What I Want Said – Long Read – but my Epitah is now determined
I like to go for a long drive to clear my head, for me, that’s forty hours over three days. This one turned into a different kind of reflection, especially after my keys clung to the window through three entire states without letting go (the guardian angels, showing off again, thank you Matlock and friends).
I’d set out on Friday Morning turning over an impossible question: how on earth are Ria and I going to raise the money to fix this church? There is nothing quite like announcing I need $100,000, care to pitch in for the first $6,000? and watching people quietly decide you can’t possibly make it happen, so stepping back a bit and hesitate on support.
So hold my tea. Somewhere out on that road I went looking for the part of my soul that writes and creates, and I think I’ve finally found her again. The Church and that Cemetery have become my muse, and those that know me, know that creativity abounds, and ways to have fun with this project, as there is so much to gain through humor and love of the human race.
The last time I walked through Seay Chapel cemetery, I went a little way down my own rabbit hole, turning over my life, and what drives me, and what I’d want carved into stone. I came back up knowing two things, after long conversations with the souls there, they do listen really well, and on occasion have fabulous advice if you listen.
Because at the end of the day, what do I actually want to leave behind? I told someone once that I’d never pour myself into fancy purses. I don’t want to end up in a nursing home someday with a photograph of a purse on the wall to remind me of who I used to be. You can’t get a good story out of a purse, but you can with 33’s and a 4.88 in a 44 & finding bones that have unearthed themselves in a cemetery, as their owner is tired of waiting for help and have decided to join the party to fix their resting grounds.
The first words – She made the world better.
Consider that my own quiet personal gain from the thousands of hours I’ve spent wanting to see the world through the lives of other people, the Food Drives, the Social Committees, changing the face of the financial service industries in Canada(several Big banks changed things on the back end when I approached them) , the Caching Events, 4WDABC and those kids’ runs for Big Brothers that I loved every minute of, the genealogy work, all the small personal projects that helped someone find the way back to their own roots.
Because it’s in those moments, when you’ve quietly laid a path and then sit back to watch what it does for someone else, that a legacy is actually left. Not in having your name hailed. Not even in having it written down anywhere, beyond the cards and small mementos you’re handed and reflect back on decades later. It’s left in the sound of children calling out thank you that echo through your mind.
It’s the child who told me they had never skipped a rock across the water before. You keep moments like that somewhere down in your soul, and when things get hard and you’re not certain you can make the next project happen, that’s the thing that hums back at you: yes, you can. You’re Kris. You make seven impossible things happen before breakfast every single morning, and isn’t that just perfectly, wonderfully normal?
(The White Queen only ever managed six.)
And there, in the middle of all that soul-rekindling magic, the thing you have to do comes clear, the clarity breaking through in exactly the place you had been struggling.
It has never been fearlessness. The fear has always been there, and it still turns up every time I go and do the thing I want to do(if I sleep here will the Grizzly eat me? If so please come get my camera).
I just want the other things more, and I trust my guardian angels to join me. Like the little golden key that appears on the glass table at precisely the moment you need a way through. the keys showed up on my back window.
Much like years before, outside my car door in the random parking lot was an arrow pointing follow me, or Ian’s family momento’s ended up in my pathway, or the Indian Burial stick almost 4 decades ago.
While they say return me to where I belong, they themselves are returning me to where I belong, which is the randomness of the universe and enjoying the chaos of Quantum physics concept of the entanglement theory – weaving in and out of my life.
Alone, I drove the Transfăgărășan. I climbed up into the mist to meet the vampires. I threw myself off bridges and out of planes, down I went, never once considering how in the world I would get back out again, as I may find I like it there, why worry about how to get out if you think you’ll enjoy it, you’ll end up where you are supposed to.
I rode motocross at five. I disappeared for seventeen days in my Jeep to sit with the grizzly and the cougar in their own country, never content to sit still, because I thirst for this world in a way that words can rarely hold. Italy. Cuba. The Bahamas. Australia. France. Germany. Romania. Mexico. Jamaica. Indonesia. And so many more.
I have never once ran from anything. I tend to run toward, toward seeing more, toward the high road that few would take alone (and, fine, three times as a passenger, so if I died it would not be my fault). Toward the old stories waiting in the fog, toward the drop and the open sky and the wild places that were never ours to keep.
Because life was never ours to keep either. Never has been. Never will be. Like our ancestors, they are not ours to own, and neither, in the end, are our experiences. We only ever get to borrow them. Stolen moments, ours alone to taste, in places where no other human exists, where you share a secret with the world itself.
There may be witnesses to where you are standing, but they do not bear witness to what you see. Too often people want you to look at them. I only ever wanted to see what they see, and for them to see what I see.
It’s no use going back to yesterday - I was a different person then. I am meant to meet the world where it is fiercest, and I let it develop into me who I am supposed to be.
Curiouser and curiouser, the whole way down, never afraid to drink this, or eat that (except that one cheese in Romania was scary)
The stone itself:
She made the world better. I think she’s a wildflower.
Don’t Panic = 42 = 6×9
If you put anything else on it, I will haunt you for eternity…
Trix's Trax 