"Through Hollow Lands"

I frequently find myself confounded in trying to put my present - the past few years - into the context of the past.

One practical way might be to view my current condition against my evolving past condition through the lens of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. In better regarding my own needs, and meeting someone that I care about and trust, and learning to eat healthy, and hell, getting sleep, I have removed or eased constraints on the lower levels, and sure enough, I find myself only increasing my desire for some sort of self-actualization (which was, admittedly, always there). My writing might even come from a need to express myself, be understood, and most of all, touch something universal.

It is that final point that I often come back to. It may have been different when I was young, when I thought the self was an act of differentiation. When did I get old enough that I started seeing the role of the self opposite - to integrate, elegant and harmonious, into what already exists, what is eternal?

Two years ago, I listened to Brian Eno in the last evening light at Chesler Park in Canyonlands. It was "Through Hollow Lands", what might otherwise be an innocuous track, but one of five songs in a row I consider perfect that end that album, when the elation of the three songs before settled into my soul and I had something like an out-of-body experience (not to put it too dramatically - I think some people would describe what I felt as "light-headedness"). I was out there searching for something in addition to solitude - meaning, connection, trying to link my past to my future. My grandmother loved the southwest, and I loved her. What of her - her values, her spirit, her mistakes - could I honor through my actions?

She died, what, seven years ago? That morning, I woke after a night out like a thousand others, strangely elated. I was lightheaded, hungover, but the morning light was upon me through the window, and I relented to it, rising early. Like some other rare mornings, the air felt full of magic, and I didn't want my walk to the convenience store, or my spell listening to the birds on the porch, to end. I called my dad that morning to ask if they were going to go see my grandma that day in the hospice, because I wanted to as well. I caught him at an awkward time - she had just died, but he hadn't called to tell us yet.

I know, among other things, that I managed to hurt him that day - the guilt of having not informed me, for they had seen it coming for hours. But I would not have wanted to be there. I might have tried to break the air in half, or the sunlight, for the feeling of cosmic frustration that must come with watching someone you love sliding into death. In failing to come to terms, I may have hurt myself (the way I used to dream of doing so).

In retrospect, there was no doubt the luck of time and circumstance on all scales involved, that she had the profound effect on me that she did. Not only that my day went that way, but that I was lost in my own life, and that I happened to reflect on hers amidst the haze of my prolonged adolescence, and understand in some dim way what was to be done. Most broadly of all, that I had the chance to know her - that the universe sat us down in such close proximity of time and space.

In the years since, I have grown into much more than I was then. More than once I have wished she could see me as I am now, for I want her to be proud of me - but what kind of contradiction would that be? And before I skip away down this road, perhaps it is wise to ask - when I say I have grown into more than I was, am I right? What does it mean? Does it matter?

When I look into the mirror today, I finally see some of the man I had been expecting to wake up as tomorrow for every day of the last 20 years - evolving though that image has been. And it is not in the wrinkle lines, or the hurt of my past that I see every time I am brave enough to catch my own gaze - but in the recognition of the collective past that I can see that I am finally there, at least in some way.