tangents: march 3, 2008

Strange how intimacy and intimidation sound so similar yet have contrasting definitions and manifest themselves at different stages.
How can one become so intimidated to refrain from speech while becoming too intimate to speak or even breathe without the other person? Then moving to the latter of complete intimidation where fear of memory , comfort or complete cowardice leads you to become the strangers you once were?
Life is so complex, the older I become, the less I grasp it. It can be so familiar, so fulfilling and at times, so foreign and disconnected.
I've lived life in two extremes- in each forgetting who I was or what I learned. Life has two dimensions- solitude/deficit and abundance.
In each stage, I crave the experience I once had. To share a life of love, happiness and comfort does not allow for a life of freedom, discomfort and unfamiliarity. Life requires a constant sacrifice and cutting of spokes in order to experience each of the two at separate times. Fear conditions courage to face the unknown.
The sweet ain't as sweet without the sour, but when the sour is too extreme, there lies no hope for the sweet. You begin settling in a life of destitution from the ideas and hopes you once had. How can you grow when you've been so cut off from the things that encouraged and reassured you of who you were and who you wanted to be?
Memories then become trite when you forget the reasons and the emotions that triggered them.
Striving a new chapter, I shut them out, and forget how they happened and how they molded me.
Climbing pine trees, building tree houses. Sitting on top of that cliff in the grand canyon, all alone, so insignificant but feeling so beautiful to be a part of this life- of the little things that get so masked by the things that are irrelevant.
I know what it's like to feel that- so fulfilled, so healed so unbroken by the simplest of things that mean the world to you at that moment. Empty of the pollution and muck I am immune to and full of the purity and beauty of the unfamiliar.
I've seen things I should never forget- things that are fully mine that no one can share in similar interpretation and perspective.
Beauty of the pure life- of the things you can never retrace.
Memories are a gift and a fault. They can cause pain and ecstacy. Bask in them regardless. They define every nook of our being. They possess the power of identity and hold the code of growth.