Down the road from me there is well-lit open space that looks a lot like a football field in a ring of lights. It is in fact a park filled with softball fields that is lit up all summer long and often in the fall though I don’t know why since the games are long over having become the stuff of beer fueled stories amid much laughter.

The lights are very bright and can be seen from from a great distance away. In the fall the fog rolls in from the ocean. The light disperses in the fog leaving an arch in the night air. On these nights, I sometimes imagine that I can hear the sounds of shouts and cheering riding the night wind and I imagine folks who are young and for whom the future is filled with endless summers of softball and water skiing and star filled nights at the beach.

I remember that it was once like that for me. On these nights I can remember my friend Phil and I leaving a softball game at 9 PM in a Canadian city that became synonymous with the draft resistance during the Vietnam War. We were carrying our baseball gloves and chatting about our plans. I remember that the air was velvet soft and redolent with summer flowers. It was pretty clear to both of us that we were going to live forever. It didn’t work out that way. Phil died four years ago and these days I spend a great deal of time doing what I can do to stoke the fires to keep the darkness at bay. Every photograph I take is part of the process as is the writing which is no longer easy if it ever was. Dictating is complicated because the words are sometimes garbled. I am about to teach myself how to type properly because when I am dictating, my fingers keep moving as though I was typing. It is as if they are my Marines at the point of attack bringing the words to the blank page. Sometimes I see the arc of light in the distance as an invitation to something better … a promised land like in “Somewhere over the rainbow bluebirds fly”. I have always thought that song was not for children but rather a junkies’ lament but I know deep down that I must keep writing. I must if only because it’s what I can do everyday to stoke the fire and take another step.

I am swimming upstream in a river of fog, I am wrecked on shoals carved by indifferent time. The meds are having a fiesta with my sanity and my clarity. Possibly too, my vocabulary. Hopefully the re-write is useful and on target. The other draft read as if it had been written by a crew of monkeys in search of Hamlet in the original English.

Photo Credit

Photo is © Michael Lebowitz – All Rights Reserved

First Posted At – Tarmac Meditations – Voices from The Middle of the Pack

Meant to shoot more last week…hell, I mean to shoot more every week but I often don’t. Meant to write more last week…hell, I mean to write more every week. The recovery from the strokes was hard-earned these past days; one foot in front of the other, a quiet waiting for things to fall into place. There is no room for anger here; it clouds the judgement. It actually changes the way and the what I can see. With all of this I still pick up my camera to shoot and I still work the images. Running is harder-when I fell during the second stroke I tore up my sciatic area-no wonder walking is painful-running is not yet possible for me. On the other hand, some time, some ice, some rebuilding exercises, some rest and a whole lot of positive thinking will get me where I need to go. My rodeo ain’t done yet…not by any means. Looking into the magic light of sunset, through the openings in the fence reveals the outlines of the ridge line, a direction for my eye to travel on the way to imagining the light show that is starting up on the ocean’s surface, the rainbows in the spray of crashing surf that rolls in all the way from China. It feels like starting out for the first time, like love is waiting on the wind, even as the light sculpts the ocean’s spray into fantastical carriages filled with childhood’s dreams drifting away to forever.

Photo Credits

Photos are © Michael Lebowitz – All Rights Reserved

It hasn’t rained for a while. Been mostly hot to moderately hot, clear skies, easy breeze, not much goin’ on. Haven’t been writing I guess because I have gotten lost in a circle of medications that dull me out and leave me disconnected. Had a second event last week. I wish the Docs on the case would stop using my time and body as an experiment. It’s hard on a person when the meds are “wrong”, out of balance, whatever. It strains a guy’s tolerance and occasionally terrifies him. So, no more of this shit, okay? I’m feeling like time is a clenched fist, not so much waiting to strike the unwary but a contraction in the flow, a tightening up of space between the seconds, more tension in the unseen continuum. Mostly not a laughing matter.

I have felt the need to play with light and shadow, get reacquainted with the nature of things in black and white. It is not stark reality at all, more nuanced than all of that, often gentle, sometimes open to imagination and a glimpse of dreams long forgotten.

Photo Credit

Photo is © Michael Lebowitz – All Rights Reserved