SEESAW
June 17 2013We’re coming up to the halfway mark; on June 30th we will have been in Europe for 6 months of the year we promised ourselves. As much as I am against measuring time and worth, nonetheless the global energy of man’s insistence upon such measure seems to press upon one, no matter one’s beliefs.Halfway: what does that mean? I have no idea and maybe that’s why this slightly disturbed feeling that’s been part of the atmosphere of late; a feeling of teetering on the fine edge of balance, as on a seesaw when both ends are equidistant from the ground. The halfway mark which, depending on the nature of the thing to be completed, can make the second half seem either interminable e.g., pregnancy or a school year not going well, or frighteningly fleeting as in halfway through a vacation or a lease on a much loved home.We came away in part to throw ourselves into the unknowable, to feel our way around in the unfamiliar territory of foreign languages and the freedom from obligation to discover what, exactly? That the grass is greener on this side of the Atlantic? Or was it also to rediscover those parts of ourselves that have been eroded by time and duty, cowardice and fear? And in this sense did we set ourselves free or did we impose conditions, the results of which, like the halfway mark, might measure the worth of time spent?I have a feeling, to paraphrase a couple of lines from Juan Ramón Jiminéz’s great poem “Oceans,” that our boat has struck something deep and nothing has happened or everything has happened and we are now standing in the new world. In many ways nothing has happened. Yet. But as the prow of our little boat comes up to the mighty rock of the halfway mark I can feel the disturbances below the surface and in this suspenseful moment we are strangers to each other, if not yet to ourselves.We are in retreat, from life as we knew it and from each other. Yet we are on the same seesaw poised, for this moment, equidistant from familiar ground; aloft but not in flight; unreachable, yet fully visible…and kind enough to not let either one crash to the ground while the other soars. Either way, one of us will have to go first.To be continued…