Yesterday was overcast and drizzly and I was barefoot up in a tree with saw in hand trying to reach a much higher limb when the danger of it all — prompted by a slip on the rain soaked bark — forced a retreat. The idea of being Icarus crashing down didn’t appeal at that moment. Was it cowardice or wisdom? My hunch is that it was a “youthful” mind coupled with an aging body with the latter taking precedence.
The initial motive was to clear away a few top branches that were hampering the flow of data from the satellite in the sky to the satellite dish on the roof of the house. (The days of living in the bus with nothing but candles and books for an evening’s entertainment are long gone; especially, with A-League soccer beaming in on a Friday/Saturday night.)
Instead of soccer, in the evening I caught up on reading and dipped into the collected poems of Jack Gilbert. Excerpts from his poem “Failing and Flying” seemed to be synchronistic with my earlier rumination on the fate of Icarus.
“Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. It’s the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work.”
At the end of the poem, he concludes: “I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph”.
When Ginny Jordan this past week tossed bamboo sticks into the air, she, like all of us, did not have a clue how things would pan out. What goes up will eventually come down. The pattern of flight is dictated by our throw. The stronger our determination, the higher we’ll fly.
Pema Chodron writes knowingly about “When Things Fall Apart” in her book of the same title. I agree that picking up the pieces on the ground is what life here on earth is all about.
In the end, even though I climbed down from the tree, I did have the initial nerve to climb up the ladder even with wobbly legs. May we all continue to take chances till the end of our lives.
Peas in the garden might be slowly drying out and nearing the end of their days, but these two geezers are still showing backbone and standing tall.
Back on the ground I got out my 20 gauge shotgun and proceeded to blast ten shells along the line-of-sight of the satellite dish into the offending leaves. No success here either.
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