Shatterstar — Zachary Cale
#365Songs: March 11th
I’m a wanderer. It’s why I run, roam city streets alone, and walk during work calls. I can energize a room, if in the right mood, and feed off the vibe of a scene. Sometimes it’s natural, if I’m in the right place at the right time, but more often than not it’s manufactured, a performance. Put me in a large crowd and I either make myself invisible or find my people and hold court in a corner. The former exhausts me, the latter brings out my personality.
But lately, it’s been difficult to escape my own solitude.
I don’t know how to tune out the world, how to ignore the wars, the politics, the negativity that breathes fire across social media. That’s not to say I can’t find escape. I do that, too, by getting lost in a book for hours, by writing these posts, listening to music, or watching films.
But mostly I walk.
I love the start of Spring because every walk is a little different from the day before. Something new blooms, and I’ve never seen a flower I didn’t instantly want to photograph. I used to share those photos on Instagram, but don’t do that much anymore. To see a flower on Instagram is to not see a flower on a walk. And that gets us to the point of this post.
I don’t just walk to reconnect with myself, to step away from all else. I walk because it’s something real. The smells, the people passing by, the way music pulls it all together into a mood that feels something like hope. This seems like such a lost art in the modern world, where every new technology pulls us towards the screen and away from life.
I don’t have much optimism for the coming months. Too many layoffs, a vitriolic election, the general apathy about genocide and climate change, AI in the hands of the wrong people, the way tech continues to bankrupt our world to enrich a few white men.
I lost the plot and I lost my lead
Up all night just counting sheep
I wanna step out of this skin
I wanna toss it to the wind
Every morning and night the same
No car alarms just the falling rain
I swear it’s been like this for weeks
Still I can’t get to sleep
In the dark soul of the night, I think about all this madness. I think about what’s been lost and what can’t be fixed. I worry about the people I love, about what happens in a Fascist America, about those starving children who only know war, about those rooting for our demise.
I can’t sleep
I can’t sleep
I can’t sleep
I can’t sleep
I can’t sleep
I can’t sleep
I can’t sleep
I can’t sleep
But then I wake up, make coffee, and take a walk. Listen, I’m not getting all Thoreau-y on you here, but the guy had a fucking point. Two squirrels feuding over a nut they’ll lose three seconds later, a hummingbird hovering inches away, a rainbow over the hills, a thousand different flowers and trees, that whiff of ocean that lives in the breeze, a butterfly landing on my dog’s ear, little kids on bikes. In the morning, there’s always hope. There’s always something beautiful if you step away, when you look up, when you let yourself forget for a brief moment.
I could’ve been a hundred men
I could’ve learned just how to win
But I was born with a one track mind
I take it one day at a time
Across this room, across your face
Every teardrop drowns this place
I couldn’t stop it if I tried
There’s an ocean in those eyes
I often think about my kid, who was six when Trump became President, that clear moment when American life cracked in two. Since then, it’s been one thing after another. For him, for that generation, for anyone who only knows the way things are now, it’s on us to paint another picture. To wake up and walk towards and not away from the chaos, to do what we can to show a glimpse of what could be.
I try to remind myself that it’s okay to be sad, to be scared, to search for meaning in the dark hours of night. That it’s okay to be angry, and ranty sometimes. That’s how we resist apathy. It’s even okay to lose sleep sometimes. As long as waking up means walking into the new day with eyes and ears towards the abundance of beauty that still does exist.
