All Souls Day
The sky looked different this morning. From where I sit at my desk, I can usually see a lot of sky, including what is revealed apart from it, the cityline and river and the changing colors of leaves and trees.
The sky is like the ocean. It never looks the same, but sometimes it will remind you of another day and another place and another sky, in a distant part of the world. Today though, I noticed it was not like what I have seen before.
Maybe I haven’t lived to see so many skies. But I’ve seen quite a few. Today it was striated. The clouds were clearly striated, like thick chunky dreadlocks, like clearly delineated rows of crops when you’re flying low over farmland, like fingers of an open hand, like the sky giving you a high-five. To the left of the clouds was only clear blue.
It was a moment.
I just finished reading The Zahir, a book by Paulo Coelho. Everybody knows I am a great admirer of his work. Reading him always manages to put me into a more finely tuned mood, like picking up a timeless violin, and I’m somewhere else in the universe, where I have always been, where we travel like babies on the umbilical cord. I feel I must rebirth myself from the universe everyday in order to truly live the adventure, and his stories bring me back into a more immediate conversation with the elusive lifeline. Shall we live from the imagination, or shall we let the 21st century tell us where to go? This is as relevant as how you want to live your life. Will YOU live it? Or do you let someone else tell you how to live it?
I feel this and everything during the story. I am not quite at peace, which brings me to read compulsively til I get the entire message. By the end I am not without questions, but somehow I feel good with the questions I may have. For once, I do not have to imagine that life. Not that one, not that character, not that life. Not when I am in the hands of a novelist who knows how to let the story take over. “Is this how a life reads?” I am always surprised. I always try for that in my songs. The difference is that it’s me naked on your ipod, stereo and car speakers. The characters are too personal. How true to life is debatable. But the story is always mutable. We are not made of stone.
That is why imagination must always conquer perception, in the end.
