Greedy for experience

For many years of my life I’ve been comfortable with sudden death.

“I could die tomorrow, and I’d still know that I’ve lived a long time, and had way more than my fair share of happy memories and adventures,” I could say.

Unfortunately, in the last five or six years, that sanguine attitude has started to rust.

I want experiences.  More of them.

I want to sleep in an ancient house of stucco walls, in some shadowy moorland in the Irish countryside.  I want the heat of thick rough blankets, the smell of recently burning candles, the sound of rain pelting the shingles on the roof.  Perhaps the low flickering of a fireplace if I’m really lucky, sending phantoms dancing up the walls.  A cozy, deep green and brown vision, stained with the history a million similar nights spent just this way by other souls in more superstitious times, all of them dead now and mixed into the ancient mud of the hills; into the very air I breathe.*

I want to turn back from long hours of travel, sweating lightly in weak sunlight, and look down a long, deep valley between ancient mountain walls crusted with snow.  I want to see a ribbon of forest at the bottom, with a town threaded through it, and an old Nordic church on a low hill.  I want to see this in a single panorama because I’ve risen almost entirely out of the valley by my own energy, thousands of feet upward, knowing that I’m still at the edge of a new stretch of wilderness and still have far to go.

I want to stand in a Roman ruin, pressed on all sides by a hand of heat in the late afternoon, and see the shadows cast by the fractured columns.  I want to take a warm breath and know that the dust in my lungs has peeled away from stone quarried and sculpted by human hands thousands of years ago.  I want to stand there and have a long, quiet thought about the legacy of empires, the impermanence of life, and the depths of unrecoverable history — all the stories of human lives lived and forgotten, un-transcribed, nameless. … And how I am destined to sink into this mass grave like everyone else, after my scrap of awareness flares out.

I want to pause in the middle of the central Asian desert flatlands, wait until the sun has set, and look up and see the galaxy screaming down at me from the dome of the sky, impossibly bright; undeniable.  I want to catch a long eyeful of light that sprang from nuclear fire an inconceivably long time before I was born, as only just now it arrives to paint the image inside my skull.  I want to close my eyes and swallow the vision, knowing that the light keeps coming, long after the entire planet beneath my feet has been vaporized and scattered into deep space, billions of years hence.

I want to stand in a huge open-air marketplace and feel like I am drowning in humanity.  I want to hear the echo die in a grand cathedral.  I want to stand in the mist of a hundred-foot waterfall.  I want to meditate in the square of some small village, hearing only birdsong or perhaps the sound of bells.  I want to smell the thick fragrance of a vineyard in autumn, as sunset moves languidly across it.  I want to stare into the faces of the carved gods in a vine-covered ruin and know that I am living in a world stranger than anything their believers dreamed of.  I want to encounter prayer flags in a mountain pass on some random day of travel and hear them snapping in the wind as I carry on by.

I can do anything, but I can’t do everything.  So if I’m going to do anything more, it’s time to move.

(*As a bonus, I want to wake up at 3:00am and see a dark apparition looming in the center of the room – some faceless hooded terror – and throw a bedside candlestick at it, then sit there gibbering and clawing at the air as the specter resolves itself into the shadow cast by my own luggage, and realize I may have just busted my camera, or sunglasses, and probably put a gouge in the hardwood floor that I will have to apologize for in the morning.)