

it is 2:50 am right now. the alarm would have gone off at 3, but i stopped it.

the moon is bright tonight, casting its light with wanton abandon upon the blind and sleeping landscape. it paints a broad and spreading quadrilateral through the window, reaching all the way to my forearm, as i lie here on the carpet typing. maybe the moon wants to see me. maybe it wants to burn me with its cold reflective light.

it has been a trying, somewhat surreal week. there have been events occurring at my school that have been strange and traumatic. i've approached those events at a distance, and with a feeling (if you can call it that) of detachment and disbelief. a school is a community, a community that is built and woven out of the fabric of the larger community it occupies, and knitted and stitched tightly by the faculty and staff who work there. it is a community founded on the highest aspirations, to care for and nurture young souls. it is a shock when something happens to that community, when an act of senseless violence occurs... such an event sends shockwaves throughout the community, fraying the ties that hold the community together. in short, it makes us all feel alone, if only partially.

that is why there are so many efforts (worthy) taken by the counselors and administration to help us to feel that we are NOT alone in this...

my greatest concern lies with the individual who was directly involved in the attack. i hope that person is well. i hope that person realizes that the community of the school would like to help, to heal... we all pray for that person.

***

at times, (several, in fact) i feel as though my life is in a rut. don't get me wrong, it is a comfortable (more or less) rut, and i am thankful for everything within it, especially my family. but there are only so many ways to recycle thoughts and reflections from this little valley of mine...

i think of the children in mad max: beyond thunderdome, itching for a messiah to take them away from their "happy valley" and the forgotten trauma of the "pocky clips", into "tomorrow-morrow land." i think of them waiting for the winds to stir up, and uncover the buried 747 from out of the dunes, so that some stranger could summon up wings and allow all to fly...

this, even though what lay outside of the valley was desert and destruction...

i think, no matter what, that humankind must venture out. it is an instinctual need, even though we do not have wings, the need for flight. we must see outside of ourselves, we must learn how the edges of our horizons connect to other lands, other places, other ideas, other people. it is our way of not feeling alone and decaying. it is our way of feeling, of renewing ourselves. that is how i view flight, not as an escape from the world per se, but as a way to broaden a vision of the world, to discover something new.

after all, we all need to feel that this "isn't all", if only to appreciate what we have.

i rarely dream of flight, and even rarer these days is the dreamless sleep that carries me bodily from the old day to the new (daedalus glides unwaveringly over the glassy sungilded waters, having sacrificed the fecklessness of his only son, having sacrificed all dreams, concentrating only on navigating his manmade wings to the shore beyond)... i want that dreamless flight to happen, to allow the world to turn, and turn away, to keep the darkness of this night behind me, and awaken with the sun, a new person, in a new day.

i pray for this, the capacity to forget. in forgetting, we remember who we are.

(and in remembering, we forget who we are.)