Sometimes life takes you on phenomenal journeys. Especially when you don't hold back or hold on. When you take that first very difficult decision to pack your stuff and go. The year has gone by swiftly. A year of leaving, a year of arriving. Even if this cherry pond is not the final place but it is a big destination. I have lived more for myself, by myself this last year than I have done before. My choices, my rules. And that's a head rush! Sometimes I pause and walk out of myself to get a sense of how I'm living. It's important every once in a while to do that. It helps to keep you rooted. It helps to see from the distance ones life like it were a painting or a film. It helps to see all the grains of important and unimportant things.
When I decided to go, I just knew I had to. I didn't know then how this place, this life and this path was getting me any closer to knowing my purpose. Isn't that finally what we're all looking for? Something bigger than ourselves to be part of. I envy people who have found that purpose when they are still young. I wish them all the luck. And there's others like me who live many lives in this one, who're different people every now and then, slightly schizophrenic perhaps, or great actors who don't act in the movies or on stage but turn their life itself into great big shows - taking on parts; the superstar, the hobo, the lost cause, the diva, the artist, the healer, the mother, the child, the lover the loved, the warrior, the despised, the friend...there are so many things I have been, to myself and others. So I spent the year consolidating myself/s....Looking at each of these personas and trying to find the red thread that connects all of them....I am alone. And now i think I have.
People started visiting almost from the the time I moved to the cherry pond. From different corners of the world. Some almost strangers. Some others who I have walked with for a while. Everyone with a dream for a revolution. Everyone fighting for something. Some to get by, some for a better world still others to get by in a better world....
There's the fighters who fight everything outside of them - they fight the system. And then there are fighters who fight all the systems within them....Those are two different fights - You can make it better for yourself - by that I mean you can actually make yourself a better human being than the world ever expected you to be or you can be full of shit but try and make it better for others.
In the last year I have met a woman who has put her faith in language. Her joys, her dreams and her fears - she wants to express them in an ancient language foreign to her - that's the better life she dreams of as she serves customers in a bar in Toronto in the heart of everything wintry - of being in a warmer place amidst warmer people rolling her tongue in circus like ways to speak a language hardly anyone speaks anymore.
And then I met this man who traveled half way across the world because there are no jobs for people like him in his own country anymore. Who is haunted by his alcoholic abusive father and fucked up childhood. He swings like a pendulum from victim-hood to abuser to victim-hood to abuser. He is obsessed with gangster films from Hollywood. He is obsessed with films in general. He is here. He often wonders why.
Then there is the artist who cannot get over his lack of privileges as a child and believes he now is entitled to a lifetime of freebies. He's a wonderful person always generous always kind. But he spends all his time negotiating in his dreams a contemporary world of art with all it's privileged slick players -he hates them, he wants to be them all at the same time. But when he is not dreaming he is awake to the morbidity, the sheer pointlessness of his own death and the act of dying.
And the girl who is brave and wants to change everything in the world. Who will stand up and fight whenever she can. But at the end of the day her heart is broken because she loves a coward - a Brahmin boy who will never fight for her.
The local big fish in this small pond who deep in his heart knows how small he is in the big pond. Every evening he drinks until he can forget his life for a few seconds only until the moment someone asks him in that casual sort of way how he is doing and then he forgets to forget - every evening he tells himself the same story. Every evening he tries to convince himself by speaking to a hapless listener how murdering someone was the only choice left to him. He is incoherent with the alcohol and the weed, his words eaten up by his grief and regret.
So many people with so many lives. My purpose is just to listen to all their stories - to be a witness. To love the stories and remember them and take them to others and bring others' stories back to them.
When I decided to go, I just knew I had to. I didn't know then how this place, this life and this path was getting me any closer to knowing my purpose. Isn't that finally what we're all looking for? Something bigger than ourselves to be part of. I envy people who have found that purpose when they are still young. I wish them all the luck. And there's others like me who live many lives in this one, who're different people every now and then, slightly schizophrenic perhaps, or great actors who don't act in the movies or on stage but turn their life itself into great big shows - taking on parts; the superstar, the hobo, the lost cause, the diva, the artist, the healer, the mother, the child, the lover the loved, the warrior, the despised, the friend...there are so many things I have been, to myself and others. So I spent the year consolidating myself/s....Looking at each of these personas and trying to find the red thread that connects all of them....I am alone. And now i think I have.
People started visiting almost from the the time I moved to the cherry pond. From different corners of the world. Some almost strangers. Some others who I have walked with for a while. Everyone with a dream for a revolution. Everyone fighting for something. Some to get by, some for a better world still others to get by in a better world....
There's the fighters who fight everything outside of them - they fight the system. And then there are fighters who fight all the systems within them....Those are two different fights - You can make it better for yourself - by that I mean you can actually make yourself a better human being than the world ever expected you to be or you can be full of shit but try and make it better for others.
In the last year I have met a woman who has put her faith in language. Her joys, her dreams and her fears - she wants to express them in an ancient language foreign to her - that's the better life she dreams of as she serves customers in a bar in Toronto in the heart of everything wintry - of being in a warmer place amidst warmer people rolling her tongue in circus like ways to speak a language hardly anyone speaks anymore.
And then I met this man who traveled half way across the world because there are no jobs for people like him in his own country anymore. Who is haunted by his alcoholic abusive father and fucked up childhood. He swings like a pendulum from victim-hood to abuser to victim-hood to abuser. He is obsessed with gangster films from Hollywood. He is obsessed with films in general. He is here. He often wonders why.
Then there is the artist who cannot get over his lack of privileges as a child and believes he now is entitled to a lifetime of freebies. He's a wonderful person always generous always kind. But he spends all his time negotiating in his dreams a contemporary world of art with all it's privileged slick players -he hates them, he wants to be them all at the same time. But when he is not dreaming he is awake to the morbidity, the sheer pointlessness of his own death and the act of dying.
And the girl who is brave and wants to change everything in the world. Who will stand up and fight whenever she can. But at the end of the day her heart is broken because she loves a coward - a Brahmin boy who will never fight for her.
The local big fish in this small pond who deep in his heart knows how small he is in the big pond. Every evening he drinks until he can forget his life for a few seconds only until the moment someone asks him in that casual sort of way how he is doing and then he forgets to forget - every evening he tells himself the same story. Every evening he tries to convince himself by speaking to a hapless listener how murdering someone was the only choice left to him. He is incoherent with the alcohol and the weed, his words eaten up by his grief and regret.
So many people with so many lives. My purpose is just to listen to all their stories - to be a witness. To love the stories and remember them and take them to others and bring others' stories back to them.
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