How Long Can I Live in the Fog?
It’s such a rarity that one dares to show up to the branches, where the cold clouds hover, and sit there in the condensation. Well at least that’s what a bird with a burgundy-colored coat told me back at the beginning, when I started my sabbatical at the top of this tree.
How long can I live in the fog?
How long can I sit or stand without falling asleep?
How long can I exist in this vessel of skin until the properties drastically change and I become fundamentally something else?
I watch the vulnerable droplets slip all the way down to the bottom, further than one can see. One after another, the painfully slow release and then, the inevitable fall. I watch it happening again and again and it seems so rehearsed.
Why are the droplets seemingly complicit with the atrocity? And then, an epiphany … I am a droplet, that’s me! And I fall all the way down to the bottom, further than anyone could previously see.
Then, the hands turn back, time ticks back and there’s suddenly another chance to maneuver the familiar, to speak with new words, and to attempt the unknotting of the knots.
Shoved (unrehearsed) onto stage for one act plays for an audience of questionable size, I feel all the emotions of a textbook human being. But who are the producers, stage managers, or this mysterious audience lurking behind the facade in absolute darkness? Are they smoking, sipping spirits with their lazy, voyeuristic faces or sufficiently camouflaged in costumes, gleefully performing as participants themselves?
Deep within, I pose a question to the ominous roads, the troubled ocean waters, and every ridiculous setting that surrounds me … How can one live in the past, the future, and the present simultaneously?
The bird returns wearing the coat of a different color, teal this time, and says, “The question is a good one, yet a lesson within itself. Right at this moment, I have your full attention and you’re listening to my words, setting unknown. Our previous meeting was in the clouds at the top of a tree, where you were willing to immerse yourself in the condensation. The questions I pose to you are: 1. Are you willing to be at peace within the confusion? And 2. Are you willing to immerse yourself completely into every setting that is presented to you?”
