Good Morning Jacob

Letter to my Son

Sunday, 24 August

no remedy

Good Morning Jacob…

It rains and it doesn’t rain.  Sometimes it’s day.  Other times it is night.  We don’t know why we’re here.  We make up stories to explain.  What appears the more plausible depends on how we are cooked inside.  Sometimes I just want to stop troubling myself.  Why should I care why the formula for discovering the hypotenuse always seems to work?  Be happy with a comic book and a cookie.  What is so wrong about tilting toward a less purposeful fantasy?  There is just enough room to curl up and sleep in this boat filled with people.  I will close my eyes and listen to the sound in words rocking back and forth until they all roll off the page.  We are settled on our fate.  We’re in this all together.  It’s nothing, really.  It just seems otherwise.

Keep busy always.  Even meditation is an exasperated effort at holding back calculated thought.  What do you find in the space between the notes?  My words are strictly laid down in linear sequence.  They serve as wooden ties – keeping the rails parallel.  My mind dare not deviate from the tested path.  Were I to jump the track I would soon be exposed.  Numbers no longer require the tool of addition.  The concept of quantity is lost from vocabulary.  I can no longer group like instances.  I have no need to.  I prefer to no longer discriminate this from that.  What is separation, anyway?  The need to sort is lost when one chooses dissolution of the matter of subject. 

Nothing exists separate enough to call it an event.  Time loses its distinctions.  Boundaries of every type only seem to dissolve because they never were in the foremost term of reality.  The mind has lost all focus.  The mind itself is lost.  There is nothing to think of as mine.  What happens to be me is nowhere to be found.  All is simply as always was.  Being isn’t something contained.  What can be made of this isolated perspective called mine? 

Words again.  I remain safely restrained within my tracks.  Choo choo!  I’m busy.  I work for my living.  I metabolize safely both material and nonmaterial elements locked within my sealed realm.  I walk the streets fully clothed and, by all appearance, sanguine.  You do, as well.  We meet and greet.  Another hot one today.  Keep your clothing loose and your emotions cool.  Say hello to the family for me.  We’ve both got it right.  Looking good.

It’s too soon to slip away into that which is without notice.  Mornings still hold overwhelming reward.  Memory serves well enough for me to find a fascination in the processing of age.  We live from day to day an accumulating change.  I could here and there strategically nip and tuck my suit of well-worn flesh but would it provoke a more succulent accounting of this life?  Perhaps.  Maybe I prefer bearing a likeness more compliant with the life I’ve obstinately lived, with its misguided dents, patchwork colorations and my ever-present vanities that loom over this personage like a thunderhead’s shadow cast on dry, laggard terrain.  Take a good look if you like.  Yeah, this is me.  Kind of funny, isn’t it?

See!  Now doesn’t this vision of life lived somehow feel more rewarding than forging a pathway to a nebulous sense of spiritual being?  We do appear to have been born into a highly corruptible existence, after all.  Is there something terribly wrong in allowing ourselves to chronicle the physical facts resulting from nature’s pull on the course of our life?  We each appear magically upon this scene and immediately proceed to etch the passing of our very existence.  We are each but one of umpteen billions of falling drops.  We are so many beings appearing always alike.  Yet, confronted together as just you and I alone, we are each refreshing and, dare I say, spiritual – in a disarming, human way.

Love,

          Dad