poem

 Two Kinds

There are two types of people here. There are the ones, a category which includes myself, who consider there to be two places.  Here and there.  It is crystal clear to them that they have entered a new territory when they come “here”. They arrive from the land of “there”. They recognize their own continuity as a collective lived experience and count the transition from there to here as one such experience, having utterly little to do with the person they were at the beginning of the transition. For them, being is interwoven with experience. They possess a willingness to release a little bit of that death grip on the notion of an impregnable unchangeable Self in exchange for the liberating sensation that they have escaped from a known, occasionally stultifying, reality and have entered someplace new. That, once here, it is a completely different place, and one must learn all over again how to “be” under entirely novel circumstances and when it wears off, ho hum, back to the familiar place where they already know how to be.  Nothing they knew there had anything to do with here and could not be relied upon for any direction or validation.  It was like living inside for decades, becoming intimately aware of all its detailed varieties and permutations within an enclosed defined space and then suddenly someone opens a door and leads you outside. It takes some getting used to. Then there are the ones who are always here.  Nothing ever fundamentally changes for them. They spend every waking minute here, always in the know.  Recognizing each and every place as home. What joy. For them there is no inside or outside. Only here, everything all together. While you are wrestling with the implications of your arrival “here” she smiles as she plays with the chandelier dimmer, watching the shadows ebb and flow across your face.

11/20/22