In view of these rather difficult times and my own experiences sitting and lying around in hospitals and other facilities, still working after each elusive objective that we’re to be the fruits of the day’s labor: there seems to be room for some admission or confession to sigh over what measure could be had, or to cry over what pleasure was sadly lost. A moment, I say. Hold, I say. I look about me, and everywhere I go are people at their jobs, people seeking after what is possible in their futures, folks going to the market for more than needed yet not excess, folks who have discovered new realities in between the metrics of their previous lives. At times I am taken forward by a rush, at others entirely arrested…

Before these few months I had become busy studying a map and pouring over books new and old. I am recalling memories hidden away in unmarked records, scratched clippings, torn photographs, and unassuming symbols to be deciphered. 

How did we get here, I wondered.  To this present, yes. More importantly, we left behind a stagnation burning into an age that held us back. In that we felt bondage and we would not be free unless we marked a date in a future, a common future, a date when we would take leave together and start afresh somewhere, here. Here is the moment in time, then a future date, now a past date, or is it a date to be renewed, and to date again, to be renewed, to date again, renew, date again, and so forth? Always in our future: if not for knowing it had always already been set in stone, forever permanent in our past, that date when we broke free - how else for sure could we know? Not only are we here, new, free, we can forever date forward, another day when our commitment to be free and to make our own destiny, everyday in the future. 

No office of Immigration, no paperwork, could really tell the centuries of stashing secrets away in books, slips in dried food, heirlooms in socks, all these items that bore magic in memories to be passed onto our children, so that in the new land some day so far into the future we could not envision whatsoever, they shall remember us well.  Some new land, yet unimagined nor founded, yet discovered already in our heart and even the soul magnanimus - somehow shared in our dreams we saw vast swaths of land where all could come, where grasses grew and wildflowers, where wells could be dug and water drawn, where crops would grow, and a house could be raised.  How many centuries in the making, these eons passing by, slipping away each second into a jar of change, to be deposited in some faraway imaginary land whose existence could only become real in the purity of belief.  How we had dreamt.  Somehow in time we invented the chests that could carry our cargo much heavier than the mass itself for the meanings and magic and memories they carried, they weighed much much more than for their physics alone.  

If the journey to the voyage had been long, it was only because there was so much we did not want to discard yet must part with.  These were not some cheap possessions easily thrown and forgotten, but part of our souls and way of being.  There were some things or many, there were homes and buildings and churches, there were stores, and cobblestones and columns, and those windows we called fenestrations.  The passageways and the narrow corridors, the light wells, all the beauty and the truth in matter we had had to leave behind.  So few items were brought yet so heavy were the cargo we found solace on the boat over the high seas.

tbc 

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