Fresh Kills _ Here I Am - Day 3

Here I am – Day 3

I call it day three but I have already spent two measures of time barely an hour or two after I have died, disappeared without a trace off the face of the planet.  I have yet to sort out the mortal details.  Is that what all this is about? Mortal details?

Does one life have to be reduced to some spreadsheet of time accounted for, borrowed from the energy of the universe?  Is there a final tallying of energy spent minus energy used wisely or energy wasted?  Is the final tally a profit or a loss?  Is life some cosmic godless transaction?  Does it all have to be tied up in some neat ribbon, a readable bureaucratic report submitted to some bureaucracy, to be read or merely rubber stamped “Approved” or “Disapproved” based on the symmetry of one’s stance or the cut of one’s clothes, and judged quickly by the glance of some bored bureaucrat’s out of the side of their eyes’ vision?

Is there no justice?  The universe does not answer.  Wrong question?

Justice is a mortal concept I guess.

Am I starting to unwind from the shock of it? It. The death thing.

Well at least there will not be a funeral expense.  No body.  Or will there be bits and pieces rendered unidentifiable by the sheer volume of bits and pieces of – how many died?

I put that question on hold for a bit (of time).  Too big and too many questions.  Don’t want another brain freeze to throw me out of the present comfort zone thing and into another sphere of reference.

I somehow know the time but there is no clock in this church.  If there was a clock I suddenly sense that I could stop the second hand of the clock – stop time for a few seconds, a few minutes, hide in the shadow of the then, the reality, and the now, the uncertainty, the abstract, the hereafter.

I stop time.  I create a comfort zone.

I rush back in thought to the white stone.  It had somehow guided me here to the present of nowhere, no time.  Did it instruct me too?  Or am I getting smarter to the circumstances of place as a progress along a non-timeline?  Time is straight?  A ball?  A fission? Fusion?

Whatever.

A jumble of thoughts.  No brain freeze.  No transporting.  Maybe just dumb answerable questions.  Whatever again.

A loop. 

Step by step, inch by inch, second by second, I replay the whole thing over in my mind.

A pause.  A cosmic breath.  An inner peace.  My first thus far in this strange place.

Reset.

I can suddenly ignore the last tragic hour or two and look about this Georgian gem of architecture.  Remember seeing it on my first walk up Broadway in my first twenty-four or forty-eight hours here in the Big Apple back in …

The strange sight of this field stone clad chapel in the middle of crowds and traffic and skyscrapers struck me as so odd and out of place.  If I could cut and paste an image of the exterior of St. Paul’s Chapel, I could land it in the English countryside with few to notice the difference of the building with its surroundings.  Indeed it had been built on the edge of a growing city around 1770 near forests, swamps, river and farmland. 

Strange too that the building survived one or two fires that burned down New York city in its first century or two of existence.  This chapel was part of the Trinity Church parish. Trinity Church on Wall Street, made of wood had burned down by the time New York was a token first capital of the United States.  With a burned out mother church, here is where the CEO founding fathers put on a public display of their worship in the new existing order of things in that young republic.  I am sitting, existing, in old George’s private pew box as I ponder this new, my own, sense of being.

Existing?  Was it all energy?  Does the dream past death – is that what it is – a dream?  Did some mind thought, its energy, just propel me here until that energy wears down, exits, transforms, moves on? Etc.

Etcetera?  A lot of questions. No mind freeze.  No Transporting.  Do I, or the mere thought of me, just fade away into the tired old paint job on the walls of this ancient structure?

Will I have time to ask all the questions? Will I have time to finish? Will I finish my bureaucratic report on the life affairs of …

There are no wrong questions.  But you are on a pathway like Broadway, the main thoroughfare.  Don’t worry about Church St., West Street, Park Place or even Nassau.  Walk along where the path leads you.  All roads and pathways lead to the center in the end.  Just follow the pathway, I seem to sense and answer myself on many question marks.

Forty. I have forty time frames, periods of time.  I guess I can call each period of time a day.  I remember once seeing the author Pearl S. Buck on TV remark that her missionary father in China loved to read the bible in its original Greek.  In the Greek, the English equivalent of the word day is the word eon.  Will I be here for forty eons of time?

God created the world in Six Eons?  An interesting question.

I am in day three.  I have also stopped time.  There will be a cost to stopping time in one place.  Perhaps I shall be pushed quickly past the next signpost.  Signpost?