Get Free Epiphanies: Vol. 1

Tom — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 13:45:06 +0000

You’ve decided there’s a stand to be made, some flag to be waved, a song to be sung on mountain tops at the top of your mortal lungs, boy.

All that stuff.

You huffed and you puffed and you made a calculated and arbitrary decision that a reasonable response to all you know was not satisfaction; that you would reject satisfaction even if your best friend thought you’d chucked your capacity for calm contentment with it; that you would drag your ass and dying wit and perspective around the whole world for some small surprise, an interesting death and a mirror that would show you a face you could look in the eye.

Varkala Sunset

Tom — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 08:24:21 +0000

photo credit: thejasp
Resting for a few days during an Indian trip a few years back, on the cliffs overlooking Varkala beach, I met Katrina, a 50-ish American expat. With Tom the Irishman I listened one day at sunset to her story while sipping fresh lime juice.
In LA, Orange County, she and her husband started from nothing and became quite successful in the custom auto parts business. They had a son and it was the American Dream.
Her son was stricken with leukemia and she told the terrible story of how his condition slowly got worse until he died, she was with him the whole time and when he died she was exhausted, finished, and she knew that her life was broken and could never, ever be fixed again. She and her husband grieved for a long time and wondered: what was the point? One day her husband told her that he was gay. He was sorry that he’d misled her as he tried to mislead himself, but he had, and saw no point in hiding it anymore. After losing their son, this was anticlimax. They laughed about it. She thought she knew what her life was, now it was gone. But she was still alive.
I don’t remember what her husband did, or how long it took Katrina to find herself living in a small house near the cliffs overlooking a spectacular beach favored by tourists in Kerala, India, but here she was. Everyone knew her and over time the locals had come to regard her as more Keralan than Californian. As she made her small, quiet contributions to the community, whether it was paying local guys to help her fix up her house or maybe giving money to help a sick child, they kept an eye on her too, as people in small communities do, she said.
And every afternoon about four she’d come to the same restaurant and have her two banana daiquiris, one for herself and one for her son, who died at 21. That day Tom and I shared sunset with her and heard the whole thing, which she hadn’t told in a long time. She was crying, but as we each gave her a hug (‘come ‘ere ya ol’ ting’ said Tom in his Dublin brogue) she was smiling too at the thought of both of us choosing to be so far away from our moms, to come here and listen to her story, on Christmas day.
At some point Tom and I left. The wayward sons. It was a sad story, but I wasn’t worried about Katrina, now. Between her local ‘family’, the flow of new tourist friends and the situation she’d made for herself, life looked not bearable, but livable. She’d found life when she least expected it, and on the far side of her world she’d arrived at a place where she could say there would always be someone to make sure she made it home through the darkness if two daiquiris turned into three or four.

photo credit: eenar_6

Having Gone

Tom — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 07:02:13 +0000

The exhilaration is equal parts discovery and letting go.

Funny, because if what gets you up out of your chair is the thought of all that you’ll find and the shock of the new, another aspect of the process is a release of the smaller universe that had restricted your awareness, until now….

You’ll know you’ve made the change when you can’t really go back, when you’ve dismantled everything to which you formerly returned, with nothing to do but go forward, romantic notions unfurled and flapping on a distant beach or mountaintop.

Wage Freedom » Travel

Get Free Epiphanies: Vol. 1

Varkala Sunset

Having Gone