The Third Largest, Something on Passion and Grief

One should reflect upon their life at moments like this.  I am on a train, underground, beneath the third largest city in America.  School brought me here.  From the south side of San Antonio Texas, the seventh largest city in America, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, a decidedly less populated place than I first thought, to the Midwest and public transportation.  I have been noticing when Chicago is mentioned in films and on television.  I think it is because I am trying to adjust to the circumstance of living here.  I think I am almost there, but I have been trying for seven months now.  Maybe it is because I have done what I did in Santa Fe.  I willingly changed my life to pursue school and found a job.  It's more than some, less than others.  I wonder if I will feel different when school is over and it comes time to go to school again.  I will say that I won't miss it.  I wonder if that will be true?  It is exhaustive this school thing.  I don't know if I was ever very good at it, but I slid through four years of it.  I don't want that to be how my life is after I don't have to worry about school.  I don't want to be able to "just get through" how I choose to live.

Passion is sought through the experience of moments and only when you stumble upon it, and label it after the fact, do you realize that you found what it was you were seeking.  An active moment of passion is life's orgasm.  That I am "passionate" about writing is not evidence of passion.  At times it may be an acknowledgment of passion previously experienced, or of hoped at passion.  A marker signifying experience at this or that point along the road and through the hills and valleys of whatever it is you were/are passionate about.

So what?  I was once passionate about playing music.  Look where that has taken me - a tour of the East and Midwest of America (and a survey of hospitality from each person and place that helped along the way) - but now music has no place in my life.  I played the clarinet in high school and then in college as part of my music minor.  I wasn't very good, or passionate enough to put forth the extra effort towards becoming better, and now it is a decidedly severed part of me.  I think I had to let it go with one last big, emotive hurrah.


Last summer I went on tour with the Apple Miner Colony for five weeks and I think, for a good part of it, I was numb.  It is not often that you can take twenty (more or less) people on a road-trip to play music, and it is not often that all twenty of those people happen to be going through the grieving process.  I'm not sure any of us really knew how to cope with the fact of losing a community.  For some of us, the very day we left Santa Fe to begin the tour, and then when we returned for our last show, only to leave, for good, shortly thereafter, we didn't expect to loose such a sizable portion of ourselves.  Who could have known?  This happened because the College of Santa Fe closed that summer due to circumstances that the students couldn't control.  We all knew long before that there would be nothing to come back to after the trip, even though there were plans for the school to reopen the next semester under new management and without a music program.  Still, until the loss of our school could be felt, we did our best to avoid it and we succeeded for five whole weeks.  The singular experience was much different from the collective strength we had sailing under the banner of "musical group".

I felt cheated out of feeling.  I didn't like that I felt somewhat adrift during those weeks, but looking back I could see it on every face that took the journey with me, if only in flashes.  Now that I see them, they are like cameras flashing in a dark night - making expression definite in the lines of faces.  Only in the reaching-for can I also draw the beauty, wonder, love, even passion from those moments because now they are precious, when then they were choking.  Maybe only some of this was from losing the camaraderie of our college, who can say.  On that last morning in New Mexico, when I watched the sun blast the clouds as it reached over the mountain, I resolved to let the experience of three years come to an end.  It was not without regrets and frustrations, some from a stubborn infatuation with the keyboard/accordion/flute player, others from sleeping on the floor for five weeks, and a few from a hidden place of love that I didn't know I had for my goddamn school and the crazy people that I found there.  I would like to say that it was over then.  I was done, the book was closed on that place and that loss, but I guess the process of grief was simply on hold until life tried to resume its course with the needle on the record jumping the grove into the next tune.

That tune was Chicago.  It was unfamiliar.  I wish I had learned to improvise while I had an instrument to practice on.  Life happened and it was good.  I came to Chi-town with people I knew from Santa Fe and found others that wound up on the shores of Lake Michigan.  We had some visits (and visited others) from people we knew in the Land of Enchantment and I think, in a collective sort of way we all found a way to cope with things, though the memories of that once-home, still, are fresh.  This uncanny sense of connection we share, those invisible lines that link us are sharp enough to cut, and they do.  Every time we slide down that line its like walking barefoot on taught, thin piano wire, and only the closest connections have released tension or widened into paths.  In a field of them, some are so rusted they are liable to snap if set foot on and the whiplash could take out your eye, so they are avoided; enough pain has been caused.  Some of us are masochists; others have made art out of severed wire and just-healed scars.

I suppose I should explain myself.  This is a tale of what passion leads to.  When I say, "How delightful," I mean it as a cynic being acutely literal.