This morning like every morning, our noisy kitty whined me awake, predawn. But instead of going back to sleep, I was awake enough to want to read some news. Why I would choose news over J.D. Salinger is beyond me. I just started reading Raise High the Roof Beam & Seymour: an Introduction. This book makes me happy, but I will return to that later, because right now I am thinking about being disconnected.
Disconnection comes so easy down here. And in a way, it’s therapeutic. The realities are different. Before it was simple: I, like most people around me, was “educated” and comfortable, I read the news and would feel emotional, even inflamed by it. Lament at what’s happening all over the world (and at "home": tea parties, oil spills, birtherism, nativism; really? are you kidding me? isn't the USA founded by immigrants?). So it so happens that sometimes we read the news, stress out, lose sleep, proclaim ourselves political and down antidepressants or blood pressure meds. We vote, maybe we donate. We grow alarmed, we grow frenzied. And this agitation pools into a greater collective human energy--maybe, I venture to say, even creating more bad news. Increasing the volume, as it were, on our own aggravated state. Thus creating more of a frenzy whose crescendo grows louder and louder and steadily more insane, because the crescendo never ends.
What am I trying to say? I see myself attempting to explain my own current disconnection to myself. Formerly I might wallow a little in guilt to be as desenchufado (unplugged) as I am these days. But let’s face it, I (have tended to) cling to guilt like a threadbare baby blanket. But that’s another story and another bad habit. Here, though, we are far, far end-of-the-earth far away from... well, everything. Isolated in every way. While such passions for news might warm me up, I guess I have little use for them here.
It’s often such a lonely place. A friend of mine, also from the states described living here as being like a family, because you know so many people. Or--she immediately revised herself--because there are so few people not to know. My experience has been rather more lonesome. But I guess my (other) tendency toward lonesomeness hasn't changed with place or time. It’s been cathartic, though, taking the proverbial step back. What I can say is, without wading through the tedium of over-explaining myself (or explaining myself sufficiently) is that I have less baggage and more presence.
I watch our 8 a.m. sunrise. Heavy violet-deep purple clouds, bright salmon linings. Wind whacks at the house and the rustic gate, clinging to the fence by the last nail of its last hinge, creaks. In bed, I can see my breath. I turn off the lamp.
Disconnection comes so easy down here. And in a way, it’s therapeutic. The realities are different. Before it was simple: I, like most people around me, was “educated” and comfortable, I read the news and would feel emotional, even inflamed by it. Lament at what’s happening all over the world (and at "home": tea parties, oil spills, birtherism, nativism; really? are you kidding me? isn't the USA founded by immigrants?). So it so happens that sometimes we read the news, stress out, lose sleep, proclaim ourselves political and down antidepressants or blood pressure meds. We vote, maybe we donate. We grow alarmed, we grow frenzied. And this agitation pools into a greater collective human energy--maybe, I venture to say, even creating more bad news. Increasing the volume, as it were, on our own aggravated state. Thus creating more of a frenzy whose crescendo grows louder and louder and steadily more insane, because the crescendo never ends.
What am I trying to say? I see myself attempting to explain my own current disconnection to myself. Formerly I might wallow a little in guilt to be as desenchufado (unplugged) as I am these days. But let’s face it, I (have tended to) cling to guilt like a threadbare baby blanket. But that’s another story and another bad habit. Here, though, we are far, far end-of-the-earth far away from... well, everything. Isolated in every way. While such passions for news might warm me up, I guess I have little use for them here.
It’s often such a lonely place. A friend of mine, also from the states described living here as being like a family, because you know so many people. Or--she immediately revised herself--because there are so few people not to know. My experience has been rather more lonesome. But I guess my (other) tendency toward lonesomeness hasn't changed with place or time. It’s been cathartic, though, taking the proverbial step back. What I can say is, without wading through the tedium of over-explaining myself (or explaining myself sufficiently) is that I have less baggage and more presence.
I watch our 8 a.m. sunrise. Heavy violet-deep purple clouds, bright salmon linings. Wind whacks at the house and the rustic gate, clinging to the fence by the last nail of its last hinge, creaks. In bed, I can see my breath. I turn off the lamp.
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