Witness

The moon. A canal on Mars. A stream in the Rockies full of leaping Rainbow Trout. All of this in a sidewalk stream of water carrying memories of laughing children sailing leaves and dogs eagerly chasing possible sea creatures.
VIVA LA VIDA.

77 degrees and not a cloud in sight. Anywhere. Not from my perspective, at any rate. So I made it. Whew. 30 days of dedicated posting. Taking my sweet baby camera with me and snapping everything my heart desired. It was cool. People would ask: "Why are you taking pictures of that?" And I would invent all sorts of amazing answers. "I'm a reporter for the NY Times." was one of my very favorites, but how cool would it have been to have suddenly sprouted an unusual appendage all MIB style and let them glimpse, even for a split second, that I was an alien life form here to document and . . . ready? WITNESS. Witness is one of my very, very favorite words.  My beloved daughter, hunter and gatherer of all good and beautiful ideas, once had a photo word project where people were captured holding up a sign with their single word of choice. I never had the guts to step in front of her camera, but my word was like a neon sign in my brain--WITNESS. And this is why. Ever EVER since I can remember I have loved to scrabble about, work really REALLY hard and CAPTURE experiences and stories and images. Oh yeah, and TALK!! My early relatives hated me for my jabberwocky quality--but I was just always SO EXCITED and like a hummingbird for real!!! I just found everything--EVERYTHING around me so exciting and interesting for gawds sake!!! I have grown old enough now to have amassed quite a back story of places traveled, adventures survived, and companions met and reshuffled and discovered anew, and through it all I know that my strongest suit has been my ability to BE THERE. To BE HERE. I thank my LUCKY STARS, and I in NO WAY believe that the long exploded spinning disks in the sky have magical powers, it's just a saying after all--but I thank my lucky stars that my mind races pretty much continually, and now that I have finally managed to exist SOLO (so essential for me!!) for FIVE YEARS--I can wrestle MY SELF-DESTRUCTIVE bad habits to the sweaty mat of good riddance and pin them down to make room for better and kinder and good TO MYSELF Bohemian through and through ways to live!!! AND MAKE NO APOLOGIES. and please, please take no prisoners. Unlock the damn prison doors and figure out a way to take care of each other PLEASE!!! Yaaaay me!! I told you yesterday about the NOT comparing and the horse blinders and add to that an appreciation for my inherent HUMILITY where life and words are concerned. Here is what I mean: oh yes. We are all so precious, aren't we?  Millions of blogs, brazillions of tweets, words flashing past us, in front of us, through us for gawds sake and we are surrounded--imagine a BIG city?-mine is such a little chatterbox town!!--and what a time and age to be here! To be witness! When I discover old, seriously old books in thrift stores that are deep and poignant and well researched on EVERY topic from house cleaning to baking anything and everything and money and politics and manners and dressmaking and life and death and good gawd, ALL THE BIG ONES-I am instantly humbled and understand completely that we are like clever little hard working--hmmmm . . . I do not wish to disparage any animals here because I dare to say NONE of them would be as destructive as we are!!--but OK. I will pick on ants--we are like busy, BUSY little ants--write a book! snap a brazillion shots! post for a month! have 1,000 friends! drive everywhere! force feed ducks for your foie gras! make new junk from recycled junk! get a new phone every month! the list of activities and must dos is endless. And my words? Oh please. YES!!! I love to read what I write. I seriously cannot exist without writing, but when I read ANYTHING intellectual I am instantly humbled--New Yorker articles, the NY times, the excerpts that my beloved son sends me from his grad school in NY, the online research that my beloved youngest asks me to read over his shoulder--I am humbled, humbled, humbled. My greatest happiness about myself is that I can witness life around me and entertain myself with the art of language, I can create something beautiful that helps me to feel worth and promise, I can dream in color, I can FEEL CONNECTED to the masses that lived and thrived and struggled and died before me-the ones who thought deeply, wrote passionately, and left me a trail of imagination, inspiration, logic, and dramatic wanderings to light my path and bring me home with a satchel full of poetry and a heart mended and patched and stitched and bursting with shared love. I have my brilliant children who have walked with me long enough to know that their mother is not just a flower fairy, but a woman who has lived the miles and ridden on the backs of more than a couple of bikes, and I mean the ones with engines and they get that I am sometimes too rude and too loud and yet they love me for my scars and pains. I have my animal companions that remind me at every moment that I am worth loving simply because I am me. I have my loyal friends who tolerate my oddness and embrace my one sock on one sock off gypsy ways. Well, actually I always wear two socks but most of the time only one is striped. And I have you--my beloved readers who for some UNKNOWN UNGAWDLY reason have read through my month of posts and sent me much love, good energy, and writing in return. I LOVE YOU FOR THAT. Witness. So at the end of the day, at the end of September and my 30 days of largely insignificant and not intellectual style writing, I must leave you with one final thought--and then I am off to finish King Lear, snuggle with Hunter S. Thompson's essays, and eat probably my body weight in popcorn before tonight's oh so exciting rehearsal--and that is this, I have learned that what makes my life so perfect, so wonderful, so hard , and so challenging--is that it is MINE. It is my life. Happening to me now and in this time. In this moment.  And I am left to my own devices to shape it as best I can against the onslaughts of stupidity, cruelty, laziness, and all things ugly and hurtful. I will no doubt spend the rest of my days writing down the moments I witness and approaching with great humility the places where witnesses like Elie Wiesel write like this: "Words can sometimes in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds." Thank you for being my friend. Peace, love, and happiness always.