Celtic Ray At the End of the Day

Physical changes of aging gain slowly, as noticeable as shadows of grass bending in a billowy tumbling wind on a summer afternoon. Of course, one day you'll turn around and get old. You can measure the distance of years if you nudge your pocked and weathered arm up against a teen's; hers is without a blemish, and you can make her uncomfortable staring in wonder at the elegant smooth perfection of skin. You gaze across the mirror and avert the other's query. But changes of the intellect, or soul if you insist, one's self, is even less noticeable. You always have been and are always you. One's self is immeasurable, icily distant, but nearer than air. But I see the change in me. My gnawing soul craves order--but this order is not a craven stoop to routine. No, I've now lived long enough to have polished to a warm shine the crest jewel of discrimination (with apologies to 9th century Indian mystic, Shankara). Young people coming into a more mature awareness of the wilderness of the world, the flowering of societies, will smile and reach out and quiver with fulsome desire to experience everything, to open their minds to what only blinked hovering pale snatches on hazy horizons beyond the stone bulwarks of trenchant suburban kingdoms. So they come to Honduras and with proud defiance of parental concern ride the chicken buses (old dingy yellow schoolbuses converted to public transportation you can ride for pennies) that spew and rumble through the city and into shantytowns and shuffle the poor and wary professionals around Tegucigalpa. Holding high aloft the torch that announces "Rob me!" Perhaps ungrateful urchins will throw rocks at you when you disembark to get down with the locals and eat shoulder to shoulder at a cramped cantina dimly lit and festooned with crucifixes and idealized simple portraits of village life as brightly-painted and sterile as kitsch, peasants balancing baskets, long blue shadows cast by a healthy donkey and his lightly burdened cart, laughing children, and an untattered, sober hombre brushing a guitar over a railing. Gringo, if you get robbed, you'll quickly convert it and set your mind at ease: those were just the forces of the (just) universe redistributing the wealth, and who wouldn't see the necessary blessing in that? No, I know what my soul craves, and it isn't more culturally broadening experiences, mundane practices that have the only virtue of being foreign and not undergone. Music that inspires, conversation that inspires, food that inspires, the noble rot, words that inpsire, films and theaters and performances and installations of all kinds that inspire, mountains and rivers and valleys and seas and meadows and ridges and springs and cascading storms and canyons and creatures that inspire, soliloquies, shadows, dappled light and autumnal blue pause of evening, willows and wanderings and wayward Maries, and the love of a good woman, which I do indeed have and for which I give thanks to the glittering stars in all their howling black cold refusal. But this is not routine, an ordered mundane soft march through easy expectations and familar tastes. Words that inspire ignite a passion to know more, that I am one with Socrates in that I do not know nearly enough, that more can be catalogued or siphoned, that when we speak of religion we speak of poetry, because all is merely food for a hungery soul. Van Morrison sings: Ireland Scotland England and Wales/I can hear the mothers' voices calling children, children/Come home children, come home on the Celtic Ray. Where I'm bound, hell or high water.