Friday, May 20, 2011

Not with a bang but a giggle

I don't imagine the world is going to end today. Though I saw it in all the papers. You can't believe everything you read, I suppose. Tempting as it may be. The believing I mean. Daddy and I used to shout over Niagara Falls from above, watching that changing, constant scape of frightening volumes of water falling over the edge, our glasses dotted with spray, our voices a whisper over the water's furor, a heady, tempting pull to be two of the water droplets, joining the many in the heady, headless adventure. To be pulled in. Bernouilli's principle pulls you in. The herd instinct. The sound of two hands clapping. Your own two hands in a vast concerthall audience, though you didn't cortically will the clapping. Your hands resonated with the crowd's rhythm, and clapped without you. No, I don't imagine the world will end on May 21, even if enough people believe it. But they say we should live our life as if this day is the last, and also live our life as if this day is the first. Look in awe and wonder at sun over waves (I do! I do! Arriving at the sea's edge is everyday a first, an awe, an awakening for these surprised eyes). That sun disappears, that darkness comes, actually surprises me, each time we stay down at the beach too long, jump the nighttime waves by ear, and fall, our ear confused by the complexity of waverhythms in the roaring black darkness. Let me live each moment as if it's the first. And savour each precious day as if, as if, as if this dear, tumultuous, beautiful physical world of ours is just one of those tiny droplets of Niagara's River, ready for the escarpment of a lifetime.

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