Capture and release

I feel the need to blog again. There’s something in the air these days that makes me want to get it all down before it’s gone. Maybe, someday, the internet won’t be there either – I expect that day will come. So, if I told myself I’m writing for some future world, I’d be mistaken. I’m writing for the moment and for anyone who wants to read it in between busy hours.

The Fountain of Trevi

My new mission will be to keep it short. That way, I can say more.

Brevity is relative, though.

In the past few years, so much has changed in my life, and I feel there’s greater change ahead – just different kinds of change.

I strive for authenticity but often fail. Most days, I’m more like Icarus. I reach for the sun and go crashing to the earth. But I started out on earth, so assuming I survive the crash, the quest was the wiser choice.

I’m just trying to figure it out for myself, to make sense of it all. I’ve been blessed in the past five years to have visited some of the greatest cities on earth – NYC, Dublin, London, Florence, Rome, with more travel to Lilydale, NY this coming July and Scotland on the horizon this fall. I remember the quieter moments the most – a boat tour on Loch Gill past Innisfree, a walk through the olive groves in Chianti, a self-satisfied ale at The Bleeding Horse – and always the train ride past open fields, pastural landscapes. More and more, I feel like it’s passing me by – that I need to capture it all as it goes – as I go stumbling through this world on great, ungraceful, mad-flapped wings.

Under the Tuscan clouds

Although, maybe that’s not quite true. I have my moments of serenity. My last night in Tuscany, the air had erupted in windstorm, and the rain was as fresh as a newly unsealed can of coffee grounds. The aroma was similar. But I sat there overlooking the benighted vineyards and wrote a goodbye poem to that place, that adventure, and to the version of myself that had come to that region in the hope – and with the earnest expectation – that it would somehow change me forever. Mission accomplished, even if I couldn’t quite grasp it at that time.

The bus would be leaving for Florence soon. Janie and I would be staying there for only one night before taking the noon train to Rome. But I found my moment. As I always do, I felt the pull of staying forever, simultaneous to the pull of moving on.

Catching the sun in flight

I’m trying to say something here, and I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s this: time is infinite, but we are not.

My feelings are a kite that depend on the direction and fury of the wind that day, each hour. My thoughts are clouds that sometimes float like those of a soft summer sky, sometimes threaten to burst like those darker clouds that form like murder over the lake and then keep moving on without spilling a drop.

That’s the mood of the moment, in fact, as I write this. Sometimes, very rarely, those clouds erupt with hellfire rage, dance rain like a midnight cloudburst over crowded Times Square, roar like a blizzard that turns to freezing rain during a risky book tour, or shift and shimmer with wondrous thoughts that send me to the page or the screen, inspired to write, wherever I am. Those latter brainstorms are precious to me. I need to rest, but I don’t. There’s too much to do.

Post-storm sky

There are many kinds of clouds, as Joni Mitchell would agree; it depends on how you look at them. But the main thing, for a writer or artist of any kind, is to look at them with sincere curiosity, and to do something about it – even if doing means doing nothing, with purpose or, if possible, without.

For the previous, much older posts, go to: http://gerardcollinsblog.blogspot.com/