I have spent nearly every morning at a high school track I recently discovered about 8 miles from my house. I feel at home on a track. I love the meditative state it puts me in when I walk in circles. I love the sweat that drips down my stomach and dampens my whole head when I run up and down the bleachers. I love feeling spent.
I listen to things in my ear buds and inhale the scent of the pine tree grove and nearby marsh as the sun comes up. It smells green.
Today I was at the track relistening to an astrological chart reading I had in late June. This line jumped out at me: Don't make sense of it. Don't settle down. I kept walking. It was raining a little.
As I navigate the creative process of recording an album and as it spills over into my personal life, and as I make circles around the track, I'm rewinding my life back to innocence, back to remembering who I was before it got complicated and encumbered. Back to whatever God is.
We are what we are, and I've never been anything except a traveler. Motion is my currency. It is the only place that makes sense. What's changed is that I don't need to be the driver anymore. I can ride whatever is moving...the stream, the train, the creative process, a song. I'm not in control (never have been) and I know it. I welcome it now. It's strangely calming and reassuring, this letting go. What you do is pick your ride or allow your ride to pick you. That's it. And then you go.
The other day I was at a bar listening to a song that one of the band musicians had composed. The song had an exquisite motion. In some kind of nameless way I knew exactly what it was. I recognized it; I saw myself in it. There I sat, with my lips slightly parted, absolutely still transfixed by the beauty that came from and through someone's mind and made manifest through wood and metal and electricity, with hands. I felt found, and found out. It was incredibly upsetting.
The last time I had experienced this was with a movie made by a Japanese filmmaker about Gaudi.
This is what we do then. We catch glimpses of other's souls and see our own. Every so often the veil is lifted and in that direct transfer the mind is blown. Language is inadequate. I've been trying to understand it for days now with no luck. I've been trying to tuck myself back into my old form. No luck. I'm rendered silent and without edges, a ripple close to the stone but never holding it.
"Don't make sense of it. Don't settle down."
This is why I walk the track. To have a shape. To keep from spinning out inside. To rewind the bullshit. To stay with God for one moment more. I'll be there tomorrow, and the day after that, and after that. And maybe after a lifetimes of days I will hold the stone.
