The Direction of Intention

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Today was lonely-odd-object-on-the-beach-and-beyond day. The morning was overcast and cool; the smell of rain was in the air. It was quiet. The tide was out and the Sound was unusually still.

As I walked my usual loop I saw, sitting all alone on a bench, a microwave oven. It’s long grey cord stretched behind it as if the oven had slowly crawled across the street and lifted itself up onto the bench to stare longingly at the sea. Since I recently fired my inner archeologist for excessive storytelling I was left to my own devices to understand how a microwave oven came to be sitting on the bench. I sat down next to the oven hoping to strike up a conversation but it was not in a talkative mood. After a while I felt oddly responsible for its melancholy so I moved on.

A hundred yards later I spied a bunch of balloons, blue and white, sitting at the water’s edge. Clearly the bunch had escaped a wedding or birthday party and had finally come to rest at the exact spot where water meets dry land. I suppose that might have been an accident but it seemed much too intentional (not to mention metaphoric) so I went to have a look. The balloons were clearly exhausted after a long flight; their once tight rubber skin was now wrinkling. The shine of festive blue and white was fading. Life, it seemed, for this tribe, had been about flight – running from a celebration that must have seemed false or like a prison. They flew rather than suffocate. I wondered if they individually or collectively had regrets but it didn’t feel appropriate to interrupt their meditation.

I arrived downtown and while walking from my studio to a meeting I passed the train station and came upon a huge statue of Anubis suspended from a crane. The jackal-headed Egyptian god weighs the hearts of the newly deceased; if your heart is lighter than a feather you may pass go and collect 200 afterlife dollars, if not, you are crocodile lunch. Anubis seemed embarrassed to be swinging from a crane. Exposed. It broke my heart to see such a powerful deity so ungrounded. I wondered what he thought about doing his heart-weighing at the portal of a modern train station. It was clearly the wrong time to ask so I walked away.

On the way back to my studio while crossing the street a man with a crazy red beard ran up to me and sang, “Do Your Life and Do It Out Loud!” A seer? A message? Personal? Random? By the time I recovered myself he had moved on. So many unanswered questions!

Filed under: Metaphor, Seeing, Story, Truly Powerful People |