LIVING ARCHITECTURE
& Construction Management
I woke up this morning with both feet firmly planted in tow worlds.
As I sit down to write this Monday With Marley I'm still whirling from an almost impossible place of slippage.
It's not scary, so much as totally weird.
While I exercised, the early morning light snuck up behind me. The sun shot through seven Bombay Gin bottles set vertically, fifteen inches apart, into the thick grotto stucco wall of the lowest of four stories of my almost new home. Seven long blue light beams itched diagonally across the arched carport, down two concrete steps and out, scratching forward inch by inch over the cold flagstone patio as the sun raised up on its elbow.
Two mirror-image cantilevered concrete stairs rose to attention on either side of the seven sisters of blue blind light. Iron wrought railings, rusty steel grapevines, twisted from under two giant Live Oak trees that sprouted three hundred years ago between Volkswagen Bug-sized-shaped granite boulders, brown-red.
My thoughts shifted shape as my arms pumped twenty-five pound dumbbells.
The chickens scratched backwards dead leaves, gobbling up every one of the wiggling locust larva only the chickens could hear.
And I wasn't there. And I'm talking weird slippage.
I was awake and working-out, watching the chickens under the giant oak trees, swallowing whole, silent screaming locusts, standing in the middle of seven streaking beams of blue drunk light fading between twin climbing concrete stairs guarding the portal to my sanity.
I was there but not there.
I was severely awake and totally blotto.
I started telling Lynn what I was seeing and the things I was hearing but words, my uttered-futtered words, emerged totally inadequate in conveying the visions and understandings I was experiencing in another side of my head.
I don't usually say, "My God", but Oh, my God, the things I understood and could see and could hear and couldn't get out of my head through this mouth fast enough. These things were of God. The ideas stuck fat on my tongue but words wouldn't do. Words were dry peanut butter and thick on white bread.
My wife tilted her head like a puppy does when it's listening but not getting it, and I said it all again as best I could and I am a man with no problem with words and no words could I find except "I can't find the words."
Now I'm going out on a limb right now, one of the kinking twisting stretching limbs from the two Live Oak trees guarding the drunk blue light streaming in through the Bombay Gin bottles this morning and I'm saying to you that I'm either letting you hear me go stark raving mad or I'm telling you LOUDLY that SOMETHING WONDERFUL THIS WAY COMES.
I can't help but believe and hope that it's the latter. Otherwise, I'm on my way out and they will put me away, white jacket arms tied.
The words I don't know quite yet how to say scream loudly like the locusts only the chickens can hear. The world as we know it is changing. Oh my Dear God, my Maker, my All, the World is Changing. It is a good thing.
Give me the words.
Give me the words.
Give me the words.
So the deeds will be done.
P.S. There are probably a few or many of you reading this thing Monday with Marley who find yourselves wondering if Marley is losing his mind. I certainly hope so. Because it is only in the language spoken direct from the heart not filtered through the head where we know what is true beyond what we hear from the mouth. "Something Wonderful This Way Comes."