Fly Fly Away
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So i've left hong kong again... just for a week this time... Below some photos of our fair city, the one i just left, while i was commuting around one day.. and the view from my crib (if anyone is confused or anything) and the garden in the rain.... And after that: a few words that came to mind while travelling... ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
The plane takes off and banks. In the assent open a million worlds while my tired mind searches for meaning. I’ve just left the kids, clutching and irritated with the early wake up and constant schedules of cleaning and cooking and managing their time. Travel is always the moment where I take the opportunity to think deeply. I guess I can’t move my body or get distracted so I’m a prisoner to my thoughts and I love these moments.
On the tarmac I sift through emptiness and a blank feeling I don’t like to have. What exactly am I doing? With myself? With my life? Isn’t it time to get a ‘real’ job? Then arrogance seeps in. Aren’t there some exceptional people in the world that should be ‘kept’ by the rest of the world. Watered and fed. Walked and groomed. If this is true then I must be in the exceptional category. Can’t I just get paid to be who I am?
But life just isn’t like that.
Recently a friend had blogged about the solar eclipse. His words make sense to me now as then. Something about how insignificant our problems seem when put next to the mightiness of the universe that surrounds us. This is how I feel as we prepare to take off. First the rain peeling off the wing lays a pattern on the asphalt. Like an echo. I don’t know why it moves me. As we shift forward in our line up, preparing to heave this mass of metal into the air, the rain curtain wobbles and moves, disappearing sublimely as we lift. Then, the play of the different mists and bursts of moisture from the clouds are like a dance. As we gain altitude and bank, the ocean opens below us moving and breaking into an infinite pattern. There must be answers in the patterns. They are too powerful. And like a master musician, something plays the melody of the clouds – different shapes and consistencies at different intervals- against the base of the earth- mountains, sea… a river seen from above spills into the water below mixing and churning. The cut of the wing through the heavy air makes me breathe out loud. Everything looks special, meaningful. And I can’t write it. I have to show it somehow.
But I’m blocked. Frozen. Showing what I see to others ultimately means making a film. And I am very close. Why am I hesitating? L said recently that it was fear of failure. I am sure that is in it. But there is also the fear of so many other things. Like showing who I really am. Then I would have to face that wouldn’t i? The darkness of this piece I’m writing. The smear of it. Doesn’t it prove my x, and other’s too who criticize me and the way I conduct my life, the way I behave, the way I dress… doesn’t this piece prove them right? It is such a tightrope walk between expressing myself and conforming, between being free and making others happy. I was overwhelmed once with this and I did something very stupid that time. This time I wont. For sure. But I think about the options if I can’t keep balancing.
I want to scream, to complain at the very least- I have no partner, no money, no helper and kids to manage with no family and no friends for them as they have their daily life elsewhere. But how can I complain? I chose this. Who can I complain to? So what do I do? I hang on to the idea that maybe I am talented after all and that someone will appreciate what I can give. Pathetically self-involved really.
Meanwhile I’m flying to see my father who is sick. Giving time and energy and money where I have none to be with him. The same man who two years ago told me there was nothing I had ever done that had ever made him proud. His words. I’ll never forget them. So maybe, just maybe the reason for keeping on being who I am and doing what I do should be because I just can’t do anything else. Not to impress or prove. But simply because that is the way it is. Most people, even those that are close to you, don’t really care what you do in the end, they make their decisions about you based on their own separate parameters. Most people don’t pay attention to the lives of their friends, their lovers, their family.
Most people pay attention to films though,
especially a film that touches them in some way.
I’m closing my eyes…
And jumping
