2004-11-19
Like a wonderful balloon
I love the way one's soul is like a wonderful balloon, which travels all the way up into the heavens to kiss the stars and moon.
Our souls travel through spring days, autumn dusks, and winter nights...collecting smiles and whispers and anything and everything that's pure and gold.
Robert Frost once said that
nothing gold can stay...
When we open our eyes in this world for the first time, it's all gold: we're in a world half-charted, half-discovered, and much, much larger than our little hearts could hope for. Much larger than our tiny hands; the idyll beauty stretches out afar--so far, our little eyes cannot see it all.
Some of us will, in the course of our lifetime, fight fiercely to maintain the gold. However, some of us are fated to never have that gold...we lose it one day.
My mother read me Beatrix Potter when I was small, and Peter Rabbit lost his mittens and hat and coat after his mother had told him not to go into Mr. McGregor's garden. Peter Rabbit, that naughty rabbit, lost his mittens and hat and coat. That's how we lose our gold--just like Peter Rabbit...we lose our gold.
But like Peter's mittens and hat and coat, our gold should become lost at one time or another. I wouldn't say that everything is ephemeral, but neither will I say it is forever--things are in the middle. Our gold is meant to be lost at one point, for, if it not lost, then we cannot embark on the poetic journey.
We cannot begin to look for our gold. As we search for our gold, we tend to find things that are so much more--far surpassing what it is we were looking for in the first place, correct?
Stumble and fall. Once, we went picking strawberries and my aunt warned me it would be slippery. I was six and I wore my summer dress and bonnet; the first thing I did was slip, yet, I finished collecting my strawberries. In the summer before I started first grade, I had read this book called Blueberries For Sal, with the girl and the bear. At least, I think that's the title. Either way, my life has been defined by fruit.
In some wonderful way, of course. Have you ever written something with the sole purpose of truly expressing yourself, only that when your fingers grip the pen, you become numb?
Because you see, I think that's the beauty of writing: complexity. And when they say, Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity..., I'd rather say, Complexity, complexity, complexity!.
It means taking things that are unrelated and making something out of them. The things that defined my childhood are still here, and I look at them in amazement. In second grade, we did a school play and I was Squirrel Nutkin. I remember these lines:
Riddle me, riddle me, rot-tot-tote!
A little wee-man in a red red coat!
A staff in his hand
And a stone in his throat;
if you tell me this riddle
I'll give you a groat
Souls never change despite the age. I recall in how the book, Them, J.C.O. would always mention: "The essential Jules"...that the character, Jules, was searching for the "essential Jules", and in many ways, the character Maureen was searching for the "essential Maureen".
The essential Libet is here. Every word I've ever said was half-way produced by this particular part of myself. The essential...and despite my claims to being an existentialist, I now have to realize that I don't agree with "essence after existence", rather, existence and essence are intricately bound together from the day of our birth.
We have essence because we have existence, and vice-versa...
I love the way one's soul is like a wonderful balloon, which travels all the way up into the heavens to kiss the stars and moon.