September 26, 2010, a bit before midnight, day before the 6th anniversary of CS’s death and two days after leaving the job.
I am sitting on the porch with the few crickets left singing outside in the cool night, peaceful, after listening to all the cut conversations from Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten. I am so glad to be here…this little ramshackle house in Albany, NY, United States of America, Earth. I’m a person among many persons in an overcrowded world of persons and not nearly enough wilderness ~ but a lot of wilderness if you count our minds.
(God, that man’s hands. Have you ever really looked at hands? They are stars. They are magnificent and improbable and so fine. Like faces they have beauty that transcends any conventional beauty if you really LOOK.)
Look. There is beauty all around. What can you do? Smile at strangers. Bring some comfort. I am indebted to Joe Strummer and The Clash for giving me back my anger and my joy, my self-respect, my strength. I don’t know where I am going. I don’t know what will happen, but I am free. And I always could have been, if I had looked. Jumping into the next thing isn’t always the right path. Beware. Hold yourself steady and really look.
“Anger can be power—don’t you know that you can use it?”
Something I saw when I was very young and resisted the gray life ahead, but when I got older it tore me apart because I finally bought into the notion that being free was something that could be attained by playing the game, by fitting in where I had no real connection.
Of course, you make connections….You make them wherever you are, to try to make a place feel like home even when you are screaming “Let me out!!” You can tell yourself all kinds of stories about duty and love and giving the benefit of the doubt—doubting your SELF all the time while you sicken and die trying to fit a mold.
And there are approximate fits. Where you think you could bear spending most of your waking hours, giving your soul for a fistful of dollars and dreaming of retirement when you will really be able to do what you want—but of course we’ve seen that story played out a hundred different ways, or maybe just one or two. People who no longer have any lodestar because they gave it up to work for IBM or some other sure bet, security and lifelessness in exchange for life, juice, adventure, reality. Enough money for a house, car, kids, and maybe a diamond or two at Christmas. (Filthy diamonds ripped out of the earth by people who have been enslaved by the diamond industry.)
It’s all connected. It’s all connected. The sparkle and the filth. And if you are on one side then you are most assuredly on the other. So what’s the middle ground? Where am I going? Where do I want to be? I wish I knew Joe.
Thing is, it’s all connected. The net of gems is cast out upon the universe and one strummer on six strings can reach millions of people and change the lives of many more than that. Ripple effect. Your smile today can make a great difference in a moment that will be remembered by one and maybe felt by many others who will never see you or know of your existence. Because you make one person feel better for one moment.
So in a way I do know Joe, because he has given of himself and that ripples out to me ~ those ripples found me as I was drowning and lifted me up, not just enough to get air but enough to see. To look around and know I was not where I wanted to be. And then gave me the courage to think that I could have the audacity to leave.
No one, none of us, is a saint. And who ever said our heroes must be? I’d rather learn face to face from a bum than at the feet of a holy roller.
I am grateful to be here on this porch in the cool night air, looking at the layers of peeling paint on a window that went out of production 80 years ago. I am grateful for The Clash, and Joe Strummer, and all those people who spoke about him in that movie. I am grateful for September, the month of endings and beginnings. I am grateful for the freedom to write into the night.