Daring To Look, Daring To Leap - Part 2

How beautiful it is, this fleeting life, if we just let it be so

This is part 2 of Daring To Look, Daring To Leap. If you haven’t yet read part 1, maybe you should, this post will make more sense if you do, just click HERE.

With thanks to Lor, Julia Adzuki and E.T. Allen for sparking the glowing embers under Part 1 so it might flame into being.

Credit - Jonathan Foster

1.

I noticed her straight away. The way her dress trembled in the wind as she rode along, her knees peeking from the hem on the top of the round and round, the way her eyes devoured the world, the way her hands loosely gripped the handlebars, the translucence of her perspiring forehead, her blissful pleasure taken in cycling and her nonchalant glance, aware of her impact, yet not at all aware.

How easily we can fall in love, over and over again. Lightning. Flash. “Who was she? What was it like to be her?” How easily we can become a singular yearning attention, a lone beating heart succumbing to the ancient urge to fuse and merge and yet preserve our discreet, unique selves. How beautiful it is, this fleeting life, if we just let it be so.

This memory hadn’t bubbled surface-ward for many years, but there in the corner of this small cafe sat a women, engaged in conversation, who had a particular flick in her fringe that had revived this long forgotten moment when a women on a bike just happened to pass me as she rolled home with her scant groceries on a Stockholm street, and now, out of the blue, awoken by a similar flicked fringe of brunette hair, there she was, riding along, igniting long-forgotten coals that had laid smouldering within me.

He could see I was drifting, that something had snared me momentarily, and he took a swig of beer and patiently settled into the moment, then after a spoonful of time he ventured,“How’s your view?”, glancing over his shoulder and smiling.

I smiled too and sort of laughed, and pointed with my chin toward the cast of characters sardined into this cafe, not quite willing to reveal the memory that had risen in my mind, not quite willing to share one of the infinite thoughts that perpetually rise and fall within us all. Some things cannot be said, at least not easily, without diminishing them. Some things need to percolate in time. Perhaps all things.

His look said, not to worry, and then he asked, “So what about you, what’s your plan, what’ll you be doing when I’m pirating?”

I thought “My plan?” and then, not so much in words but rather in a tide of feelings, I wondered What would this world be if the things we lean toward, like a flower toward the sun, were not hidden away but said out loud? Who would we be if we revealed the intimate, the important, and not just a sanitised simulacrum of ourselves? And who are we if we don’t?

I wasn’t used to being the patient, I was used to being the therapist. But his question and his open gaze and his kindness in this warm oasis in the snow laid me firmly upon the couch from where I peered into the glorious nothingness, surrounded by those who also dared to feel the vertigo, and I let the feeling rise within me that I might dare to speak truly from the heart and shed this habitual identity and float away upon the sea.

2.

He would drive for hours along narrow roads, often without seeing a single car, only the occasional logging truck extracting forest flesh, until, eventually, he would pull into some school car park, where beside his car, in all weathers, he would don his pirate garb and check himself in the reflection of the car window and wonder whether it was the reflection or himself that was real.

Around the land he travelled, from school to school, in his small car, through such vast silent forests that when he stopped beside the road to rest and drink from his flask of coffee he could hear the forest breathing and his heart beating to the melody of birdsong.

And in every school he came to he brought the calm forest silence with him and let it settle all around so the children themselves would quieten as they also took deep forest breathes and listened earnestly to his words. And they would look into his face and smile when he smiled and laugh when he laughed and together they would slowly all become pirates and sing out their pirate songs and raise their cardboard cutlasses toward the heavens and dream of uncharted oceans on which they might roam forever free.

3.

“You know,” I said, leaning on one elbow, resting my cheek in my palm, twirling my beer bottle on the counter, “just then, I remembered that I saw my wife once, before I actually met her, I saw her riding along on her bike, she’d randomly ridden past me and I saw her and I think I fell in love with her right there and then, like, bang, love! But I didn’t actually meet her until years later at a party, though until right this very moment I’d forgotten I’d ever seen her riding by.”

He didn’t say anything, just smiled and waited so I went on, “I didn’t meet her until I was in my thirties. I didn’t have much faith in relationships, at the time” I did the rabbit ears gesture, “but then bang, she hit me like a freight train and I’ve been in love with her ever since, truly…”

“Madly,” he laughed.

“Deeply,” I smiled and said “but what I’m trying to say is it wasn’t planned, some things are just unplannable, right? How can anyone plan their way through all the knotty unpredictable entanglements of this life?”

He nodded and drank and then said, “But you can’t live without agency, you can’t just float about waiting for potential wives to ride past or some divine providence to deliver you from evil, you need to dare to leap sometimes, don’t you, especially now, don’t you?”

My mood was soaring from the beer and the warm embrace of friendship and all the trust circling in this den of murmuring, laughing, bubbling fellow adventurers, so I was momentarily bewildered by “especially now.” What did he mean? The ongoing planetary collapse? Or the fact we were, staggering upon the foothills of old age? Why “especially now”?

Again he saw I was momentarily drifting and took pity on me.

“I mean the way you’re also building a coffin,” he said, “and throwing yourself into a grave, I recognise the symptoms,” he laughed, “Isn’t it time for you honour this fleeting life and also do what you need to do, no?”

I said nothing, feeling suddenly exposed and unveiled, my supposed cultivated opinions revealed as the anxious coping mechanisms they really were, my own emperors clothes getting the pointed finger. And I felt relief wash over me as another layer of so-called identity was stripped away. He was right, “especially now”. Everything should always be “especially now”.

“OK then, do you want to know what I want?” I said.

“Tell me,” he replied.

“I just want to write stories. I want to write such beautiful stories that people feel alive when they read them, I want to write stories that strip the world of all this,” I did the spiralling gesture that seemed to take in everything that ever was, “and I want my stories to set off tiny waves of love that wash away all the pain and all the cruelty and all the stupidity and leave nothing but beating hearts and yearning attentions and lovers riding on bicycles right into each others arms,” I was getting louder as I got caught up in my own dreams, “I want to write stories where people actually pay attention to each other just because paying attention is the right thing to do, I want to write stories that unleash curiosity and friendship where each and every one of us is respected for just being ourselves what ever that might be, I want to write stories where we do the things our hearts tell us instead of the things we are forced to do, I want to write stories of trust and dignity and curiosity and meaning where everyone can bare their soul without fear of consequence and we all value each other just because we exist, I want to write stories that teeter right on the edge of a mystical abyss and then I want to leap into those stories and float about in a sea of love, that’s what the fuck I want to do!” And with unexpected tears rolling down my cheeks I stood up and I saw that other people were actually angels and they too were standing up and embracing each other and smiling and there were tears rolling down their cheeks and we all transformed into singular yearning attentions and joyful beating hearts fusing and merging in all this wonderful delirium and I thought, How beautiful it is, this fleeting life, if we just let it be so.

And he stood up and smiled and said, “Now that’s something, that’s really something to want.”

And my face was a wet smile of relief and joy and he said “You see my friend if we just dare to leap we’re all angelic pirates underneath it all.”

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