Obsidian is used in cardiac surgery, as well-crafted obsidian blades have a cutting edge many times sharper than high-quality steel surgical scalpels. Even the sharpest metal knife has a jagged, irregular blade when viewed under a strong enough microscope. When examined under an electron microscope an obsidian blade is still smooth and even. A obsidian knife is one of the most ancient of weapons, with a blade as dark as death, and as sharp as life.
As a gemstone it possesses the peculiar property of presenting a different appearance according to the manner in which it is cut. When cut in one direction it is a beautiful jet black; when cut across another direction it is glistening gray.
Sharpened, obsidian, like words, can be an instrument of hurt or healing. Polished smooth it is a thing of rare beauty. How obsidian is cut reveals its use. How our souls are cut, shapes ours. Everything we experience in our life, in some way, chisels and shapes what is left, making it sharper, or grinding it to bits.
I had family visit a few months ago and we went through some old photo albums, memories to share. The comment was made that I had saved so many pieces of things of the past, of my family. I'm not sure why. I think it's because the past has been such a tumbling series of changes that having the artifacts of memory helps me remember how each piece shaped my life. The grade cards from school, a picture of a model rocket built in junior high. My Mom's badge from the Sheriff's department. A petal from a wedding bouquet, that unwittingly survived every other keepsake of that decade being burned up in a fire. A notice from my 20th high school reunion. Things that touch the memory.
I grew up in a small logging town, one of dozens nestled around beautiful, forested mountains in the West. Ever present was the noticeable rotten egg smell of the pulp mill that I never noticed as a child, but is as constant as death and taxes. There were no malls, simply a main street, a roller rink, a movie theater and only two fast food restaurants. It was a town where my best friend and I could ride our bikes over streets unconfined and unhurried, until darkness or hunger for family dinner around the table brought us home. It was a town where you could raise your family in relative comfort and safety. Life was routine, life was predictable. You graduated high school, married the first or second person you ever slept with. Had several kids, a mortgage, a dog, a cat. You retired and got a gold watch and watched the next generation take over the positions in the mills. The incredible open sky and mountains notwithstanding, it was a flat landscape of life, and one that I knew, probably by the age of 12, that I had to escape from.
I had never really fit in. I had skipped several grades, starting college at 14. I was outgoing, yet painfully shy, and though I usually had one or two girlfriends, the majority of painted, attention seeking girls hated me on sight, making cruel, catty remarks if ever I stumbled, when all I wanted to do was to go to organic chemistry unmolested.
I could not wait to leave.
At the time, and still today, the biggest employers was the factory and mills, and the majority of my graduating class, attracted by pay an 18 year old can only dream of, were working the green chain or in the pulp rooms right after high school. It's honest work, hard work, and dangerous work. It stole the youth from your bones and the hope from your horizon, for by the time you were 25, you have a modest home, kids, a bass boat and the prerequisite four wheel drive. College and a distant city are beyond thought and the pay that was incredible at 18, required more and more shift work and overtime to provide for your family.
Life would have it's moments of fun, watching your kid play softball where you once played, watching the sun come up over the river. But, for many, it's not what you dreamed of when you were 12 and the spaces between your dreams, once lined up like pickets on a fence, get farther and further apart. And all you have to fill those spaces were a few lonely hours with a book or out hiking a walk path, striding further and further away from yourself. Simply existing, as the daily repetition of just breathing, eating and paying a growing pile of bills, hammered you into an attenuation of wasted hope and frustrated longings as dull and pale as spiritless ashes.
I visit every few years, to see my Dad who settled there, lured by the fishing and the cost of living. Usually my family meets at a siblings, at a central location we can all get to easily so I'm not there often. I enjoy seeing my Dad, but I don't look forward to revisiting what my future might have been had I not ever left.
For when I step away from his house, I don't really belong. After 7 years of college and a substantial career, I am a stranger in what many would call my home town. I'm one of the few who left, as soon as I was old enough to get to Seattle and fill my life with books and knowledge, travel and new mountains. I wasn't the only one that went, we heard about each other in bits and pieces, a scholarship notice here, a medical school graduation there. But those kids and myself soon drifted away from peoples thoughts and faded away, until we return for a visit and people look at us long and hard, as if they might remember us from a grainy photograph somewhere. No one knows exactly what to say. It's as we stepped over some invisible line in the sand when we left, and are never seen quite the same way.
Visiting Dad one summer I ran into someone at a grocers with whom I played with as a child. She's been working the register as long as I remember, and although she is as pretty as she always was, there's a roughness to her, like a piece of beautiful fabric that's become worn and frayed over time. "How have you been?" she asks, but the question doesn't reach her eyes - beautiful eyes fragile and the color of tea, the color only deepened by the wrinkles I already see around them. I don't think she recognized me either, age and life has its ways of changing us, but she saw the name on the credit card. She asks what I'm doing now and when I tell her, I might as well be telling her I was just abducted by aliens and returned, my life so foreign to the life she leads. "Well you have a nice day" she says and I nod and take the receipt for Dad, not knowing what else to say. We're strangers, and though as children we shared bike rides and ice cream, now we are looking at the world from completely different places.
I can't live my life that way, in a sepia toned existence of just eating and breathing and going to a job I hate to pay the bills for people who care as little for my dreams as I soon will myself. Waking up each and every day with tastes dulled by the grind of life with no flavor; skies cloudy with the dark reassurance that living life far back from the edge gives. Comfortable, safe, and as stale, bland and artificial as a Twinkie.
I left that life, as quickly as I could. Left in a trail of exhaust from a small airplane that would as soon kill me as carry me forward; leaving it perhaps a bit worse for wear, but alive. Flying out into a night as black as obsidian, senses sharp, and ready to jab at whatever life threw my way. Yes, it's been a life of changes, of mistakes, of tears, but it's brought me to this spot, here today.
Here where I keep small snippets of memory in a folder in my desk drawer to remember why it was all worth it. For memory feels before knowing remembers. It feels stronger than knowing recognizes. Memory feels with nerves sharpened by pain, and aged like wine, until every nuance of life is clear. Every choice you have made, laid out on a stainless steel table for your review.
In this small town in which I keep to myself, I am mostly a stranger but it doesn't bother me, as those who do include me in their circles do so for who I am now, and not what they expected me to be. Those that judge or prejudge aren't those I welcome in my life. My group of friends is small, but true; people like me, those that share that same elemental feeling of living that seems to have escaped so many.
Last time I was back there I couldn't help but notice that the huge field back behind my Dad's home, where once we hunted for shiny black arrowheads, is now the parking lot of a Walgreens, and the forested hills behind me are crowded with homes, hills I could still see if not for the large Burger King sign that blocks the view. As I walked back from the store to my Dad's house I searched the once familiar sky for the clouds that fueled my dreams and strained my ears to hear the beloved sound of a log train. But the train no longer runs along that route and I only hear the clatter of traffic.I don't really belong here any more. Somehow today, I don't belong anywhere but here in this place, now, but here, I am at home.
Would I change my past, even the most profoundly painful parts of it, knowing I would not be the person I am today, in this moment of time, in this place? A past that, had it been less stressful, might only have ended diminished and foreshortened in it's outcome. For without all of those tears and struggles and changes in landscapes, I would not have ended up in just this one spot, in just this one moment, breath teeming with promise. Alongside me in the truck, the touch of soft black fur against me, my lab Barkley, my companion. Like me, he is ready for today's play as we head out into the countryside, resting up against my own arm, my skin smooth as obsidian, yet strong as steel, muscles taut with the excitement of just being alive.
"I don't know. I'm making this up as I go."
I put a thin layer of cream cheese on a fresh flour tortilla and then added the potatoes, ham (lightly browned), the scrambled eggs, cheese and a nice dose of mild salsa.
I learned from someone much wiser than I, that sometimes the best meals don't involve a recipe or a lot of fuss, just a sense of adventure.
Besides - I don't think Indiana Jones started his day with corn flakes.
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