You have no other choice on the menu, despite the endless perfectionism taught to you in school—a perfectionism that said if you make a mistake you are a terrible person.
Your life is the only item on the menu.
The nutrition is your own actions served back to you on plates. Everything you have said and done, returned to you. All the risks you didn't take.
You can eat it or you cannot.
and yet your own life is the only thing on the menu.
The only place in the US where four states meet is at Four Corners Monument.
I went to Four Corners as a mystical adolescent, contemplating where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado meet. There was a cross-section of kiosks there, places to buy things in the middle of what I remember as desert.
It wasn't just one location, or two. Nor three. But it was four.
Several decades later, I find that profound.
Instead of just looking for where a crosshatch might take place, it might be worth considering where four corners of our life meet. It might be a good place to set up a kiosk or so.
Because at the cross section, the winds blow in interesting directions, especially when surrounded by open terrain.
Arica, Chile in 2017
There it is.
It sits back there and assumes that a more perfect version of this moment was possible.
It's a moment of fiction.
It's a moment of incomplete living, because the more perfect moment of this specific time and place doesn't exist. What does exist is the reality of human lived experience—which, when happening, made its own way in the world.
The perfect version of it doesn't have a name or a place. It doesn't exist.
Grieve it and let it go.
This is what we have, this…here.
Note from our recent photo exposition: this moment couldn’t have gotten better.
