An Empty Room

Ramblings from last year ....
I am home again, again. It feels different every time. Outside tonight it is darkening. I have in front of me a glass of red wine, some blood red tulips sit on my desk. An old painting of some quietly pink orchids sits behind them. In the living room plays Dadawa, world music at it's best, at it's most soul opening. Sadly, it makes me want to take acid.

Here I am, sitting in another room, in another house, on another part of the earth. It doesn't really matter where the room is, I always feel as equally at home and not at home, as familiar and as alien.

My friend Mike wrote a poem about a lone person standing in a room which is empty. I imagine that the room is made of wood, wooden floors and walls painted white, without any decorations at all. Like Jackson Pollock's house on Long Island. But this one, the one in Mike's poem as imagined by me, looks over the ocean. Sits up on a hill and I imagine the lone person, whose face I never see because their back is always turned to me, looks out an open window to the ocean. And I imagine this person, this way, forever, in this empty room.

I think it says something about me, about the way I think. I can feel the wind coming into the house off of the ocean far below, a cold wind that channels in and touches all the empty places of the house. Moves the hair of the person standing at the window, who never moves. It's probably me, but it looks like Mike from where I am standing. I told Mike about this, and he said something which I hadn't pictured in my version of the poem. He said something about the room being furnished over time, with the things that you bring into your own life. I had imagined it coming from more of a zen point of view, as in not needing anything and in the essential truth of aloneness.

What he said gave me faith, because I think that the way I pictured his room, is the way that I picture myself. Alone. Eternally unmoving, unchanging, the wind making sure of it.

So, now that I am home again, I struggle to furnish the room of my life. I think about what I could possibly decorate it with, and nothing seems to feel right.