The time is almost 7:00 p.m. I decided to write a short post, despite the late hour. I may write again tomorrow or I may decide I have nothing of interest to share. Time will tell.
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I thought I would drive myself to the appointment with my cardiologist this morning. Thankfully, mi novia thought otherwise. Before I could ask her to drive, she had made the decision. I am not sure I could have made it myself; I was more than a little tired—I felt a powerful need to close my eyes and rest. The cardiologist visit was uneventful. When it was finished, we went to breakfast at a diner near the race track; I was feeling much better by then. When we got home, though, I slept. For at least 3 or 4 hours. Ach!
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Unsullied by artificial light, the sky above the far northern Scottish coast was awash in starlight against a backdrop of the blackest black. Standing at the edge of a high cliff at St. John’s Head, Hoy Orkney, overlooking the Norwegian Sea, the scene mesmerized me. There’s no telling what possessed me to do it, but I did it nonetheless; I leapt off the cliff. I suppose I expected to plunge into the sea, ridding myself of years and years of unpleasant consciousness. What I got, though, was entirely different. Instead of dropping to the sea below, the sky drew me upward into the darkness and toward the stars. My experience from that point on was far too involved and complicated to explain. But I can relate something I learned. There are times when the gravity of the sun and the earth pale in comparison to the magnetism of the stars. And I learned that being swept into thousands of clusters of stars at the distant edges of the universe is an incomparable experience. The gravitational pull of elsewhere is beyond comprehension.
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There is a moment beyond which the propellants of rage cannot be restrained. More than “a moment.” Many, many, many moments. So many that rage can erupt with virtually no warning. Regardless of the steps that might be taken to harness rage, the blades to cut through that harness are so sharp and so numerous that restrictive actions are fruitless. That pessimistic vantage point is brought to you—in the absence of meaning and purpose—by fragments of broken humanity and shards of shattered compassion.
