iktomi

Sun 11.3.19

      When I was a kid in boarding school sitting by the pool, watching girls execute their audacious dives into the water, I felt a tickle on my leg.  A monster was crawling up my bare leg.  The daddy long-legs gave me such a fright that I remember the incident to this day.  I think it was either Wordsworth or one of his fellow poets who stated that you must cherish such moments where your system gets a terrific jolt, pain, sudden unexpected death of someone in one’s circle, the loss of a limb, the near death experience.  At such moments, offers Wordsworth, we are most truly alive.  Only a writer would proffer such an idea.  But it’s true, we are most present at those very moments.  The mind takes a picture of the scene.  One remembers the minutest of details.

      What was it about the daddy long-legs that gave me such a start?  I note a detail of the incident recounted above: This monster was crawling up my ‘bare’ leg; it was touching my most personal self.  I had been separated from my family, which was not my choice, and as a child of the streets with my two brothers, was placed in a strange community which traded in guilt and fear.  At such times one tends to draw inward until one is able to forge a path among these alien folk. 

The spider was breaching my protective wall, my very body, and it was huge and ugly. This was my awakening.  They can get you; they will get you if you don’t wake up and act – Wordsworth’s jolt.  Life is a series of such jolts, both minor and major, especially if one is a sleep walker, an NPC.  Otherwise, one learns circumspection, and in time impeccability where one is acting in such a way that benefits all, whether they like it or not. 

      The wall is important and must be protected and defended; the spider will be squashed or sent scurrying when seen for the awkward defenseless creature that it is.  Life is full of spiders, but few are a real menace.

The favorite essay this month has been, Nietzsche