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Fundamentals


by Deborah Oster Pannell


You can have two threes, or three twos. I hear the beat both ways. It goes back and forth in my head, like magic, transforming from one to the other and back again. And I am learning the basics of music theory, and painting geometric shapes with primary colors. I am looking at light through a prism. And remembering dark, shadowy figures at night. And I am open, or closed, forced or free. Back and forth, from yes to no to yes, no, yes, no, and back again. I am breaking things down into their smallest parts, parts of me, parts of the universe, the elements, the building blocks, my tools, my future, my songs, my pictures, my dreams.


My love. Is real. I have loved and lived with love, and lost love and gained new love. I have shared love in so very many directions. I understand that love is vast, but always the wavering, the back and forth, the wondering if it will go this way or that. Will I lose? Will I win? What will be given, and what will be taken? Will the timing divide this way or that? Can I really make it change back and forth at will?

Oh yes, it is my strength to see things as I wish. I want to believe, and therefore it is. I shape my memory out of the needs of my future, the horrors of the past. I remember that which will help me to go forward, two or three steps at a time.

I look at my son's face, sleeping. He has a half smile on his face, where I see his father, and his grandfather. I see their lives, their deaths, the purity of their existence and all that remains of it, living, breathing on his soft skin. I see his past, the baby that he was, and the man that he will become in the future, and poised between is us, now, skating in now, without control, with some measure of balance, but we could fall, and I imagine awful, terrible things sometimes. Tragic outcomes, horrible accidents, and I think that I should redirect my thoughts, because they are so powerful.

I have loved. I have lost. I have gained new love. There is no end to the giving and receiving. It keeps on flowing around me and through me, and I must choose to embrace it and feel it, or repel it. I want to organize it around me in patterns, replicate the patterns endlessly to everyone I know, and then connect the dots to everyone else, until everyone is joined in a big patterned connection of love, repeating itself endlessly.

I want to create the biggest show of love on the planet, to hug it, to heal it, to save it, to make the haters disappear and just leave a big wave of love lapping at the world's toes and making it happy and safe. But the vibrations continue, the wavering, back and forth, two to three and back to two and three and two, three, two three, endlessly rolling over the hills of time.

And all that remains is the lone voice. I want this. I need that. You are so beautiful. Yes I am. And we kiss. Yes, sometimes it is just that simple.

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