CHOICE

Being married to a builder for many years, I cannot look at a bathtub spout without likewise intuiting the plain galvanized pipe that lies at its center, conveying both hot and cold water from their respective copper pipes and sources to that vessel of respite at the end of a long day.

Similarly, I can no longer look at a person and glimpse the veneer they inhabit without also sensing the undercurrent of dissatisfaction or dissimilitude in the presentation.

It might seem like a curse, and I can understand your thinking. It is the bubble burst; the dream splintered into fragments of a plain vanilla reality. Strip away the many-hued veils and the dancer appears, naked and exhausted, as simply one of us.

This commonality is what draws me in, oddly enough. It humanizes the lofty and elevates the mundane onto the level playing field of life. If you dare to join me there, we can soar on thermals of imagination because we know there are no limitations, now that we’ve cast aside that heavy cloak of artifice.

Freedom lies in that shared parenthesis inserted into the continuum of existence. Authenticity is paradoxically that which we cannot view with conditioned eyes, yet it is felt right down to the bones. We either meet there or plunge like Icarus back into the practiced abyss of suffering and into the dreams of others.

 

Image: Anna M. Rinaldo