Somewhere there is a well

I actually wrote this first in another blog. Don't tell Kevin but I was not thinking about the play at all... but, going back and reading it, I do not feel remiss placing this here, too. In some
places at some times, people sit in a circle and pass a thing around-- usually a bottle of booze, or a rod, or a staff-- and whoever has that thing in their possession has to say something.

The world is simple: there is a house; there is not a house. There is building and then there is not building. Life and then not life. People who believe happiness is dependent upon a larger, metaphysical good will never be happy. People who need everything to be good will never find peace. Peace is in the silence between crashing waves. Peace is in the silence during the shortness of breath between sobs.

If the world was benevolent, then every five year old girl would befriend every animal she tried to pet.

But.

The world doesn't hate you.

You are. And it is. And anything more that you could want is selfish. Life is building and destroying what was built. Even the pyramids will one day crumble to dust and something beautiful will grow out of that dust.

I was watching a forgettable movie a long time ago and a dreadfully sad song was being played on a record player in the scene. The woman remarked, dreamy-eyed, "that is so beautiful." That is so beautiful. If all we do is count the 'happy' moments in our lives as the beautiful moments in our lives, then we will always feel short-changed, cheated, and deprived.

Happiness is waking up and maybe finding food to eat. Happiness is walking through a dream, a ringing in your ears, and you wake up one day and discover that you are married, and that you have beautiful children, and that you have a photo album full of smiles and wrinkled shirts. You can not help but live every minute of your life. Choosing to engage it, though, is something else.

There were two towers in New York and now there are none. The sadists in New York want to build a tremendous monument to the fact that people died. But people die every day. I went to Ground Zero (no, I do not mean Nagasaki, or Hiroshima, or Dresden). I went to Ground Zero and it was beautiful because it was the only place in lower Manhattan where the sky opened up. The din of the city had nothing to bounce off of and the echoes were lost in the sky so that silence, for a moment, came down and gently held you, and there was peace there.

Ground Zero is a clearing violently cut in the forest and now flowers can grow. In one hundred years, nobody will care about this ground zero. Nobody will care about monuments and 'never forget'. We always do. It isn't sad. Those people touched other people and those people will touch others. This is the only eternity granted to us mortals, these deeds we do. And we'll pass, and others touched by us will touch others and those others will touch others and an abstract piece of us will live on, having touched the Earth, and the sea, and the trees. And echo slowly fading. That's okay. All songs end.

I drove by a house and there was a family there. I drove by later and there was no house and there was no family. I do not know where they went or if they even escaped from the house.

Life is beautiful because it is fragile and only five minutes long. What do you do with those five minutes? Who are you? How loudly do you call up to the stars and to the immortal sky, "I am here! I am alive!" Will they remember you when you are gone?

In Pakistan, they still use as a highway a portion of the road cut by Alexander the Great on his quest to India.

He was twenty eight when he died.

Scientists and adventurers are discovering cities and roads in the sea off of the coast of South America, places where people lived, and walked, and loved before the sea rose and slowly and gently swallowed them.

When I was at a beach on the Northern tip of the Washington Penninsula, as the tide was coming in, I wrote my name in huge letters in the sand. I dragged my foot like an enormous wedge and wrote it so that even birds in the sky could read it. I sat down and watched the waves patiently rise and erase it. I watched myself die and be forgotten. It was the most liberating thing I have ever experienced.

Nothing you love will ever be taken from you because nothing you love is yours. Everything you love is something the world is sharing because the world loves you.

It is not sad. These are the truths that we know at that exact moment when we fall asleep when we are five years old. We die every time we fall asleep. We may never wake up but we trust something. We do not even trust that we will wake up, but we trust something.

Many people say nothing and pass into death quietly.

Oscar Wilde made a joke.

Ludwig Van Beethoven kept his fist raised in the air as he died. It did not fall until he was dead.

The universe is not beautiful because it provides for us, or takes care of us, or lets us believe we are forever. The universe is beautiful because it allows us to experience it for a moment and that moment, this delicate moment, is worth death and, this life, worth all of its pains, and sorrows, and miseries. To be exultant is not to be happy. To be exultant is to be alive.

'I sound my barbaric YAWP over the rooftops of the world'.

Lovers, and philosophers, and murderers-- they all contribute to the song, they are all part of this choir and every voice, no matter how 'sweet' or how 'terrible' adds something.

Without villains, we would have no heroes. Without sorrow, we would have no hope.

We would not have God if we did not need God.

This. This life. It is so beautiful.

One moment, there is a house. The next, there is no house.

It is so beautiful.