The Village

It stretches across decades and time zones and continents. All the places where I have lived and for as long or as short as I have lived there are more than I can recount. As a child, my parents sent me back and forth over state lines from California to Utah. I can only guess at the number of moves I made in those early years. And perhaps the uncertainty of younger years led me to live the vagabond life as an adult.

The longer periods of time, for me, I lived in Denver. I lived in Portland. In the shorter periods of time I called Sacramento, Tucson, New Orleans and rural Vermont home. I have had the opportunity to be in Mexico City, Ansbach Germany, Lisbon Portugal and the most exotic of places in rural Colorado and Oregon for extended periods of time.

What I have learned in these places, was that each was populated with the people and things that I knew there. In each of these places there were certainly bookstores and coffeehouses and bars. There were friends and lovers or the illusion of friends and lovers. There were days and nights in these places when I was alone, because I was always mostly alone, and I was able to think and daydream and recoil and smile. I do not have specific memories but rather the memory of memories.

So many places. I never thought about the transience. It never once occurred to me that living here only to soon be living there was out of the ordinary, or bad. I know some people stay in one spot from birth to death traveling only sporadically or even specifically. I know that not everyone can live in a 81 square foot walled tent and comfortably move around. I know that not everyone can do these things.

For me, it was always like I wanted to keep on the move, and in recent years that has not been the case. I often think about going off to live somewhere and the discussion arises when and where and how long. The truth is, I like the views of new places and when they become commonplace or familiar, I tend to like them even more. I love the notion of new faces. I'm fascinated with the prospects of different raw ingredients for dinner. I want new thoughts, deeper thoughts and sometimes shallower thoughts.

But in all my life and sub-lives, I have always had a village whether it is a massive cosmopolitan city, a camp with tents or something in between. I have always had a village despite all that I say about wanting to be alone in the hermitage of my own manufacturing. Being a hermit, although appealing and probably healthy for some, could never work for me. No, the village, no matter what size is where I need to be. And of all these villages, I have remained in all of them to a smaller degree.

When a person sets out to be an artist, my case a writer, that person really sets out to find the truth. The truth about the world, the natural and the supernatural, the truth about light and dark, about the human condition. It's the process of discovering who lies within and to juxtapose that discovery on that of the outside. It's the life long study of life that has to have a context. Oftentimes, that context happens in a setting of human society, and for the sake of my thoughts here, the village.

Most human settlements have been build slowly, over time, over generations. This means, of course, that the buildings and the roads and infrastructure has been constructed, deconstructed and built again. It means that each generation has to repair or demolish pieces and parts or more of what came before it to make it new again. In a way, every neighborhood, every city is itself a living breathing, evolving thing. Certainly I have been places that are abuzz, the feeling in the air is alight with action, life.

When walking though the streets and alleys of towns, through the fray of big cities, through the footpaths of the rural settlements, there are layers of the things that men have built. In the darker corners of Mexico City, I would see the underbelly of society's basest desires overlaid on colonial buildings next door to the preserved remains of the Aztecs. In these darkest corners I could see the people of my neighborhood living out their lives, their passions, their conflicts. Through windows and doors people got born, lived, died in a single instant as I walked by. Their lives, like my own, only brief warm breaths in the void of time and space where nothing seems to really last, not longer than an Aztec ruin, anyway.

It is certainly true that any place you go you must discover anew. It is this notion that you must get off the beaten path and see how a place works, how it lives to understand it. I have been a night owl for most of my life and often still awake around dawn when a city begins to come to life for the day. When this happens, it is clear how a place functions, how all the little parts make up a living system. Beautiful. Somehow at that hour, I never felt like I was a part of a given system, but I never felt foreign to it either. I was just what I was.

In the golden glows of lamps, half obscured in shadows, the cracks in the pavement bespoke secrets too. The footfalls of generations of people, or perhaps the fall of a generation of people. On each street corner, ghosts. On each block reels of scratch paper stories. In each village, the heroes and the villains and the good people between. In each village, hidden nooks, vortex places, wildlife, civil life and the otherwise unseen precipice we'll all fall over in time.