“And when the going gets tough
When we look in the mirror and we want to give up
Sometimes we don’t even think we’ll try
Sometimes we cry “

Van Morrison, “Sometimes We Cry,” from The Healing Game, 1997

This song was around when I was in the heart of my last rodeo with crack cocaine. I had gotten sick and then gotten well and as a result thought I was bulletproof. I found my way to an island in the gulf, met a “girl.” We drank a little, drank a lot, laughed some and went off together that night. It seemed like we were destined to leave our mutually shared life sorrows behind and find our way to a better place. We went on like that for a while and before I knew it I had found my way back to the lost highway of my drug-laced writing and my addiction. We did not stand a piper’s chance in hell of getting out of our delusional alliance alive, and together, with our dreams intact. Crack cocaine does not support kindness for the good times gone by. Late one April night I found myself on my knees in the drifting smoke of another hopeless journey in search of peace, love and silence. The grey uncertain morning was coming hard, the light was unforgiving, indifferent. That lost highway of mine had had its way with me. I was done, the ride was over. In those moments there are no hallelujahs, burning bushes; there is just the creaking silence of another broke down o’l beast, slouching its way towards a lost grace before the end of things shows up and closes heaven’s gate.

These days I am many years clean and sober. But on days like today, grey and cold with a hard rain blowing flat from the north, there is no escaping the sense memories of those days. I can remember her laughter and the sunrise over the bay, I can remember thinking that I would get out of the hell I was in and we would walk forever on the beaches of our island in the gulf. We would watch the eagles soar on ancient thermals, and we believed that the rocks in the tide held the secrets of our dreams. It didn’t work out that way. On days like today, I will find a sad melancholy movie or tv show to watch, in which someone dies or someone’s dreams come true, I will get way too involved and sometimes I cry.

And then the sun comes up the next morning or the rain keeps blowing’ in and I get back to what I do to be who I am. I have no choice but to leave what is done behind and make the best of what is here for me to do. And like I used to do in the middle of long runs, suddenly, inexplicably to me, sometimes I cry.

Image Credit

Photographs by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

Time to get off Facebook as a political forum, me. Mo’ betta, time for me to get to work changing shit with the folks to whom the results actually matter. Social change is where you find it. For me it ain’t here. Good luck to all of us; it’s likely to be a bumpy ride.

The image captures tools at rest; the gloves imply a human working hand. I shot this image because the light from a setting sun caused the handles and the wedge to glow, as if satisfied with their day’s work. The absent wood chopper is present in the objects at rest (Giacometti called it the presence of absence in his sculpted figures). It is an ongoing story of ritual, survival, and the peace that is often a part of the day’s end and work well done.

Getting off the Facebook chatter highway is related to many things, not the least of which was my growing sense of wasting my time in useless political debate for my own personal satisfaction. The issues we face as a nation are too big for a Trump-like aggrandizement of self. In other words, Michael , get up off yer butt, go to the woodshed (as metaphor) and start choppin’ wood. (Van Morrison once said that in song about his process).

Simply put, git to work.

Image Credit

Photo by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Yeats said that. I read this somewhere earlier today, maybe in the NY Times in relation to some political commentary about Mr. Trump.

I thought of it when I went to work on this image; I have looked at this view a thousand times and never seen the “V” in the trees and the patch of light behind them. It has generally been fog shrouded and mysterious. Another way of saying this is that I made an image of something that I saw that wasn’t actually there at the precise moment that I was inclined to make the image. In fact, this is a case of seeing something for the first time, revealed by the absence of the fog. Curiously, when I looked at the image afterwards I saw the trees and the light and the fog that wasn’t there. That makes it a pretty interesting image to me. Perhaps it will only confuse things if I show y’all an image I made of the typical winter look of those distant trees albeit from a different angle. I like both of the images. That’s why I made them. I said that.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

I went out of the house early this mornin’. Way early. My first thought was that it was freakin’ cold, and I was wearing shorts. But I cowboyed up and headed down the street instead of going inside and changing into running pants; courage is where you find it. Along the way I turned many corners, until eventually – a half hour later – I found my way back home. I glanced up at the winter moon high above, realized that I had been checking it out with every turn and at last, cold moon risin’. Here I was, home in one piece, “fired up and ready to go,” as my former President used to say. Overhead I saw the geese in “Chevron Flight” racing north. I took a picture of the moon and headed inside.

Image Credit

Photo by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

I slept badly, woke up ready to go for a run, not a feeling I have had in recent years. Surprisingly, dressed in shorts and an old rain jacket, and a red Foothills 50K Frenzy hat, I did exactly that: ran a little walked a little, did the iPhone to the ear thing and wished my daughter a happy and fulfilling trip to Asia. Took my blood sugar when I got back – way too high – again. Damn it, I love this country. Democracy is hard work, more now than ever. Time to get my heart in order for the hard times comin’.

I have now gotten out of the door two lousy days in a row. I will continue down this road. Blood sugar is apparently my spiritual burden for years of bad choices and a Peruvian marching powder nutrition plan. Great for weight loss, lousy for good choices. Given the politics here in America, a land I dearly love, it is my time to straighten up and fly right as my father used to say to me. Running before daylight has always been my chosen cathedral. Time to eat right, work hard, run and pray.

Oh yeah, also a good time to be grateful for the miracle of second chances.

Image Credit

Photographs by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.