Sometimes I look over my old blog posts to see what sort of imprint I’m actually leaving. Throughout the smorgasbord of posts scattering my thoughts across dozens of different blogs sometimes I come across ones that make me cringe, sometimes they make me facepalm, and others simply make me flush in embarrassment that I could have ever written such a thing. Hesitantly, I share this example from January 2011:
So, here you are, whomever you may be, a single person out of billions reading this blog, reading this blog out of millions of other blogs that are much more decently put together, much more organized, much more thought provoking, much more in touch with the culture around you, much more… a lot of things, so for whatever reason you are here today I must admit something to you that I’m not sure you’ve realized yet, it’s that when you read these words from this very blog you are actually not only reading my words but you are riding a train with a worried old wanderer who makes stops along his way to whatever end in small towns not often visited. These stops represent my wonderings, my trains of thought that are well escaped from the big cities. This way of life, (traveling the railways to the ends of the universe) takes its toll on the body. Sometimes I think I would trade all of these writings, all of my crazy ideas, all of these pages and pages of pure written thought that I’ve accumulated over the past few years, all of my experiences, all of my passions and vivid desires for simply a good night sleep.
And I assure you that it was the lack of sleep (which was prevalent for years) that caused my railways to travel to the ends of the universe, and not LSD.
Sometimes though, certain ones pop out and make me glad that I’ve written as continuously as I have. Those posts help me identify who it is that I am, an inquiry that, for much of my life has remained unanswered. There are strains through my posts that have remained constant which both encourage me and dishearten me the same. The encouragement comes because I realize that I have been blessed beyond what I can explain, and that life is actually really good. Yet, I am dishearten because, other than perhaps slightly better grammar, my posts have remained nearly the same, and I realize that had I not known that I wrote this next passage five years ago I might have thought that I wrote it yesterday.
Sitting here on these rocks, watching the sun go down over the city to my right and the water fall to my left, I think that this really is a different world out here, even just mere miles that separate the congested, confusing city lights from the natural, mostly untainted truths of nature. Even time seems to flow differently out here as opposed to my life in the city.
Time does indeed flow differently out there. It might explain why I feel like I’ve done so little over the years.
And then there are the lines of which I have felt came not of myself, and not especially of angels either, but inspired of the lost ethereal lovers of truth, the wanderers who inhabit the crevasses of our hearts by means of natural gravitation, the fair ghosts of the world, of which in all of said truth I felt I was one for a number of years—an issue I have yet to purge wholly from my thoughts or explain in depth to anyone who’s authority to evaluate my sanity.
Notwithstanding certain exceptions, I’m sure that shortly after one’s soul exits this coarse world and enters into the next life hereafter, one will realize that, in regard to the welfare of his or her own being that it truly is not a matter of religion so much as it is simply an understanding of what it is that is true. April 2011.
Goodnight dear lovers. Do good and sleep well.