Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

I collect phrases, little bits of prose and poems.  They play back and forth on the axis between my hippocampus and the bow of my lips.  I lose them, forget where I got them or how they go.

"The seven years' difference in our ages lay between us like a chasm. I wondered if these years would ever operate between us as a bridge."

First seen, spring of 2003.  In a packet of material from AP English, cut out after I moved to my own dorm room in my freshman year of college and taped to the wall.  I lost it after that, lost everything I had on the wall.  What I could remember: "seven years" and "chasm" and "bridge."

Found, December of 2006.  Hypomanic, bipolar disorder undiagnosed.  It's from "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin, a favorite author of one of my best friends at the time.  Back then, everything felt like a sign.

"In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."  

First seen, high school.  Lost simultaneously by both my father and me.  We could both remember that we had seen it in the front of a YA book.  We could both remember "winter," and another season (incorrectly thought to be spring.)

Found, later in high school, much to the delight of my father.  Written by Albert Camus and used as an introduction to "The Pistachio Prescription" by Paula Danziger.

***
We had a long day.  We almost always have long days.

"...the act of attention is a form of prayer."

First seen, unknown but prior to April of 2006 (also hypomanic, quite undiagnosed) when I misquoted it in my old blog.  I have no idea where I saw it.  Remembered: "attention" and "prayer."  Many permutations of these words Googled over the past seven years.  So elusive that I though I may have - in that spinning lost world of hypercreativity - made it up.

It was fitting in those days, when we had easy access to a "prayer room."  There, we would sleep and study and meet in the middle of the night to flip through pictures and go into giggle fits.  So many of the things we did in there weren't even close to sacred, but we did them anyway.  I justified it thusly, that given those things undivided attention was its very own prayer.  Maybe it was.

Those same words, popping up in my mind all the time.  Running or concentrating in the lab, I feel like I am praying.  "Please let me make it to the end of this mile."  "Please don't fuck this up."  If there is a god in this machine, then he is the constant recipient of all these pleas.

Today was a long day.  Almost every day is a long day.

I was reminded, though, reading one of my favorite blogs, that some people are content to squander their gifts, to waste their own lives.  Which reminded me of this quote:

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day."  Never lost but always delighted to be found.  And at the top of the poem, on one particular website:

"Today's poem holds that the act of attention is a form of prayer."

It does.  It is.  Our days are long, but oh (my love, my life, my world) so so short.  Across chasms and bridges.  Through the winters and summers in our very own hearts.  Wild and precious, full of secrets and plans.