3/3/10

I had forgotten about orange faces and quiet campfires, I had forgotten about the land without mirrors, without grades, and I had forgotten about having dirty feet. I had forgotten about all this at college. I was measuring my life with a system other people had given to me. No one in particular was responsible for calibrating my mind, just a nebulous majority called 'good life.' It had no mention of exile, poverty and thoughtful silence.

It was a giant tumbling machine, and even the people who proclaimed to resist it helped push it out of ditches when it was stuck. To resist the machine is to give traction to its treads. My parents and teachers are apart of it too, gearing onward to an invisible horizon over a sea of money.

But friends have shown me a new system, a new measurement set. Taft, the twenty two year old butcher, fourteen year old GED recipient, veteran traveler, is neither wealthy nor glamorous. But he found a detour to the place called happiness, which the giant machine passed long ago, tumbling instead on a blind convoluted route across deserts, towards the same goal. There are many questions we only feel comfortable feeding the machine before thinking over ourselves, but I realized that with patience, there is no knot we ourselves cannot untie.