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Sunday, October 9, 2016

The Days of Wine and Roses

Do you ever get hit by a wave of nostalgia that either knocks you off your feet or leaves you breathless and then afterwards find it hard to stand up straight and get your bearings as you linger in the intensity of the reverberations of a single moment of a time gone by....?  How is it the ripple affect continues on even now, much later...? How can it leave such a mark?  Did those moments really occur? Or do they seem like distant dreams now.....?

I have been completely overwhelmed by nostalgia in the past few days.... This time round I think the experience of soaking in the rays of heady halcyon days of the past has actually left a physical mark...much like the sun, overexposure for sure, maybe even a bit of  'saudade' sunstroke.... When these powerful moments come knocking on my door I welcome them in, they are friends, they feel like home.... so it is hard for me to let them know that the hour has grown late....that the time has arrived for them to leave....so that I may return to the land of the present, and somehow recover from it all. They don't leave easily... You don't really want them to leave......you both want to languish and linger and squeeze every drop out of each remaining moment....

The inevitability of tomorrow's reality check always wins out, but the mind can always soar again.....later.

How can one single photo cause such a tsunami?  The power of one image, one smell, one song, one freshly baked chocolate chip cookie, one glance.... incredible!  What emotions they can trigger, even those ones that you put away deep in the closet and locked up long ago.... Bang!! The doors fly wide open and there you are....all over again.  You watch the movie again, for the 1,000th time, and it never gets old.  It reminds you that you did live, that you did love, that you did matter, that you did contribute somehow, some way to someone else's experience and life.....after all.

Those moments where the bliss is so exquisite, the pain so engulfing..... the meaning so deep. Add them all up....and maybe you hold 5 or 6 seconds worth in your hands, compared to your whole life's clock, but they are the few 'seconds' that were the most revered, most loved, most magical, the one's that almost give your entire life it's earthly meaning.  Fleeting, yet full....yes, very filling...to the brim.
These moments are part of what one poet captured with this beautiful phrase:  "The Days of Wine and Roses"

There is something that happens inside me when I read this poem, especially the second paragraph. There is a contented melancholy that haunts me.  The words are not depressing to me, nor are they by any means overly positive either.  They just.... are.  They depict well, at least for me, how I think about those particular days... simple, beautiful and brief... as they should be, but big enough to swallow me whole every single time.

                                                                                                                                                                               They are Not Long

Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam.

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate;
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
   

They are not long, the days of wine and roses,
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

                                         Ernest Dowson                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  What I love is that I relate to the poem.  I am a dreamer, I take emotional journeys often, but I can relish the fact that my worst days of hate won't be long, neither are the Icarus-like soaring moments of bliss either....Even James wrote this in the New Testament: 

"Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes."  James 4:14

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