QUACK! QUack! Quack.. quack....qua..

As I look back upon my 58 year journey thru time and life on this, our Island in the Sky.. I see that there are times when all my little Priority-Duckies tend to realign themselves into this nice & neat & pretty row of what is really important.

I have helped two people, dear to my own life, to die.

Lying on a mattress on the floor by the deathbed of one ..as his heart raced and with shallow breaths in the pre-dawn hours of this his last day on earth, I myself, in that restless half-sleep state.. dreaming ..maybe dreaming.. of 'seeing' him lying there..then..spirit body lifting out, sitting up and out of his own cancer-ridden guts.. freaking me into ordinary waking-up-ness where I could no longer see anything with my ordinary eyes but the semi-darkened room, the bed.. the body still prone and laboring like a locomotive trying to climb a steep grade.. his wife and partner in life now also wide awake from my fearful dream yells.
My friend whom I had known since high school and went on many a mountain hike with, now still there..lying flat and speechless, heart chugging still against inevitable odds.. breaths in short gasps, only to all "let go" itself a short while later.

Then comes the weeping..
and the crying from our own spirits who have been holding our own breaths as we waited for the end and the relief for everyone involved with this supremely ordinary event..
Incredible consciousness in our movements setting in after they come and take the body away on a stretcher...more tears. Patti crying "I'm never going to see you again!" as the men in black bang the stretcher through the doorway.
We walk to the couch and sit... then to the window... to the fridge.. I get telephone duty to let others know of his passing. Then bed stripped, and put in the laundry. This great emptiness of a bed that so long held sovery much love.
Clean it all up, almost as if nothing had just happened.. as if nothing had just now happened!
Ever the question of the moment of "what to do now?" hanging around our necks like the infamous albatross. What to do now? that does not appear to be totally absurd... is most certainly absurd to what has just happened. Nothing of course can be done, or said that is not totally absurd.. for all things that we do and talk about are absurd. So we drive to a small restaurant with water nearby..somewhere near a docking pier. I still remember from all those years ago..getting out of the car..Patti, Judy, myself.. the sublime and nothing human act of getting out of a car and walking across that parking lot in total silence.. no weeping.. no insanities.. just heavy silence and pure, thoughtless awareness.. stripped bare all lives cloaked in absurdities, especially those whom we meet at the entrance of the restaurant and politely hold the door open for them to go in first, polite smiles all around.. and ...little priority-duckies all in a nice and pretty row.
I ordered a bowl of soup.
It was good.


..and then again...at the foot of the bed of my own dying mother.. holding onto her feet.. I watch her sunken face, now nothing like I had ever known for the entirety of either of our lives, taking that one, that single next-to-the-last breath and letting it out with a great sigh... then unexpectedly 30 seconds later.. still one more time, this time truly was the last breath of her long 80-plus years of her life. all done. all done now. it's all done.
I leave the room and go to the kitchen, find a spray bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels and go upstairs and washed windows for the next two hours, sometimes barely being able to see which ones I had cleaned and which ones I had not cleaned. It didn't really matter anyway.. as I moved through the memories of childhood and teenager-hood and beyond.. always this person who had given to me this absurd life with ever a smile on her face.. always the champion of unconditional support for my own perhaps somewhat bizarre individuality, always a support for my own well-beingnesss, at times even at the expense of her own. Still.. it has all come down to this.. this is what I do in life now.. I..wash..windows. What else is there to do but wash windows? What more important thing in life, in my life than to wash windows?

Incredible absurdities, all these things we do in our passing lives.

..and again.. there it is.. that blazing consciousness standing aside, like a small sun standing aside from the earth itself.. detached from that idiot over there cleaning the dumb shit windows.
Of all the stupid things we humans do, that we consider important, why not clean windows?

Little priority-duckies all again in their nice and pretty row. What is important is again clearly delineated in my spirit.
I know, having clean windows is somewhat down on the list of importance... yet still I spray and wipe, wipe and spray.. little squeaky glass noises are my symphony playing to the act flowing tears and I there..being the conductor, stick in hand and conducting it all, in charge of it all with paper towel, round and round and round we all go..up and down, and all around, inside and out.. squeak, squeak..I, now once again the maestro of my own fate.. clean windows are important too, are they not?

I stand aside from my self and watch me there, participating in the grandest symphony of them all. The most absurd symphony of them all. The symphony of simply being alive, moving along with time.. each breath a step closer to either The Light or The Dark.. this thing ahead that so many have gone to already before me.. "The Great Perhaps" ahead.. right up there ahead.. can you see it? I can... for the moment.


Then again.. the days before and after my own 15 year old beloved daughter must go into that insurance paid-for house of repair, and climb with great apprehension and upon the surgeon's table so that he may cut an 18 inch swath of blood and parting flesh with his razor, then screw into her young growing spine those great bolts and rods of titanium, before pasting the whole concoction of steel and blood and backbone and blended stolen rib into a proper straight path... as nature, fucking nature.. should have done in the first place if it had a halfpenny's worth of sense.
No 15 year old (or her parents) should ever have to go through that. ever! ..and that created conflict of the soul I have yet to reconcile to myself, thus I will speak of it no more, lest I not finish this.

Little priority-duckies.. There they are... all in a row again. At least, until I am able to cover them up once more in time and days flowing by with those zillions of absurdities of paying bills and vacuuming the floors and what-to-have-for-dinner, which we all do and then talk about... endlessly talk about.. needing desperately to keep the real stuff of being alive, those things that have bloodied up and bowed us into twisting submission, to keep them all-as-one ball of painfulness, all hidden and secret in a corner of a little box in our soul, away from display lest we feel all the pain of being alive and then making supreme fools of ourselves in public and what will people think? if we breakdown in the middle of a conversation about football or politics or religion.

Still.. I must ask but I expect no answer..don't really even want one one anymore.., but is a whole evening's conversation about corn and soybeans and beef production and sports and which computer's are better, Macintosh or PCs, or the latest movie, or what Bush is not doing right, or how much money this or that is all about.. is all that really so damn important?
I say that definitely it is necessary. It is what we are about.. on our surface. We care.. Goddamn we care!.. about which corporation will win the freakin' Super Bowl. These Masks we wear are necessary to keep us safe from the real terror of the situation at hand, from breaking down at every moment and the twisting of our lives, each breath a step closer to the Light or to the Dark, that only the disingenuous and truly asleep have the great and ever faithful egos to declare which it shall be!

In truth the absurdities of it all are necessary but they not important.. It doesn't matter who wins the Super Bowl (guys) and it doesn't matter if your boobs hang down like a couple of old limp dish rags (gals) and increasing strands of grey appear on our tops. None of it is this huge priority that we assign to it.
My little priority-duckies are, for the moment at hand, again.. all in a row.

There is a heavenliness in Letting Go of these things. Deaths of people in my life have triggered the release and a great Consciousness appears within. This freedom in "letting go"..the peaceful falling backwards of something inside.. spiritual "hands in the air" and just simply getting to the other side of our own human conflicts.. This freedom has nothing (and yet still everything) to do with these zillion-and-one absurdities we are so attached to... but cannot get beyond except for occurring trauma. Perhaps for a moment in endless time we have escaped Great Nature's little trick to keep us attached to the small lest we see the terror of the situation and the end of our own time, drawing one step closer with each breath we take.

What is really important? Of course, I am and you are.. that is what is important. ..and Stop right there!

Our opinions? naaa,, they don't really mean Jack. What we do with our time? whether we wash windows or spend all of our semi-awake moments of this journey thinking of ways to maximize our profit margin.. well.. all of that stuff is just... stuff. It's how we all choose (using the term loosely) to use our short time here on This Island in space, ..social masks firmly in place to our Tribe Mates and to ourselves.. priorities forgotten in the eternal rush to get stuff done..make more money..keep occupied and entertained, our duckies are skewed all over the place keeping quiet. Quiet that is, until Life Itself cracks it's little whip over sleeping heads and wakes one up..for one terrible moment of loss and we stand aside from our absurd little selves there in our absurd little lives.. endlessly repeating the dance to some unknown piper.. duckies all uncovered now and realigned in a nice and pretty row as they should be.

Ach!
My mind has again escaped from it's box with this post.. I need to put it back into the box, arms crossed and sit on the lid, I'm sure you will all agree.. Back dog back! Into your box with you, you mangy barking bitch cur.

Maybe there is something better on TV.