Tabula Rasa

It took more than twelve hours but I finally figured it out.

An absence of feeling isn't necessarily a feeling of absence.

Going into work today, I was trying to figure out my mood through the music I fancied. Like most of you, I'm sure, my music is reflective of my mood. But this morning, music just wasn't calling out to me like it usually does.

I skipped through Beiderbecke, Coltrane, and the rest of the jazz greats; I'm (almost) always in the mood to listen to jazz. But I really knew I was in trouble when I skipped through Sinatra; that just doesn't happen.

I realized I was in no mood at all. Not sad, not happy, not even blah. Maybe a little bit pensive but about nothing in particular.

I figured one would eventually hit and I was fine with that. Good mood or bad, I was going to be patient.

Noon came and still nothing. I went about my business as normal, talked with everybody in the office like I usually do. But when I sat at my desk, I was alone (but not lonely) without a mood. Completely aware of my surroundings, just no feeling toward them one way or another.

It wasn't until about an hour ago that I felt the urge to read some of Jim Morrison's poetry. There is something about his words (and music) that makes me slow Life down, realize that it doesn't have to have meaning all the time, and that things happen at their own time.

So I pulled out Morrison's poetry books and headed for the back porch.

The first poem of Wilderness is great. He describes what he wants his scrapbooks, which eventually turned into his poetry books, to contain:

a series of notes, prose-poems
stories, bits of play & dialog
Aphorisms, epigrams, essays

Poems? Sure

It finally hit me. My life should be every bit of these, and more. Maybe, even, it shouldn't be all of these sequentially. Maybe it should be parts of all of these mixed up to give life some chaos. Maybe only then would order appear.

I was finally comfortable with having no mood. I just had to wipe the slate clean and let new words be written without any guidance. Words that weren't even mine, words that I didn't even understand. Free form, like Corso or Kerouac or Ginsberg.

I got to the computer and I started listening to Waiting for the Sun, which oddly enough doesn't contain the single of the same name. Go figure. Other than Hello, I Love You, you won't likely hear many of the other tracks on the radio. Perhaps my favorite song is Wintertime Love, an inspirational song of intimacy sandwiched between a song of uncertainty (Summer's Almost Gone) and certain death (The Unknown Soldier). I listened to the songs over and over again, understanding new meaning, waiting for the words to appear.

It wasn't until I got to Not to Touch the Earth, the first stanza perfectly describing my no-mood day, did I start to understand:

Not to touch the earth
Not to see the sun
Nothing left to do,
but Run, run, run
Let's run
Let's run

Not running from or to anything, just running.

Sometimes, that is enough. Enough to wipe the slate clean.