While not a question we ask regularly, it is a slightly scary but very valid one. Here follows my attempt to answer it as succinctly as possible.

We are those who still believe the American dream is to be productive and proud, in all aspects of life. We want to look behind us and see a trail of invention and construction. We want to look down the stairs we have just climbed and be able to say gleefully, “only I have done this”.

We are those who want to understand and improve ourselves. We know that there is a great a mystery as any inside of our own perceptions and experiences, and that the path to discovery is through experimentation. We are our own scientist, and our own experiment; our own control and our own variable. We are sometimes startled at the sudden appearance of challenge, but always rush towards it with the sword of curiousity held overhead. We know that we can never be perfection, but we know there lay grains of happiness within the struggle.

We are those who want to understand, and improve the world. It unfolds and reveals its secrets slowly, as we grow alongside. We see the beauty in all there is, even though it contains boundless pain and death within. We wish to impart our energy to bring light and warmth into this world. We don’t have to be seen from space to make a worthwhile difference.

We are curious. We do not accept authority blindly. We eye facts, boasts, arguments, theories and commands with skepticism. For some of us, the Truth is the closest thing we associate with the divine, and it is a thing to be revered. We are aware we can never know it all, but that won’t stop us from trying.

We are those who believe in personal dignity and respect for all things and creatures. Sometimes, these seem so self-evident to us that we forget that others don’t always operate this way. We give these courtesies to others without even thinking, and are often irked when we fail to receive the same in return. But, ultimately, we are those who will forgive, because we refuse to have our flame sputter out because of a few misguided souls. But we try not to forget, because we are just as delicate as we are forcible.

We are those who love mischievous spontaneity, and carnivals of mirth. Every day we peel back the corners of reality to see bits of the joke underneath. We know that to harvest the most out of our lives, we must vigorously apply our heart and soul. But still we revel in the little celebrations of slapstick, of tragedy, of irony, the absurd, tickling and the good old fashioned belly laugh.

And the sad truth of the matter is…. we are very few.

© Peter Hauschulz, 2009

[others]

I lay in a warm spring pool, the sulfur, steam and vapors lazily drift off the shimmering surface. The clouds are white and sharp, like holes in a great blue canvas. It is chest deep, yet down through the cracks, it is endless. Crystal water tickles the loamy sandstone, lapping lightly against jagged rocky heights and rolling thinly over oddly smooth slabs, playing its bubbly music. There are no violent or offensive angles, but it is obvious that I am only borrowing something designed for another’s comfort. Minerals just arrived from the earth’s cellar are greedily absorbed by my pores; a nourishment to the point of delirium.

I stand in a dusty old room, gray floor boards curling up at the unnailed ends. A stale overcast light mopes in beneath the slanting and broken blinds of a single window. Two chairs are pushed against the far wall; one a simple painted brown frame with two cinnamon-candy red cushions and the other a pale yellow bar stool, well on its way to join the disposition of the floor. A rolled persian rug lays against the wall, uncoiling and leaning into a vandalised and chipped coffee table, resting on two legs. Two pale ivory cups are undisturbed, one full of dark green liquid, tilting and staining below the lower edge, while the other is gapingly empty, whispering with absence and conjouring a proportionally mountainous spectre of influence. It looms over my trembling shoulders; tendrils of shadow creeping into everything. My tea has grown tasteless and my hunger remains unsatisfied. My thoughts are disjointed, noisy, and my bed unfilled.

I walk along a fishing dock, its dim sand is brown in the dusk and its air is quiet while the gulls rest. A ship departs slowly, agonizingly, seeming to shrink noiselessly and calmly. One wonders if we are drifting away from it, or it away from us. The heartache stings like a bulldozer. The throb of memories carried away by the ocean’s pulse, exalted into a waterfall of yearning. I watch the flowing sails, doing their best to dance their way off the mast and into freedom; every neuron flickering like the firebombs of Dresden. Their thirst for the wind is unmatched and unquenchable; far beyond the field of our telescopic understanding. Hordes of mosquitoes are coming from the swamps, seeming to levitate en masse out of shadows and stale puddles. As the sunlight thins, the air slowly becomes electric with beating wings and insect hunger. Some bite hard and some go unnoticed until days after; every itch screaming with a drowning cerebral howl. It is a reminder that I am so alive, and so doomed.

I dangle my feet off of the Berlin Wall, all business and sharp angles. Below are frantic and defiant acts of expression and self respect, rainbows dripping with the haste of curfews and terror. On the far side, you can see the flight of an amateur guitar bird, its neck and throat crackling with untrained soul. Its wings beat with the march of the warheart, the tectonic drums resounding to a frantic fire left in the wake of stomping legions. Trees reluctantly poke through the morning mist, their leaves still drowsy with dew and night. Like other creatures in the morning, I look around with the curious knowledge that I am but a small leaf, destined to one day fall lightly amongst the grass with all the others.

I watch the pulse of night city traffic from the mountain’s foot. Each pair of tiny white lights is a blood cell coming to drop off new molecules, before receding as a pair of twin red dots; gone to refuel and cycle again. Despite the hillside colony’s resemblance to one another from afar, and no matter their normalcy; each is a manifestation of uniqueness. No one is alike, and each is an extraordinary occurrence against all odds. Rare as a diamond in a clam, and rebellious in their uniqueness; people are an amalgamation of fingerprints, snowflakes and butterfly wings. Their individual existence each so improbable, their nature is that of forgotten beauty.

I dig at tough old clay, my trowel both forceful and delicately precise. Slowly the earth reveals clues to our oldest friends and their hobbies, scattered skull fragments and petrified corn cobs. With sorrow, the dust is brushed off the mysteries of an older life, a familiar one that we will never quite know. Our brains are too tiny, the mental doorway is too stooped, to allow the full majesty of humanity to breach the heart’s walls. In the deluge of history, and even the present moment, we have room for one and one only to sit by our inner hearth, both warm and dry. As creatures of comparison and dichotomy, there is only one that can be exalted to the fullest extent that all deserve.

I change a tire, its last breath given out through its rib cage, on the side of the highway. The sun is setting over mountains, and the edge of the highest clouds is brownish green. A sunset is an event and a word, but each one is an experience and a celebration; never to be recreated or captured. Each one is our chance to reach the untouchable and cross the rainbow bridge into worlds of myth. Colors are so large and expressive, that I feel as Picasso’s fingers felt; captivated and enslaved to the surreal. The hand moves the way the art demands it to, and not the other way around. Surrounded by circumstances so bizarre, even the startled atheist will look at the swirls of cream in his coffee, and wonder if there is a fate is behind it all.

I follow a massive vein of coal deep underground. Layers of soot and black stretch; streaming along the walls as if blown by a breeze a million years ago and then frozen in place. The mine’s mouth closes behind me with the deafening crush of stony teeth and airborne dirt. A thriving fear winds its way up the spine; a sinister snake on the vine of bone and nerves. Silently brushing past leaves of hardship, its eyes are glazed over with mystery unspeakable and its tongue tasting the unknowable. Even through the stinging dusty black pitch, he whispers warnings, ‘if it seems too good to be true, it probably is’. In a tomb there is nowhere to go but down, and misunderstanding is never far away with only the absurd to guide you.

I examine the summer’s handiwork; the farmstead’s walls sturdy and eager for winter. Upon my shoulders stands a congress of demons and angels, pensive and heated. Points and conjecture are thrown back and forth like spears, continuously hunting the elusive animal of decision. They argue the horrors of letting slip such wonders as would taunt and inspire poets for centuries. And those horrors are too grotesque to ignore, yet in equal strength is the beckon of frightful success. A conclusion so divine, that it could only lead through a shadowed and cool tunnel, to upheavals entirely unknown.

the grapes and minerals

the shadows in the wind

the song of the improbable

the majesty (and dust) of the painting

from the tomb crawls the animal

and it is she

© Peter Hauschulz, 2009

[others]