I just wanted to say that sometimes we co-bloggers at TMV talk amongst ourselves about why we write, how we write… and I believe some late nights that it’s because many of us are helplessly insane and have to write ourselves back into sanity every night…
Or semi-sanity
Or sanity defined only by us alone.
and also, you, reader, come to mind, late at night especially, you know when the tide is somewhere in the middle of neither coming in or going out, and the lights out the windows from where we sit writing, well, those lights go out one by one, like filling in a screen finally with all black pixels, save the sky which keeps it random white dots.
I think of you and what you are doing, maybe sleeping, maybe making love (I hope), maybe watching Jack Black in the latest King Kong film at this late hour… If you’re awake now, which is about 2:36a.m. Mountain Standard Time here, it’s not likely you will go to sleep anytime soon. Rather pour another (here cup of hot tea), and light another ciggie (here, no ciggies, but definitely on this winter night, light a fire) and try to read a little….
I’m looking at the latest MacLife about how I can make a dinosaur of a CPU into a Ferrari overnight with only this speedo thingie or another that all have names like bands during the Def Leppard period. I read through Newsweek earlier, on how stress can be good for you… from their lips to God’s ears. And the pix in the mag are taken by photographers with big cojones and ovarios… dangerous times, murderous evil walking the land… and they stand there armed only with a little metal box with a lens.
Sometimes I think we’re all mad… that we can somehow manage with all that is ever going on of mayhem, to think about things that are not mayhem. And maybe it is true that ‘the opposite’ comes to mind because the psyche must balance itself with both ends of the imaginal and emotional spectrum, or else go completely grief-stricken… which in some ways, I can understand as a form of psychosis when that grief is so deep.
So, probably compensatorily, I’m thinking tonight too about an article I’ve wanted to write about for a long time, something I am essentially stupid about… that is, golf. I know, I know. It’s got to be compensatory.
I’d like to write about golf mainly because I have seen pictures of golf course in places on this earth that look like God lives there — they are so dramatically holy. At edges of cliffs over oceans that invented the color blue, on greens that are primal viridian lit from the inside as though with candles: the land literally seems to glow.
And the idea of human beings being at peace on those lands, any lands really, that’s the idea I think must be part of the golfer’s instinct…. too. To go be at peace for 9 or 18 holes. To take a sheaf of little silver sticks, and a white blob of rubber thread with a plastic carapace, and play. Then, to do it again. And again… to be at peace.
Though the ‘game’ of golf matters, I imagine the peace must be the matter that really matters, the solitude, the ‘being alone while being together.’ I could be wrong, but it seems to me from watching golf on TV that in the nth moment right before the shot, if the golfer can eject from ego and pull the chute string, she or he could in those moments of the swing that is ‘just so’ …. find the updraft mentally and in spirit… and thus ‘soar through’ the swing and follow through… remembering– being seated for those moments — in their true selves once again. Exhilarating.
The cartoons of golfers tying their silver sticks in knots might not come so much from frustration with missing the shot, but rather from missing a chance to be in the zone of radiant self… a sense of augmented goodwill, well-being, peace and pride that is soulful, far more than egoistic.
Soon I’ll be praying the last prayer of the night. I live on a tiny tiny lake in the Rockies, and it’s 27 degrees outside, and the moon is just a little crescent. You’d think the moon would be swaying on its string in the sky from the winds that are howling right now. But I’ll step out on the porch in a few minutes here, in big black parka with the black fake-fur rimmed hood, and ask that however possible… the souls of the world be/ do/ be given/ be shown— and in ways they can recognize— whatever the next best step is for each… and these prayers include you too.
Things are different at night. Night magnifies. Tonight, as you can see, perhaps like you too in your own ways, I’ve an especially strong sense, that ‘being at peace on the land’ whether to play golf, or to pray, and all else — must be one of the greatest privileges of our times… perhaps the only thing all of us are striving so hard toward, for ourselves, for the world at large… and the world at small.