A Gem in a Snow Globe

We are good

It feels like there is a post tragedy phenomena where words don't mean enough, yet they are everything in their own way.  I'm realizing many different things right now; part of it's in my own head, but is triggered by words and moments brought on my others - mutual thoughts on similar issues.  

Realizing that there is a big part of our friendships that exist only in our own minds.  Sometimes when you have good enough friends, this can be a beautiful thing.  But it can be dangerous in its own ways.  When you lose someone close to you, it perpetuates so much internally.  Where is the border between how much you're supposed to be here and how much you're supposed to be in your own mind? 

He had a way of being able to talk without speaking.  He also had a way of understanding things most of us didn't, just by seeing the world in a different light, angle, perspective.  

For some reason I'm thinking about Pompeii.  A beautiful tragedy.  Thinking about how much is behind it, a message of past success and pain.  Shells of bodies that couldn't escape but knew their fate.  The power and beauty of a volcano ready to explode and leave an unknown effect on the earth it touches, and all the things captured by its lava.  Even now there is a new city of Pompeii, building its livelihood from the ruins of a fire-filled past.  Thinking, what?  We're too smart for nature?  Maybe we're thinking in the same fantastical day dream that everything is happening around us instead of to us.  

I'm up late, writing pages and pages.  I've tried to do this many times, but it leaves me feeling like the shell of one of those bodies in Pompeii.  Like I'm some sort of unfinished story.  Half of me exists in a day to day way, surrounded by people and reality that have shaped me and do shape me still.  But when I sit down with a pen and paper, I know there is something there trying to escape.  Something familiar, but always unknown.  

I know I'm capable of so much more.  And I say this for myself and the world.  Our time here is short, but because of that so many people have lost sight of so much.  Here we are, just a part of an unpredictable and finite world.  We know so much, but we really know nothing.  And isn't that everything?  But it isn't, it isn't even close.  This is all we have, our place here.  Somewhere though things have gotten off track, everything has gotten so big and complicated that people have forgotten they need to look out for each other.  Like in politics and community, everyone is trying to fix things, but we're forgotten what's in our own back yards.  

Who do we owe and what do we owe?  Our fear of the world, or maybe even our understanding as we see it, has left us thinking we have to only look out for ourselves first- then everything will fall into place.  Why do we somehow owe ourselves everything, and place everyone else second? 

On some level I can understand how our most valuable investment is what we put into ourselves, how if we want to make a difference somewhere, it has to start with us.  But I just feel like that "fact" (if you'll call it that) has gotten distorted.  We should be making this investment in ourselves, so that we can truly be invested in our people, all people, the world.  There are all these justifications and reasons, but the bottom line is that somewhere, somehow, people have forgotten how to take care of each other.  

I don't want this to come off as me thinking I'm some superior person who loves everyone and has the world figured out, because I'm not.  But what I am beginning to understand is that my way of thinking is unique- I mean, this is true with everyone- we're all different people with different ways of thinking - but I'm starting to understand more why and where my feelings towards people and the world have left me with some hurt.  

Right now I'm thinking about a big jigsaw puzzle, a model ship in a bottle, and a snow globe.  When you put together a puzzle, you start with the corner pieces, then group similar pieces together.  Each piece has its own purpose, but without the other pieces, there would be no puzzle.  Different areas of the puzzle are made up by groups of pieces - maybe pink for the sky, turquoise for the ground.  By looking at two different pieces of the the puzzle, pieces from different areas, you could sometimes forget that they work together and have the potential to become one interconnected entity.  

With a model ship in a bottle, the trick seems to be precision and care.  Taking the time to tweeze together tiny pieces and parts in just the right way creates something beautiful, something mysterious.  I think every kid has had, and remembers the moment when they saw their first ship in a bottle.  So much fascination, wonder, and imagination.  Thinking, how could this be possible, then getting lost in the detail and perfection, imagining being on this tiny ship, this huge ship.  Then it hits you, even as a kid, that the ocean could swallow you up at any moment.  You know right then that something as perfect and intricate as that ship contains so many boundaries and conditions.  Yet, even though you know this, there is that undeniable eye of the storm; that moment where you are so connected to the stranger that put together the model ship, and it's just enough to continue having faith.  Just enough beauty to overcome the fear of being so small and getting swallowed up.  

Thinking about a snow globe, I envision a lone snowman entrapped in a strikingly familiar sphere.  The isolation. The delicacy.  Majority water, round, waiting to be broken - really, it's too much.  But it goes back to that snowman, that Eiffel Tower, or whatever your character was; it's so out of place being there alone completely taken out of its context.  

The connections and the metaphors could go on forever.  Like the winding roads of all the places in the world you'll never go.  Just don't forget about all the places in your imagination that will only be walked by you. How can this be balanced?  We need to make things, create, get stuff done.  Live in the way we want to live, capture moments, but create continuous dreams and ideas.  Don't get invested in anything, get invested in everything.  See things for the way they are; see things only as you see them, but always see things through other people's eyes.  

Sometimes it's just about waking up and thinking about all the different places around the world.  Reminding yourself that there is so much happening in the moment when you brush your teeth.  People are getting raped right now as I write this, children are dying and continents melting.  I know there is a lot of good and beauty too, but for some reason it can be so much harder to think about.  And when I do think about it, it's in the form of aesthetic beauty and the vague reality of love.  

There is beauty when people come together to make a change or fix a wrong.  But there was one time when I learned something that changed everything, and it had almost managed to take the beauty out of that, though I admit I'm still clinging.  Learning about philosophy and reaching the point of questioning the selfish in the selfless.  They say that even the most selfless acts are spawned from a place of selfishness.  Is this supposed to suck to think about, or is there something we can do with this? 

The moment when that man or woman made the ship in a bottle had to have been about them.  I wonder if they knew where the ship would end up or what it would mean to someone.  To a little girl, on a real, tangible boat.  To a little girl who, for a moment, had everything; but knew too young the cost of having a seemingly stable life.  Trapped in a snow globe, knowing that one day it will break.  Being a part of a beautiful, but fractured, puzzle.  Realizing that the cracks are just as important as the whole picture.  Hoping to leave a legacy, something beautiful and full of questions and answers.  Some connection.  

But because we can't see, feel, or paint the whole world, something had to change.  Some sort of shift had to happen, slowly and powerfully, like the rocks deep underground that cause earthquakes.  Only, maybe an earthquake would be better, because there is some fear in living- waiting for some dark unknown to startle you awake in the middle of the night and never let you go back to sleep.  

I can't really tell you exactly how or when this shift took place, but it's ever evolving like the water drops that form stalactites and stalagmites in caves.  It involved a closing and opening of my heart.  It involved me admitting I had no idea who I was, while also knowing that any conceptualized idea of me from friends and family was wrong too.  Perhaps it was me realizing that in the grand scheme of things I, we, are nothing.  Or maybe it was me realizing that we are everything.  When you control your own steps, influence and are influenced by others, where do you go and how many times do you get lost? 

This is an evolving journey, captured only in brief by evolving writing.  It has become personal, it has become a challenge.  Like somehow this pen and paper knows more than I do.  Really, there is something that happens, and sometimes it's hard to recognize my own handwriting, my own thoughts and words.  I could go on for hours, days even, but the problem is distraction and not knowing where I'm going.  I don't really have some grand story to tell, not even a decent memoir.