January 16 , 2020

Body

1. Thinking about final things, like the Rose Garden at Lake Harriet in South Minneapolis where so many times I visited looking for myself my past my present my future.  Where I would meet Pamela when we first became lovers. More than any place the gardens have been my home or at least the home of my secret self, my soul and spirit. 2. When I think of where I have been most happy and most sad most lonely and most alive it is there and in those spaces those trees and gardens. Pamela and I would visit there frequently and it was an odd sort of center between her places and mine. When I was most ill my desire to go there and be there by myself or with Pamela were vivid. Since I have lived here no place resonates more for me than there and in the sanctuary adjacent to the formal gardens and the graveyard near the fences. When I first lived here I always enjoyed those spaces flowers trees the lake and over time it became a magical place where I found my whole life. 3. Many of my fondest memories are there in fragments in forgetting and in my hopes for comfort and healing.

  4. The colors there in Spring and Summer are so vivid the flowers attract us like nothing else in this place. I think I have to write about the place in a more private and intimate manner at some point. But I live a broken life. My main focus has been to find my way since I left my birthplace like a character who returns to his point of origin to find his resting place and the thread of his wandering narrative. I left Chicago to escape it as much as to go anywhere else. After a brief time in Northern California I returned to the Midwest. Minneapolis was a place I had visited once and I remembered  the gardens on and trees around the Lake of The Isles and the Swans there then. To me it seemed an urban paradise. I stayed with an old friend on Franklin Avenue and we talked endlessly about art. He moved on the New York City and my eventual return was I thought a stop along the way towards New York. 5. But I settled here and my health went sour eventually I was quite ill and very lost. My mind gave out not completely but enough that I knew I was broken and that the idea of my life gave way to harsher realities. Always I seemed to return to those gardens and the bird sanctuary as if that were my home my woods my secret magical place of love and loss.  6. Now I am still here now on the other side of the Lake but still here and still alive but in my last times as my health my dreams are now more lost and found. The park is still there even in the depth of winter and my dreams still flourished but in as I wrote in a broken arc. Finding love late in life has kept me alive. Pamela and I have both suffered before and after our finding each other. But we have also found something enduring and magical. We have struggled but we have always returned to one another, we have always found some peace and some healing of our separate and joined dreams. 6. Last year we dreamed of a return to our point of origin when we first fell in love and wondered about whether we would be together and whether we would keep our love. Now it seems as if as we have grown old we have still found our souls mingled and we till can laugh and dream together. This is still the garden and the many dreams we all shared remain. 7. Getting too dreamy cold and Pamela woke up we met in the kitchen at quarter to six in the morning on this day. 

8. More to follow. Trying to remember a book of letters I read years ago by a German poet about two people one in Greece and the other in Germany. I feel like I ran away from home from a certain destiny but I so hate returning to that place (Chicago) !. But I know life is a circle. And I know consciousness is a very enduring experience. And art sweet art is lays at the center of my thought. And love takes the form of Pamela and I drawing together forever.