One Lone Dancer
My hard drive crashed. I had just copied all of my photos to it, over 5000 of them. The collection spanned ten years of moments in Mexico, Europe, and here at home. Some are still on my computer but many are gone. But the loss is more that the photos were a journal of my life over that time, a time in which i’ve gone through so many changes. As I would go through the photos, and I did so frequently, a narration underlaid them, a documentary of transformation in a language of my own.
Just after a confusing, painful, and less than gracious divorce, I drove through the sugar cane fields of Queensland, Australia and spent 3 days on a schooner, diving near the Great Barrier Reef in the Whitsunday Islands, looking for a beauty to console me. The sea held me easily, let me see through her and I touched the living coral and felt the awe of the great pulse of life beneath the sea.
Croagh Patrick
Through a time of whirlwind personal upheaval, a loss of sureness as to who I was, I went home to Ireland. I had never been there before but it was unmistakably home. With no sure footing under me, feeling disconnected from all that’s courageous within me, I climbed Croagh Patrick, that holy hill of eternal penance, singing a lamenting air, one the Irish know by heart and by heart alone. I sank into pints on a wooden bench and laughed at the scenes before me, taking some respite from the scenes behind and the gravity of a sullen tale. In the native home of the sullen tale and the sorrowed heart, with good friends, I found courage in the barren length of the Boirinn, I let go of cares into the air of the flautist in Westport, and poured longing over the Cliffs of Mohr. To grace my tomorrows, I bent over backwards at Blarney Castle and sipped the water of life in Cork.
Big Bottom Straw Holder
At the workers carnival in Sayulita, Mexico, I started to laugh again. Watching the cowboys heaving rocks, 3 for 2 pesos, and breaking beer bottles stacked in pyramids at the knock-three-down booth. With mucho gusto, they cheered in unison whenever one got the prize – a can of cheap beer. I received the blessings of the inflated jesus and mary dolls, the prizes in the spin-the-wheel booth; pulled a straw for my bebida from a big-bottomed babe cup, and remembered myself in the ice-cream smeared noses of los ninos. Under the din of the hootin and hollerin over the motor-driven rides and the barkers, I laughed.
The Castle in Prague above the River Vtlava
In Prague, those resurrected days in Prague, I was new, with time having washed me through. I found no infant of redemption but a full return to something I hadn’t lost, only overlooked. I found majesty to explore, courage, heroism and bravery to imbibe, noble history to wear, beauty to live with, culture to feel at home with. Courage returned to my heart, I returned to my eyes. Under tall arches in black stone battlements, in the hermit cellars of alchemy, under St. Vitus’ towers pointing to God’s endless firmament, I felt the turn within. Deeper and stronger waters overturned a weathered and wind-blown surface and took the high ground once again. Lead becomes gold, see it with no eyes, feel it with no skin.
I took the hard drive to a computer shop and hoped to recover what I could. But I knew the odds weren’t good and I slowly accepted that the photos are likely lost, so many mile markers on my walk. All on a string going back to collapse, to wandering, regeneration, leading me to where I find the spot from which to let go. As I held the memory of all of those photos in my mind, I wavered between sadness and surrender, renunciation and reminiscence. Life now looked like a wind — a wind with a skin of images, a lining in a meandering, weaving tunnel around me. I wondered how i could hold on, they were all so ephemeral. And then, like a skill I’d learned, forgotten, and remembered, I let go. I let go a possessing grip and released a breath with conviction. The swirling gallery was moving out of sequence, time was being shuffled, the narrative rearranged. but I felt the core. I neither saddened or became joyful, neither victim or hero, I simply stopped.
Soothing a sad, longing-addicted heart, they got me through a night, wrapped me in a colorful fabric with a texture of earth and of ash, a shawl for slow grieving. The wind of images still swirls, always there for the taking, but the sky’s become vast and my life-like-a-wind escapes the hollow soul of stories left behind.
Everything is tenuous now.
The filaments that tie me to desire
are moving from rope to gossamer,
the lure has cooled.
Calm respite and refuge overtake me,
the calm sea of death is in view.
A subtle thrill of floating,
a remembered joy,
a wind of nobility fills my hollow shell.
The moon rises above my mind,
the communion of ancestors and creator
solves my pending equations,
leaving me fresh,
washed ashore in my single boat.
Orange sun on my breast plate gleams,
i sit before the heaving sea
breathing the stillness of dusky sky.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 John Curley
