Hawking Radiation

Weighting keeps us here.
The day that Stephen Hawking died,
the day Albert Einstein was born 139 years before,
Hawking born the day Galileo died 300 hundred years before
and someone was born on this day. Pi day, the day the chasm opened
and dark matter was ejected from the light.
I suppose we all got to where are by quantum leaps, by climbing, rolling moving across and over greater fields-we succumb, we are nowhere, we rest in solitude.
My own shoulders are up to my ears, I keep my weariness behind my shoulder blades and I feel my own mortality jutting out-I cannot look directly,
like microwaves and radiation, these invisibilities are equally scary like dark matters and dark energy without heat.

As my daughter says frequently, ‘Be sweeter’,
we should all kneel more, perhaps it would amplify the tiny voices
and it may allow the light to penetrate and diffuse itself further if we could only muster the energy to move out of our own way. It is all about the angular momentum and perspective. Rainbows are only visible in certain conditions. Rainbows are always sweet.

What goes around comes around this sphere eventually. We all find ourselves back to where we started at some point even if we never walk the same path. The choices are limited. For now we can only see things set at twenty-three degrees in relation to the sun and a shrinking two and a half light years is suspended between our galaxy and the hungry Andromeda, I am reminded of Benzine or the Ouroboros and the spiral enlongated in our DNA which may make all of this swallowed whole by more than one ellipse, or black hole singing at 432 Hz carrying a message for us all about the birth and death of stars and the inevitable darkness out of which new light is born.




Image credit Hewholooks at en.wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Scenic drive

It was one of those times that shock would be a gift-a present. A time that slowed to enunciate its meaning. A moment that is more than a moment, yet thankfully, is still contained in a wincing short period of time, shorter than it takes to tell a tale, shorter than a breath taken away, one of many-only a moment in time, by definition of duration, three seconds.

Inside the adrenaline 'present', you are made inherently aware of the nowness and the predictable future simultaneously, but like running in a dream, you are unable to escape the moment you are in. We are all stuck together here, running for our lives and gaining no distance.

You must have seen the heavenly shafts of light beaming through trees, the golden glow, the dancing white light. You have witnessed the mist beading and rising from wet wood as the morning dew becomes exposed to the steamy sun and transcends into steam, thick and nearly choking you have sometime seen dust in a dance swirling in its dirty misery...I have sensed the spirit stirred from nothing but new air, like you.

As individual bodies, we were still falling together around the man whose body lay twisted and flat, lifeless in the road. See, stained glass, all in fragments, shuffled photos, squares with light and dark edges, no faces, just the red wooded, cold-blooded earth now stained with oil, an oozing puddle of inky blood on asphalt, a pile of metal pieces sneezed, plastic melted, knobs twisted, and frozen bodies, gravestones stood around the body alive and marking the spot.

Memorable moments make themselves known when they arrive. They announce themselves by silencing all else, by walking heavy and slow across our timeline, across our chest. Death is so natural, as natural as being born. We are biodegradable, most of us. We should not be baffled or afraid, there will be nothing we can do to reverse the course, to turn the clock back, to wait a moment.

This is where we are, on a two-lane narrow and snaky mountain road. Natural springs occasionally burst out of the cloddish mountain side whereby a fallen tree protrudes as if a giant archer missed his aim. Our latitude set is at thirty-six degrees, and we are approximately thirty minutes driving distance from any type of township, storefront or place with streetlamps. There are houses tucked away deep in those hills, do not think it is desolate. No Trespassing signs mean ominous things, you should not get lost in these woods; hermits and hemp farms, loaded shotguns held by shaky hands and blood hungry wolf-hybrid guard dogs nestled under trees filled with booby traps set by Vietnam Veterans and a variety of other power and fear mongrels, assorted such boogie men, convicts and ex-killers, anyone with something to hide hid there. A feral forest in the Wild West. We are facing those demons on this day. They watched us watching over this body.

It is not for us to ask why we may be meant to be in a place at a certain time, to see a stranger die before our eyes-a fellow man or woman leave their lifeless body where they last found it. It happens to all of us, we lose ourselves. As witnesses, we all looked the same. In death as empty vessels, hollow bodies, burnt out trees, shells of what they used to be, suddenly we find a stranger before us.

For 5 minutes or 100 moments, sound waves were swallowed by light waves. No cars-or bike(s) came on the road for a time. After a couple of awkward human coughs meant to clear all air, someone said something about medical school and having no service and we knew that all of us together were alone. The body had been hit or lost control while riding his motorcycle.

The Ducati motorcycle lay wedged deep in the slope of the soft crumbling cliff, its front wheel was buried near an exposed tree root, the back wheel was still spinning and the mans shoes were on. His helmet lay head side up like a bowl in a ditch, the face plate shattered. His appendages were contorted and badly broken. Two approached him while I stood frozen looking upward in between the trees to see if I could catch his spirit.

A loud whine came up in the distance, louder, closer, and then 3 motorcycles appeared around the bend in the road. All at once, laying their bikes in the road and shouting, screaming, they shouted like banging drums, throwing blame, as if an incantation of life by volume or praying for rain or dropping salt, as if any of that would help him now. There was no ceremony for time to turn around and come back, like they decided to. The ride was over. We went on our way.

No. Nothing could be done about what has been done. We were simply meant to see. We were meant to be stopped, dead in our tracks, to notice the silence, to hear these stories, to pause and take a moment to go.

Image credit By NPS Photo [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

'Til Death do Us part

We need to have a conversation, ok, perhaps this is going to be one sided, but what does that matter? Nobody ever talks directly to you anyway, it’s always about you, or not about you.

They walk around your name as though it carries a spell like Betelgeuse, nobody asks for the spelling out thrice, or once for that matter despite the obviousness, yes, inescapable, unavoidable, palpable, and wholly disregarded, shunned, tabooed and flat out feared. Yes, you’ve done it. For every life that has been given, hard-wired for survival, hard –headed about failure or that falls hard, you take back, pull up, welcome home, regardless of age-gender-or denomination-circum-stance. 

I will tell you something you know, we don’t like change, or when matter changes, yet what matters always changes-but that is a different matter-you are always the same, the final matter, always the last word.

You win. You always win. Maybe loss teaches more than accrual, or at least reminds us what we are looking for.

I thought it was coincidence when I was 20 and all babies in my close proximity knew I was pregnant before I did.  It was not happenstance. Have you ever smelled a baby’s head?

When I hit the middle of my life, my kids stepping into adulthood, my parents’ health on a roller coaster, I saw both ends of me, but I was not afraid. I wanted to talk to you about it.

I have smelt death, we don't speak of it for fear that it is contagious like cologne. 

A man I love dearly is dearly afraid of you. I told him this explicitly-of course he denies this, but naturally he absorbed some of what I said about you. After not seeking a doctor for 20 years he is planning a much-needed surgery in the next month. I sowed the seeds.

My mother fell (again), broke her hip and fractured her (other) wrist, and at 61 and she is pissed off. She has never had to stop and think. 

My step-father has recovered from Leukemia, or is it remission; the revolutionary pill replacing chemotherapy for him was approved by the FDA on my birthday. He said this was lucky.

My ex-husband decided he need not pay for his children anymore. And after I have raised them myself he says, “What’s fair is fair,” and “Get busy living or get busy dying”. At over forty he lives with his grandmother, mother and cousin on the same property, he has never left that tiny nest. Days later after he cut his financial chord his grandmother fell, broke her hip, fractured her ankle and had a small stroke.  At 94. She’s still here, and angry as ever.

Royalty-the Prince-and Bowie-Boom! 

Baby boomers are all exploding, imploding from natural causes they say...Well, there are more celebrities today-that’s why-and still nobody gossips about you. Bigger than the Pope. You’re nothing new-I guess-does Death have a Twitter? I guess discussing you is still taboo.

Instead, let’s talk about what was done, what we did, the past and the passing of time. By passing the time this way, time becomes ours again to manipulate and postulate. Nostalgia is nectar to remember something new(ly), better than was-and is-and is needs was. I was here and in such and such year. It proves our is-ness.

I trust you 

will be on time.

And I hear you knocking, and I am home, I will answer. Invite you in. We can talk…heart to heart.

Tell me why you never explain-yourself-or tell us about where you are from and where you are taking us.  Perhaps if you’d simply explain the part you know- the part that says, the more you sow the more you reap, I won't say a peep.

This thing called life is a loan and not mine to keep, guitars gently weep the notes dictated from your morbid humming, some think it’s beautiful and that is because they’ve read your notes all along, they know the song, a lull to bye, but just forgot the words.

If this is all a game of Hide and Seek to you, suicides and confessions, seconds and hours, chances and misses, I would say peek-a-boo-I am looking at you-and might say-winner takes all. 

Image By Pryse, Gerald Spencer, 1882- [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.