The long absences here have neither been planned nor railed against they have just been, it is my life. Gaps never filled, activities not remembered, people missed but not as name only feeling, days engaged with but impossible to bring to mind without detailed notes and pictures etc, etc.
Sometimes I just get very tired of trying to keep track and let the daily routines and rhythm slip but often lose them completely.
This is sometimes a conscious decision though more often than not it is a case of me absent of mind ripping up and throwing away the notes, books, alarms and all the other nuts and bolts that hold this life together, then metaphorically heading down a jetty path just for a quick look at boats and water beyond.
Of course the quick look becomes weeks and sometimes months of floating midst a sea of chaos oblivious to the rotting planks of the row-boat I have cast off in, until feet become decidedly damp or better still I find myself sitting in my boat with oars floating rather than pulling as water level inside is equal to that outside so that swimming rather than rowing happens whether I want that or not.
But always there are new things to glimpse in the waters surrounding and entering my boat and though there are times when sense of drowning is more than ‘just’ a sense, the delight of the life flowing around and past me rarely leaves me.
I often daydream about a last boat ride I will make and am never dismayed by these thoughts rather they are the life-preserver for now. They always awaken in me great feelings of thanks and joy in knowing that I have this wonder-filled landscape to glide through, be held by and eventually almost certainly be embraced and captured by.
The boat ride may one day be one embarked upon in a solid plank built boat, across known waters that roll on to familiar shorelines, moving ever towards the dark horizon filled with falling stars and rising sun. The wheel house will be empty with its steering gear lashed to a point on the compass for I will need to be at the prow to watch the waters I will forever be part of at journeys end and beginning. Where that horizon and I will become one as the falling star and rising sun become the only trace I leave behind.
Or the waters I travel through may be those labelled by others as madness, dementia or senility, the boat will be hidden from all save my heart and mind but still the horizon will beckon and the falling stars and rising sun encourage and fill me up with the wonder and magic that have formed and reformed me for the now and always known and unknown.
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