The Clocks March

---12.31.1999---

The world’s clocks have swallowed the last hours of this year, this decade, century, and millennium without regard to the sweetness or bitterness of those hours in the locations which they were consumed. Insatiable, indifferent clocks, devouring seconds and hours without pause, never stopping to linger over a savory, delicate minute, never deciding that a few exquisite moments should last all day, or that some miserable stretch of time should be disregarded and skipped altogether. All they know is onward, only onward, piling broken and spent intervals onto the ever-increasing mountains of used-up time.

----

Balancing on the edge of two millennia, this is the last thing I’ll write before the clocks run out:

Starry stars, empty bars,
lonely cars, and girls with scars.

Quiet walks, solemn talks,
moonlit stalks, and sliding locks.

Dreaming seas, heartfelt pleas,
sickness, illness and disease.

Black, dark nights, age-old fights,
far-off lights, and terrible plights.

And if you knew what men could do,
then you’d be through and through and through.

You’d finish your days, not yet done,
and far away you too would run.

Run and run. Run, run and run.

—01.29.2022---

Hi, it’s me in the present. Sheesh—OK, that feels like a rough way to have ended a thousand years.

And why? I think for my first go at living on an island I was partially driven by wanting to find a haven, a safe place. At that time I saw a world mired in conflict, and perceived it (or us) as unable to heal. What to do in that situation? Head for the hills, or the hills surrounded by sea, in my case.

And today, I also live on an island. And I also feel that my motivation and perspective have changed. This round of island living was motivated by joy. My partner and I picked this place because we found it, and the community, beautiful and inspiring.

The world may still be what it is. Twenty-plus years ago, I think my outlook was one in which I expected things to happen to me, that I felt unable to effect change, or navigate a course, that I would have to take what came.

Now my viewpoint is that each one of us can effect change, within ourselves at least, that we all learn from each other, and that each one of us can effect the whole. We don’t have to take whatever comes down the pike. We can attract what we want to our lives. We can create our own realities.

I think one of the tricks with that is taking time to imagine, asking ourselves what kind of future we want, dedicating time and energy towards visualizing it, and then working toward that heading. Sure, there may be headwinds, there may be currents, but with steady, and perhaps well-placed, application of our will, we will get there. Or perhaps we work with the wind and currents!

That’s the energy I’d like to take into the next thousand years.