Caleb Stine has a fine song called "I Wasn't Built For A Life Like This", off of the album of the same name. It's sad, but beautiful, and it just about hit my frame of mind tonight. It knocked me off my pins, what with the great weather and the gainful employment I have been experiencing. So it was disorienting to find myself watering the flowers on the porch, shoulders slumping, and asking myself "What's wrong with this picture?".
A puzzle, really. There was no obvious reason for melancholy. I was home from work, safe and dry, with a full belly to boot. The cool quiet evening was just the thing for a tired mind. But...
There is a hanging basket on my porch, the plant it contains is surely dead. The shriveled blossoms hang limp over the sides and looking uncomfortably like hair. It used to be a pansy. It is dead because I haven't watered it in about two weeks. I'm slightly uneasy about that, but it didn't get watered because a robin built a nest in the pot and promptly laid four eggs in it. I know that because I peeked in it once when the mother bird was absent.
Fatigue surely played a role here. Maybe it was the faint music on the air, too. I stood and watered the flowers, peering at the bird perched on her nest when something coalesced out of the air and wrapped my heart in a faint, cool hug.
Like that bird nest suddenly appearing, things in my life have this tendency to take me by surprise. And this past year, especially this past winter and now spring, feels like it has been full of surprises (some good, some bad). The net result is frequent change of course, reconsideration of options, sudden outbursts of epithets. The daily fabric of existence gets woven out of living "on the fly", and I've never been too good at living an ad hoc life.
Or maybe its all been ad hoc to this point, and I've been laboring under the misconception that there was a plan, an order to the unfolding of my life.
I'm rambling now, aren't I? Is this now ad hoc, in and of itself? Should I cease and desist on this idea of an order to everything, all the time and embrace my inner Rube Goldberg?
Posts
Sup Gumbo.
ReplyDeleteIn the words of Dori, from Finding Nemo, "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming."
Got some news today, and I don't know if the final results of some tests will change my life,.....forever. At 35 years old.
I hear you bro. Loud and clear.
Just keep swimming, watering flowers, etc.
Later,
Jason
i owe you so many words IG....i just can't seem to muster the energy to keep up with anyone these days,let alone the mad ramblings of LIFE...how do you manage to so eloquently put these thoughts to paper (so to speak)
ReplyDelete"An ad hoc life"...oh yeah. This random melancholy bug must be going around...keeps biting me too.
ReplyDeleteYou've shared a universal feeling so poetically. I think it's only through the proverbial rear-view mirror that we know why this melancholy appears out of nowhere.
ReplyDeleteAgree that life is ad hoc and changes without our preconceived idea...I find the only way to adjust to confront it...ask life..what do you what from me today...you must show me..or I will not know where to step...look it in the face and say..it is you and me baby....lets do it..bkm
ReplyDeleteTired, melencholy, and a reconsideration of options. Oh man! What a world of changes does that present? Doesn't it get weary in that head of yours? I think so.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of letting the plant go for the emergence of the baby birds, well. that speaks volumes, doesn't it? The Wee Lass?
I don't know. Life is a mystery after all, isn't it IG? Hugs to you!
Eh...no need to rethink the comments under the roof...I love the irreverent and off the cuff.
ReplyDeleteFirst exposure to J.O.Y., huh? Love her stuff. Awesome writing set to music...Picket turned me on to her.