It has been a rough patch of living as of late, Mercury is about to complete her (damned) retrograde, which has left in its path tiny piles of destruction. I awoke this morning feeling that - while everything on the surface was fine - the world was somehow askew. I fumbled with my notebook, unable to find words. My cup of morning tea remained untouched, and my body refused to contort itself to any shape vaguely resembling a downward-facing dog. A bust, it was heading to be a bust of a morning - which, of course, runs the risk of evolving into a bust of a day. And that is not what I am after. I decided, hesitantly, that what I needed was a change in perspective. To shift not what I was looking at but rather the direction from which I was seeing it.
I parked my bike and walked the rest of the way to the lookout point, taking notice of every tree branch, of the sounds of the birds, of the coolness of the air in the shadows. I was grateful for the movement, the challenge to my thighs, the contact between my feet and solid ground, even though I did feel a bit like I was floating. Perhaps a part of me was. I walked like a child, I hopped, I shimmied, until I found the perfect spot. My intention was to look. To see this place I have called home for the past two years in a new light. Or to rekindle an old light, maybe, I don't know. But what I noticed first was not what was I was seeing - the roads and buildings, the cars that moved in slow motion, the pockets of jungle trees everywhere. What I noticed, overwhelmingly, was the sound. The sound of everything moving down below. It was magnificent. So I sat, and I wrote this: "Up here, the city hums. It's a constant rumble, the wheeze of a tired breath, the hot sun baking every inch of it. Vroom, woosh, whirl go all the things in motion down below. People, like ants, driving around a giant train set. Slow, but steady, they don't quit. A bang, loud and prominent, breaks through the distant sky, and a handful of birds scatter like shrapnel, bursting upwards. They steal my eyes, and following them, I realize that the sky is radiant. Clouds in a line - unmoving, a kind of permanent installation - hang steady atop a mountain sitting subtly on a horizon faded in haze. Such perspective, to peek outside my boundaries from above, resting my eyes on the lines of the sea that always - most humbly - wraps itself around me, unknowingly. I am here, if I am anywhere. And no matter what the markings of a map tell me exists in this place, I can see from the sky that it is anything I want it to be. A jungle full of butterflies and human beings, who unbeknownst to themselves move around just like ants do, all the while humming."
2 Comments
Esther
1/25/2016 01:35:35 pm
So great to change perspectives and see things in a new light! Love this ka!
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Anne
1/25/2016 07:29:12 pm
This is really lovely, thanks. I wish I'd seen more of Surat Thani and areas around it while I was there.
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AuthorChicago-born citizen of the globe, rich in the things that really matter. Let's get weird. Categories
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