Chief Sitting Down

***

I am happy.

A little restless, it's true.

I tend to gnaw at myself.

But that is a surface condition.

Deep down, I own a glad and grateful heart.

*

I will be forty-five in a few days.

Time for another self-portrait.

*

Maybe Chief Sitting Down is that.

***

If I am supremely lucky, I am about halfway through with my life. I hope so. I would like to get old. I think I would be a nice old guy if I could have another thirty or forty years to mellow.

Take some of the edge off.

Develop a little depth and complexity.

*

Easy to say now. The road ahead, if there is one, is fraught with perils. And the end is certain. The road gets darker and twistier and the trees crowd in and the hoot owls call and...what.

You run down. You bust down. You get crippled and stove in. Deef. Blind. Incontinent. You get bladder cancer. You get emphysema.

A troll sits on your chest of an evening and you gasp out.

*

What a adventure!

*

The other thing is I just get smacked on my way to work tomorrow. Lights out. Or crippled. Brain injured. It could happen.

It happens all the time.

But I could just keep being lucky.

That happens, too.

***

I love trying to make my mind come to terms with the vastness of the known universe, and with the limitless expanse of deep geologic time, of cosmological time, of interstellar distance, of neural complexity, of genetic structure and epigenetic processes, of complexity emerging from seemingly simple repetitive structures and a handful of rules, of love and loss, how when you lose someone you really do lose them, for all of time and in every corner of the universe, and how that, in the end, has to be okay.

We are all riders on the same merry-go-round. We are all grist for the mill.

How our small hearts beat with love and fury!

*

Namaste.

***