All You Can Do is Do.

There are some questions you just can never answer. Some things that just stick, adhere to your skin, cling to your eyes and ears and brain, seeping deep within you, slipping fingers into the cracks and seams; rivulets of thought or trauma or strength or less-named things. Though, I guess all of those could be bunched under the heading of "less-named things". It's all veiled. Covered from our eyes and kept away; to obtain any knowledge of those things it takes your own hand, your own will, your own willingness to reach forward and draw that veil aside. The world is blank, when it comes down to it, but it's not bleak; it's emptiness is akin to that of canvas not the dark, uninhabited space of a vacuum. That canvas is a veil, stretched over with the less-named things, covering what lies underneath. The space beneath that blankness is a pool, an inkwell and life is simply the art of finger painting, the strokes of penmanship, the scratches of chisels. However you go about puncturing that veil is up to you; you choose to write or paint or carve your life, your surroundings, your perception of your very existence in the way that you find most fluid, most organic.

A little over a month ago I left home, flew halfway across the world and placed myself in an alien place... a little over a month ago I left my girlfriend of, now, five months alone for a span of four... a little over a month ago, I tore myself away from any place I held as sacred or warming or healing, from the woman I have come to think of as my home, to live alone here in Auckland... a little over a month ago I first read the words of Jack Kerouac, first grasped the spontaneity and blankness of the world, first realized that some things you can never answer, some things don't need to be answered and some things can never leave you... some things become you.

At the top of a mountain in the Northlands, a Maori woman named B told me of the mountains and rivers and valleys around us, about her families ownership of that space, of their connection in blood and genealogy to the very land they live in. They call those spots, those points of sacredness, "Wairua" (or spirit, quintessence) sites, places of quiet contemplation and connection. Up at the top of that mountain just below its peak, it's point of "tapu", of sacredness, I felt the peace of "Ohakiri", of that sacred mountain. Those mountains are always in the mind of the people who live beneath them. They see them every day, live in their shade, and those places become engrained in their psyche, become a part of them. So when they turn away from the looming shapes of their past, of their heritage, of their home, they dream them always.

I grew up on the Delaware; the river a constant in my life. It's grey-blue tail curving past the deep browns of the shore line; the pines, the oaks and the maples mapping out my childhood in cycles of lush foliage and bare skeletal Fall. That place, that river, has always been in my mind, in my writing. Following the river of my youth came a city, low and capped with heavy, crimson clouds, pendulous overhead; a place of brownstones and pockets of quirk and oddity. Baltimore, Bodymore, became my new home, inhabited the role of mentor and tutor during a time of blank self-searching. And now a new "wairua" spot occupies me, a place, a person, who has been with me since before my waking memory. Her name, oddly enough, matches her meaning. I left that place, both of those places, where I had pulled back the veil, pierced it and let the water beneath it pour out. I left them both for a spot where no well has been tapped.

But a thing I've learned over my journey; those spots come with you. They cling to you like those questions you can never answer; they adhere to your spirit, your mind, your physical form. Forever I will be "Delaware born-and-bred; Baltimore forged; and electrified by Edan". I come from somewhere, we all do, write about it, know your origins, those of your life and those of your "less-named lives", past, present, future or imagined. Know your origins.

Those places press on you, into and what comes of it, well that's the mystery; whether you live a life of misery and shame; a life of invigorated creative joy; of silent searching; all of your paths do not stem from where you emerge from. Those are choices you make in the end. Those homes you have, the enliven your choices, give them fuel and strength. In the end, all you can do is do.

There is one thing I can say in all surety though, of those three places that mark my life as what it is, the woman I have found in the last five months usurps all other memories. She inhabits them. Inhabits me. And I can say without any shred of "embarrassment" that she has been with me since before I was born. Before I was even transmigrated to this form. There are some things you can never answer, never comprehend... and then there are those you can.