"dumbly"...

I was talking to my Pennsylvanian kith via the phone lines on Saturday & I had to apologize, because I couldn’t recall when he had graduated high school, wanting to gauge his journey through pop culture, which is greatly influenced by our childhood & teen distractions. Of course, it was the same year I graduated: 1980 – but on the other side of the country. It is embarrassing as well as frustrating how my disabilities hurdles such knowledge out of my memory & they are misplaced, sometimes entirely lost. Afloat, this is my curse.

But is it a curse? To not remember everything anymore, it's easier to achieve emptiness that the Zennists & Taoists suggest in their riddles. Maybe this makes my spiritual path easier.

Maybe not.

The path... We struggle, we ache, we forget, we can't, then can. To wash my body becomes a sacred act.

In the Making of documentary for The Mahabharata, the French/German actor who plays Arjuna said that performing in a language other than his natural tongue makes each word precious. Familiarity since first learning to speak has eroded the uniqueness of our own language. But, having migraines & seizures, clicking off the power from time to time or electrifying my lobes, I find this is true with English. Words are incredible jewels again, ones I hold up to the light to see through them. But on the far side of this realization, newer learned words fall entirely away, leaving my thesaurus a major part of certain re-writes.

Held up yesterday for inspection, I only knew the sound of the name “Kyle”, uttered by a neighbor child who wears it, and was unable to spell it. I found it in a Baby name book after I had exhausted the options before surrendering to simply scrutinizing all the common "K" names.

This is my life. Damned & blessed in the same hug, kicked and nurtured in the identical kiss upon my smoldering forehead reacting to too much barometric upheaval unleashed by the Gods & Goddesses of weather & brain. Cerebral awareness dissolves in my palms & I am left "dumbly"...

(Art © 2011 by j. m. Scoville)