Category: Thoughts

In a seemingly different life I dimly recall the sage words of another.

Hobby is the intent of a (leisure) life; work is but
means to an ends: we work that we might hobby.”
— me, now

Since graduating high school I forgot how much I love my art. My writing. My reading. My fiddle. My Japanese. My photography.  In the past few years it is has been a small renaissance of sorts for myself to rediscover all these things all over again.  I have for now called myself Traveler, not just traveler: explorer of the world around and in myself.  But I could replace Traveler with Hobbyist and might still come to the same consensus: my hobby is my life, life as art (as cliché and trite as that might seem, might actually be).

I once thought that by developing myself professionally I would make myself a content and complete individual.  (Work, marriage and all things external will never make a person happy, but this is for different time.)  Work is not necessarily, of course, drudgery; but, that is, at its barest, the beginning and end of it all: Work is work.  Work is but a single aspect of our lives; a single dimension of a life that is infinite in its dimensions. There is a value in learning to cope in this environment, but in and of itself work is less rewarding than the Puritan-Protestant upbringing would have led me to believe.  For the vast majority of us, work is a borne necessity; this I get and do not argue; but, it is with more than a mere thimble full of humility that I have learned the limitations of work and more so learned that there is far, far more to life than work.

I suspect that our hobbies are a truer determination of who we are, of what we truly value.  Certainly work can and does compensate us in times when nothing more than professionalism and discipline drive us to complete the task; but, hobbies give us neither salary nor security.  Hobbies are opportunities to do something for the sheer joy of it.  Hobbies do not require us to consider if we are professionally competent or sufficiently skilled to be financially compensated for our work.  Hobbies do not require quarterly reviews to determine our progress or our title or qualification for promotion.  Hobbies do not need last longer than they are satisfying; there is no penalty for leaving them for years at a time when they no longer suit us.  Hobbies give us nothing more than a deepening of ourselves; their greatest wealth, at their core, is their pursuit of ourselves through them.  I heart my hobbies; I hunger my hobbies.

Today I am thirty and seven years old.

I doubt even to a bored numerologist it adds up to much; but, to me it sums to a most precious number.  A number I had some doubts I would be able to count on.  When I was a child I came to believe through a long series of dreams that I would die when I was thirty and six years old.  Silly, really.  Who still believes well into their adult years in the dreams they had as a child?  Certainly not the person writing this here now.  But a part of him, a part of me, believes it or at least believed it might be true.  Call it one of my inner children: he still believed.  Was it probable that my death was foretold in my dreams from childhood?  Probable?  Not at all.  However.  Is it possible?  Yes, oh pity yes, it is possible!  Anything is possible.  Oh! such an infinitesimally small crack that is, is it not?  Possible.  Possible, it is enough to crack wide anyone’s grasp of reality.  It has been a year both lived as best as I know how, but also a year secretly wondering if this is the year a door, my door, closes.

This all began more years ago than I care to comment on; but, by age eight this reality had been seeded deep.  In those dreams I was forever 36 years old.  In those dreams all things centered on the end of the world in its many and varied forms.  In those dreams it was always I that ended the world; my hands were its destroyer.  In those dreams in the end I always died.  At some point, as I grew older, I understood all this to be merely the dreams of a troubled youth.  But that was some ten years after it all began.  In the years it took me to recognize this the thought of death was already planted deeper than I wished (and wish) to admit.  Especially in my younger years the dreams came to me with such rapidity and regularity that I thought they were the only things I ever dreamed of.  There was no other dreams.  Just those dreams.  There was for a time that they replaced my waking world’s reality as if every night as I closed my eyes I was actually awakening to my true world, a world where I came to destroy it and then die.  And when I died in that world only then could I open my eyes and go to sleep in this world, till the next night when I would destroy all over again.

These things have a way of snaking themselves into the subconscious, twisting things around till they become something more than mere dream: they came to be my believed destiny.  It is maybe why I believe so strongly in free will and why I feel it necessary to damn Fate.  How else could I have finally escaped those dreams then to believe more than in anything that my life is not at the mercy of anything than my own decisions: I decided back then to live; to not die.  But when you believe something as strongly and as deeply as I did for as long as I did, I suspect it must have changed me, warped and cracked me even.  I also suspect that I will never be able to fully comprehend the extent of these changes in me.  I only know that I was changed by them; I am changed by them.  I eventually let go of the idea that I would someday destroy the world.   That is an easy one to dismiss: me as the destroyer of our world.  But I was never able to completely dismiss that I might be the destroyer of my world.  Why could I not be my own destroyer?  I identified directly with  King Lear in large part because the tragedy of Lear who wants to be loved but does not know how to is a mirror to my own self-image; I wanting to love and be loved yet always seeming to fail utterly at it.  Which is to say, there is a part of me that never quite let go of the seed of an idea that my dreams were harbringer of my own doom.

The tick and tock of the clock has brought me ever closer to today.  In this last year, in some ways, my world did end.  It was not for the first time I found myself alone at the end of a sudden divorce.  But unlike the first divorce, I was able to admit to the sobering truth that it ended at my own hands.  No relationship is as black and white that blame can laid at one pair of feet, we both contributed to our demise.  But I played my part as co-destroyer of a beautiful life with a most beautiful person.  Sitting amongst the ruins of a life, once I put aside ego and discarded self-denial, I discovered something precious.  Maybe it was not so much a discovery as it was that I allowed myself the courage to love myself; the compassion to forgive myself.  Just as I learned to forgive myself, I also learned to accept myself.  I also learned that all realities must be allowed to co-exist.  I had to accept my now ex-wife’s reality that I was an unforgivable, damnable person even as I found the courage to forgive myself.  In the end, I coexist next to my contradictions of myself.  We do not cancel each other, we only strengthen and broaden who I am in this world; all these realities are valid parts of who I am.  I also discovered that all of these realities must be honored and accepted, and all the while I must never lose my faith in my humanity.  This meant, as odd as it may seem to be, that I had to accept my childhood dreams as both a possibility and as a delusion.  Denying this insanity, as it were, was not an option; to deny those dreams was to deny who I am.  It is my reality even if it all but a mere dream in my head.

So I did the one thing I am know best.  I dusted myself off and walked toward the pain.  I embraced who I am (and am not), delusions and all.  This past year I named the Year of Ward for reasons rather more humorously macabre than the cheery reasons I told others.  I traveled to say goodbye to the places and people precious to me; I traveled to say hello to the people and places dear to me.  I tried to squeeze every ounce out of my time, spending as much as time as could be afforded with the people I love including myself.  I tried to give myself the gift of life.  It has been 36 years, much of it wondering if this was the year.  It seems it was not to be.  At least not this year.  There is always time enough to die someday.  But not today.  I only hope that in the coming 36 years I find a long line of doors to open: from the year of Ward to the life of Ward.  Word.

MAZEL TOV.

On evenings when I come home, I find in the dusty corner at the bottom of the stairs him waiting.  Patiently on slivery web he waits till, when I kick off my shoes, I disturb him.  And only then does he scuttle somewhat hesitantly back toward his hollow between the tile and carpet.  I have come to find his presence a friendly warmth, especially when the cold of winter settles itself at the bottom of the stairs.  He is my friend who sits up waiting for my return; forever faithful.  Generations of his kind have taken up home there in the crick and crook at the bottom of the stairs.  Always but one.  From father to son and son to son’s son passing from one to the next a heritage that binds them to me.  Generations have come and gone; I only knowing of their passing by the change in size.  One day all hairy and large with age; the next day suddenly grown diminutive and petite.  This is how and when I know of the passing of the guard, the passing of an old, dear friend who for weeks and even sometimes months welcomed me home on the evenings when I return late.  Strangely I find it, but find it nonetheless, a kindred fellow in Spider and all his sons who have lived and waited for me evening over evening at the lows of my stairs. Thank you, my friend.  Welcome home, indeed.

Jump!  It is a hunger.  A need.  Insatiable.  To the cliffs!  To the blackness!  Jump.  Grab the hand of Fear and smile.  Fear is neither Enemy nor even Stranger.  We are Fear.  We standing in the shadow of our Ignorance.  Our cliffs are but the line to this Shadow; that which separates our Present Now and Future To Be.  Together spread arms and jump.  Jump!  JUMP!  Even in the breaking of bones, in the crush of organs there is no Pain That Kills.  Pain is but mere notes from a song sung Time Immemorial; a song we sing off-key when we refuse the Vision; refusing to accept We as Who Always Were and Who Always Will Be.  It is a gift the re-knitting of Now Self into Truer Self.  Sup at the teats of Ignorance’s breasts, her’s a murky blackness as sustaining, as nourishing, as nurturing as Mother’s Milk.  Smile kindly on Fear.  We are more tripped than tripping when we stand There at the precipice unmoving.  So be tripped and in so being tripped fly into freedom.  Turn then to Nyx.  Turn now to her Father.  Turn toward Blackness Absolute.  Jump.