It’s foggy today where I live. Like looking through the intervening years back to childhood. Vague impressions standing ghostlike on their own like tree stumps lurking through the fog in a field. I’m told that as one gets older long-term memory becomes more acute while short-term memory diminishes. But I remember what I did last night, it’s the childhood years I’d spent so long trying to forget that I am now trying to remember once again. I remember why I spent all those years trying to forget them; I just don’t know why I now want so desperately to recall them.
Perhaps one needs the totality of one’s life to truly put ones self in any kind of meaningful context. As struggling and sensitive people, as people susceptible to emotional and psychological pain, we tend to diminish, or eliminate, portions of life and history we don’t like in order to arrive at the conclusions we wish to accept about ourselves. It is a natural thing to do. It is self-protective, it is often necessary, but it is surrender to the MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) way of being, and of seeing; like looking through the fog, aware of the ghostlike images of stumps in the field, but not seeing them clearly, not understanding that they really are, quite profoundly, beautiful trees having, at one time, been thoughtlessly, and carelessly, cut off at the knees.
In order to see the tree one first has to see the stump.
