table, apple, sky

I live for security, my retirement plan and medical insurance.  Tomorrow is the only thing that scares me.  The lack of ability to plan scares me the most, tomorrow does not exist.

We met in the US Army, Fort Stewart GA, and when Alicia ended her military service, we were married, I reported to South Korea and she was thousands of miles away, I missed my best friend.  We were able to get stationed back in California, to be close to my brother and my mom.  We then received orders to report to Germany.  I got out of the service, we moved back to California, finished school and went to Louisiana.  We settled in Pittsburgh, PA around 2003 to be close to Alicia’s family.  We bought a house, dreamed of building a darkroom and decided we can travel in the warm months and take photographs.  Alicia would become a master printer and we would make the prints during the cold months.  This past July, we celebrated 25 years of marriage and I am truly the lucky one, she still likes me most days. 

In 2011, Alicia and I were in a doctor’s office.  The Neurologist said, I have three words I want you to remember, and at the end of our appointment, I will ask you what they are again: table, apple, sky.  She was falling a lot and at this point, confined to a wheelchair.  The Army denies that her rare neurological condition, stiff person’s syndrome, is connected to her time in service though her unit was in the exposure area to chemical agents resulting from the demolition of Iraqi weapons at Khamisiyah during the Gulf War.  At least two other members of her unit have this same condition, and the challenge was to remember three words.  Neither of us remembered the three words that day, I remember them to this day and today we still fight for a service connection. 

We are lucky and have spent most of our lives trying to do the things we love, like pebbles in a slow moving creek, life is wearing us down.  I work to make sure we have medical insurance, wish away all my Monday through Fridays trying to get work done at work and chores done at home.  She sleeps most of the day with her medications, reading and being tired from regular assertions.  We are close to fifty years old and missed enjoying the mid life crisis, we are now in the middle of a mid life clarity.  We took out all the nice dishes from the china cabinet and now buy the higher quality items we like.  She has fought like hell and now uses just a walker, she is the strongest person I know.  We know that air has healing quality and are trying to transition to a lifestyle that can connect us to the open skies, the open road.

The world is still imperfect, life is flawed, time changes slightly, each day a new normal of some of the same old things.  Tomorrow may be a new normal I have not prepared for, I am afraid tomorrow will damage our existence beyond repair, broken and shattered on the floor and no amount of effort will be able to put us back together again.

Embracing flaws or imperfections is the Japanese philosophy of Wabi-Sabi.  It serves as a rationale for keeping an object around even after it has been broken and as a justification of kintsugi.  Kintsugi “golden joinery” is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, silver, or platinum.  As a philosophy, it treats breakage and the repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise, highlighting the cracks and repairs as simply an event in the life of an object rather than allowing its service to end at the time of its damage or breakage.

There is no attempt to hide damage, the repair is illuminated becoming an expression of the spirit of mushin (literally translated as "no mind").  It carries the connotations of fully existing within the moment, of non-attachment, of mental calmness and composure amid changing conditions.  There is an unwelcome circumstance of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, these become clearer in the breaks and the shattering to which the ceramic ware was subjected. This poignancy or aesthetic of existence is known as mono no aware, a compassionate sensitivity, identification with the things outside oneself (paraphrased from wikipedia).

We have so many golden seams of kintsugi in our life.  Each golden seam illuminates a path we have taken, or a path that has been given.  Our next path includes a camera and a new RV trailer, an Airstream, a home for the open road, golden joinery, each highway a hallway, each national park a living room, golden sunsets, each golden sunbeam a seam, a seam that combines our life into a bowl, a fruit bowl, a bowl half full, full of apples, some green and sour, others red and sweet, and the fruit bowl sits on a picnic table at a national park, under an open sky, a blue sky: table, apple, sky...