The Wire Walker, the Traveler, and the Sartorialist

Okay, dear reader. Here’s what we’re working with.

It’s 10:13 in the evening. I’m wearing the red cotton robe that I bought at an estate sale a few years ago in Ormond Beach, Florida. The homeowners (God rest their Souls), whose entire contents of their home were being sold off and picked over by strangers, had spent the latter part of their lives traveling the world. Their (very large) beach house was tastefully yet eclectically filled with books about art and philosophy and history, statues and paintings and handcrafted pottery, richly woven textiles on the walls and a kitchen filled with dated yet extremely charming dish wares and appliances.

Because I had, at that time, a small business re-selling vintage clothing, I did as was customary for me and made a beeline to the walk-in closets. 

In between the golf shirts and the tennis skirts, I found this red cotton robe. I once used a translator app to demystify the bright white symbols that have been carefully screen printed onto the cloth in Japanese. Though the translation was choppy at best, there was mention of a festival, and I imagined the gentleman of the house (for the robe had been hanging on his side of the closet) being the only white man at this festival in a small town in Japan where perhaps a business associate had taken him and his wife to meet their family and to have an authentic, local experience. Arigato gozaimashita.

And sitting here with you now, this memory reminds me that we are always, at all times, creating our own realities by the choices we are constantly making.

I can so clearly recall writing about this in the first blog I ever christened in college as an official “artist”, which was really just another blogspot address where I shared my ramblings, my hopes and my fears; not at all unlike this one, 15 years later.

The breakthrough metaphor which helped me out then was to think of life like a tightrope walker. Always, there is this great act of faith; faith in your own sense of balance; faith in the One who is guiding you. Culminating this faith prevents you from looking down or from misstepping. You picture yourself safely arriving to the other side and you make up your mind that that’s the truth, and then you go. And ever since that first, terrifying free-fall feeling as college graduation approached, and yet I had absolutely no idea of how to apply myself outside the walls of the campus I had grown so fond of and dependent on, I’ve been learning how to confront the unknown without letting it completely knock me off the wire.

But life is and always will be ripe with unknowns. The truest test of my own internal courage has been to look at my life, to see the gaping holes and the empty spaces, and to say, “Okay. What’s next?” without an ounce of doubt that the path will become revealed.

I want to do good things with my life. I want to be of good service to others. And lately, being a writer feels a little fluffy. And though I’m not here to put myself down or to doubt myself, it is, after all, my blog. And I can at least use it to remind myself that when we share of our gifts, the world answers.

And if I can learn (through practice and repetition) how to share of my most undiluted, unfiltered, uncensored self, the message will ring louder and further than I could have ever imagined.

And furthermore, if people are one day combing through the contents of my house after my death (in 100 years from now, God willing), they’ll surely find stacks and boxes of manuscripts, notebooks, scraps of paper with jotted-down poems and critiques of storylines and character names, etc. But mostly I hope it’s the letters from friends, kept and preserved as a memory of love, and the stories of togetherness from family members scattered about that would make an impression on someone like me those years ago, whose only just come to raid the closet.