Still Sundays

September 25th.

made-up memories. a genetic predisposition to engage with life. a real dreamer. real magic. when the Universe bends to become the bow.

It’s so still that I can taste the difference: my black tea with milk is tasteless without the nectar of orange blossom honey this morning. I forgot to buy it yesterday.

Sugar doesn’t taste the same. Not in my tea and not what I can recall of it tasting when I was a kid.  When I think of my childhood I recall sugar like a person with personalities, faults, issues, and plans. A relative everyone had to welcome because that’s what you do: pour sugar, large amounts, in desserts, eat items ordered in from bakery for guests, pick up goods from a confectionery.

Growing up sugar was a party. You grow up to realize sugar is not even as necessary and it certainly doesn’t make things sweeter. What then makes the good memories—however few or plenty—of growing up so sweet? It wasn’t the sugar. Perhaps it’s some fragmented memory we create as we get older because life isn’t easy and never was.

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I read a short interview last night at the end of the magazine Whole Living. Musician Sting’s wife answered the generic form questions presented for a new person every month. I can’t recall her name. The magazine referenced “you may have heard of her husband Sting” to let readers know who she was and more so that she was “somebody” because apparently her introduction that she is an actor, producer, director, yogi, and mother of four wasn’t enough. What she had to say was true and inspiring. I would have been inspired even if I didn’t know she was Sting’s wife of 30 years. Why did you have to do that, magazine? Why did you want to make it matter that what she has to say matters because her husband is a celebrity?

In the mini-interview the final question was something about her hopes for this world. She dreams of a better world where profit does not take precedence over human rights and human life.

I wonder about the answer this man in my neighborhood would provide if he was interviewed.  He has had to shut his coffee shop because he can’t keep up with the other commercial establishments. In his hope for a better world I am sure he just wants to make a living to pay rent and provide for his family.

Maybe we do define our hopes and dreams for this world based on our personal reach. Financial reach. A real dreamer, then, is one who can conceive a reality he can’t even dream, nor see, but only feel.

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Many super-wealthy people across the globe are quite giving. They are kind with good intentions, are often humble, and do their part to share their wealth. Not all are what reality television, which is farthest from reality, portrays. Then why is there still not enough? Either those who have it are not sharing enough (not that they have to at all) or they are not making enough to do so.

I think it is because we are more willing to give to an ideal than a reality. The neighbor can’t go home for Christmas but one would rather donate that same money for a charity dinner. The neighbor, who is not impoverished but simply someone who hasn’t saved enough to buy a $400 ticket to visit home, probably wouldn’t accept it anyway. We can’t give where we are not received.

Is everyone really doing the best they can and this is our reality?

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Also while browsing the Whole Living magazine there was a section about time management. It asked the reader to make a daily log of 30 minute increments and jot down every time you changed an activity to see where your time ‘went’.

That made me giggle. Mr. Time is a Pied Piper walking out with legs and arms with his flute of moments and we are children running after him. Where are we going? Where does Time take us?

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I have always said and believed wholeheartedly that 99% of life is a series of choices. There is always a choice. I surrender: writing is my 1%. I don’t really have a choice at this point. Of course, literally speaking, I can not write. Sure. For example I have not been writing because I have been trying to make money any and every other way. It can’t happen any other way for me but writing. There really are some things that must happen. Everything that has happened in my life to this point I didn’t think had to do with writing, but looking back it only happened so I could—I would—write.  Universe has its conspiracies and agendas, indeed.

When you are meant to do what you are meant to do, the Universe bends to become the bow and you are the arrow. Every tree along the trajectory is a seed.

In my favorite daydream I begin writing and never stop.  Just words between conscious inhales and exhales.

I think the time has come to do something new. The world needs it. I need it.

Courage and bravery are not the same. Courage is a state of mind. Brave is something that you do. They are not? Then I so (re)defined.

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I believe in real magic. The Cross of choices. The needle of thoughts. The voodoo of consequences. The powder of courage. The bones of bravery. You want to manipulate reality: change your mind. What can you make happen without controlling anyone?

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This Sunday I want to propose to New York City all over again.

We had a fight.

I am no longer in love with my particular neighborhood. It has changed into this noisy commercial monster and the energy no longer feels like home. But typical of a discord in any loving affair, we think the entire person is one habit. I don’t recognize my neighborhood near Morningside Park but I can still recognize New York and parts of me in other parts of New York.

My neighborhood has become too expensive and has lost its authentic charm in many aspects. Gentrification in the urban landscapes of North America or rejuvenation as they call it in (South) Africa or development as they call it in Pakistan does not have to come at the expense of community.

Can we not do better than this?

If everyone leaves who stays behind to remind how it was?

I am okay with moving. The earth needs some of us to wander so we can help each other recall and recollect what matters. Someone else here will take my place and a few might stay behind till their last breath as a testament to how it was. Evolution is not just moving flashyforward but change. In the end it doesn’t matter who stays or goes; we are all soldiers for possibility, to preserve what has always mattered in order to have what can be.

New York, New York, you really are like no other place. Yet there is a portrait of every town in you. How many photos do I carry?

New York, New York, you are that stunning beauty that even turns heads of the noblest married men. Sure they may not stay, but they will never forget you. New York, New York, you are not for everyone but you are a nostalgia not attached to any real memory.

I believe certain people are coded with a genetic predisposition to engage with life and when they come to New York City it just clicks like a DNA code. A complimentary DNA sequence between you and the City for starting over, striving, never settling, dreaming, re-defining, and all often without knowing.

Life is a double-helix bond between what is possible and what was and so we live.

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