A curious thing, and to me a beautiful thing, is how all of this life, and yet none of it, seems real. For me it’s a vivid, personal fiction, a novel, a poem. The days are a series of pages, full of lines and paragraphs connected by a common thread, and that thread is the familiar idea of myself, which I’ve been creating and imagining from moment to moment since I was born. And so perhaps this is one reason I never feel old. For how can I feel old when everything about my story is new, and when its meaning changes with each word and each sentence, just as it did when I was a child? And if it was changing then, and if it’s changing now, what does this say about memory? To me it says that everything that’s happened, is happening still. It also says memory is a dream. And having recorded many of my own, I know from experience that memory and dream are more than inseparable; they are expressions of the same thing. When I look back, I see more than the past. I see myself as I am now. And I see those I’ve known not only as they were, or as I thought they were, but as they are, or as I think they are, and as I am. And, just so, I see things that have happened as they are happening in me now. As I said, curious and beautiful. There’s no need to give it a label or nail it down. It just is, and it isn’t, somehow.
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Categories: Sweet Sleep and Bare Feet
Tags: Aging, Beauty, Creativity, Curiosity, Dreams, Experience, Fiction, Identity, Imagination, Life, Memory, Poetry, Reality
William Michaelian 
I know what you mean, about being incapable of feeling old.
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Thank you. It seems to be a matter of engagement and attention. Being part of everything, and with everything constantly changing and new, feeling old might signify a falling out of step, as it were, or that one has made an island of oneself.
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Perception often changes and so do the meanings we associate with people, actions, and places. It’s ever-changing and that’s the only way to keep stagnancy at bay. Lovely words and meaning. 🙂
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Thank you, Terveen. Yes, and we’ve seen that the stagnancy of being set in one’s ways and one’s views, leads to all sorts of nasty outcomes.
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Das Leben als Gedicht, als Roman. Dieser Gedanke gefällt mir sehr gut. Man kann durch die LebensSeiten blättern, mal ein LeseLebensZeichen setzen, das Ziel erkennen oder total überrascht von ihm sein.
Darf ich neugierig sein? Gehst du immer noch barfuß?
Liebe Grüße von mir zu dir.
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Hello, Edith, and thank you. Yes, I am still without shoes. It’s been a lovely winter. To celebrate, I just walked across the street to the mailbox with frost on the ground.
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