Gravity

"Is this what it's like, I thought then, and think now: a little blood here, a chomp there, and still we live, trampling the grass? Must everything whole be nibbled?"

                                                                                                                       -Annie Dillard

  On account of life and deeds, color and texture, sexuality and religion I am a tumble weed of both desire and constraint.  As one writer wrote about his life (and I paraphrase): "There I was, successful, famous, and rich only to find my self the next day raving mad!"  When desire takes her hand and holds me too close the scales shift to that side of life and off I go!  And when they shift to guilt and worry, sliding to far to constrain, I choke on a noose of my own making "Their freedom has now become their bondage." Brett said this week end.  I just finished two days with the delightful Mr. and Mrs. Townson.  I awoke in their "off the grid" house in the West Kootenia late last Saturday morning to wander up stairs with my guitar. "Dodging bullets in the sun, I hope that was the last one" Brett howls to a riff I start playing.  A new song is born as we pull secrets from the air about a man caught in something too big to handle.  The morning turns into afternoon and we hunt the scrap yard near the shop for a surface to paint on.  House paint gets dribbled and thrown, flexed and suspended before contact, a collaboration of wills and friendships. Brett and I paint together just for the hell of it, just to see if we can bend like reeds in the same wind.  These images are from those days. Just a grab at a time and a glance of a memory.  We talked exhausted into the night about our feelings on religion, that oh so delicate balance between relativity and cramped security: what parts of life are gravity and what parts are atoms and beyond!  Our basic conclusion, in case you are just dying to know and believe that at least one of us must be ingenious enough to figure it all out, is simply this: "somethings are basic truths, such as gravity, yet moral law can't be applied to life like say "gravity" is, it comes down to love and hate, "to hate evil and love good" yet we are easily fools for evil that is good and good that is evil.  This means it is a day to day walk in grace, mercy, love, and repentance but most of all love. Some how things are better that way.  And we are all crazed artist's with our hair flying, our desire flinging and our constraint held in the tensions of gravity.