For decades my life has been like a well fortified castle. Solid, forbidding, and for the most part impregnable. I suppose it was an outgrowth of my insane experiences as a child. And I guess that it served a purpose too. When I was in my 8th year I had needed a place where I could retreat to. A place of safety. One that I could call my own. That castle, the one I built in response to the craziness, became my hiding place.
It was an idyllic area, this place where I built. The countryside was amazing and bucolic, all various shades of green intermingled with rolling hills and trees. The kind of place that Frederick Law Olmstead use to love to create in the 19th Ce. It even had a meandering stream far off in the distance, one that feed the trees and wild flowers that grew near to its banks.
However, as time has gone by the countryside has changed. The once rolling hills have become fallow and full of weeds dotted only with a collection of dead and withered trees whose only purpose is seemingly sculptural. Too, that stream, the one that was meandering far off in the distance, has itself become a raging torrent, one that is getting closer and closer to my castle all the time. I suppose I have known all along that these changes had been taking place. That my pastoral setting had been replaced. I suppose I have tried to deny the danger that the river represents too. But the river is too close now and it has begun to eat away at my foundations.
My castle has not been spared the ravages of time either. It too has suffered, becoming a broken down fortress that both time and necessity have slowly dismantled. My once solid stones walls have crumbled under their own weight leaving gaping cracks that allow dusty shafts of golden light to shine down into the soaring galleries. Even the mighty oak rafters, splintered and aged over time, have become havens for all of the birds who have sought sanctuary to create their aeries.
I can't say that my life is crumbling as the result of the big reorganization at work which has been brewing for over a month, the one that is my current source of craziness. If pressed I would have to say that its origins are rooted in the Spring of 2006 when my body gave way and I became ill. Since that time I have been struggling, both physically and emotionally. This is not to say that I have not made great strides. I have come to terms with a great many things over the last three and a half years and I have established a solid and integral spiritual connection with a power greater than myself. But all of this has not been enough because I have not yet experienced the true powerlessness that will come when my castle is finally destroyed.
So here I stand as the final bits of my life crumble around me. I have to say I feel a lot like San Francisco did in those first three days after the earthquake, those days when the raging inferno began eating its way across the hills and valleys of the City. I particularly feel like that group of men and women who were standing at the top of Sacramento Street that first morning watching as the fire crept up the hill towards them, destroying their life in the process, the one they had always known.
Just like that group, I now stand here watching my life, the one I have always known since my castle building days, crumble as the raging river destroys what is left of my foundations. Watching and waiting, hoping that my Phoenix will rise out of the destruction just as San Francisco's did after the 1906 Earthquake and Fire.
what? uhhh. what?
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