WHAT I LEARNED FROM A PAINTED CHAIR IN A CULINARY CAVE

I descended into that musty place and found colors usually attached to me, pleasantly fanned out on tables. Like I’d been swallowed up inside the kitsch and tourist-oriented design of someone who unknowingly, and possibly half-heartedly, decorated my very core into spot-on outward display. Naked in a pink chair, I became. Exposed in the saturation of it, and me. Like they knew.

The sweating water glass juxtaposed my fork and crumb, just so. The tearing, smiling version of my better-day-self expanded across the room boldly and quietly. I couldn’t have held much conversation then if the moment had aroused another close by to try it on me… or tried to know me better than the delicious cookies of playful plaid I was already beaming straight out my eyes.

Then and there, I didn’t care if I was on the chair, or I was the chair. If I were a person or a napkin. If I would become a YouTube sensation, or I never would.

But then I heard again those grey ground whisperers, upstairs and down the gravel road, inside the bowels of those pyramids where I’d just been born into something new. How they managed to reach me, even here, when about to focus on beans from a good place. Finding me like wind chimes find vacant kitchens. Like uprooted floorboards puncture abandoned living rooms. Finding me like finding itself were the goal, the persona of their finding merely a wasteful form of star calculus.

Yet in that, the greatest compliment…

For those whose pilgrimage here is for the haunting silence of carefully stacked rooms of stone. For those here to receive the messaging on and of the precarious everywhere stairs. For those who are not here with a world checklist in hand… For those of this kind, the candy syrup takeaway from a place like this is having themselves… taken away. The celebration of that achievement looks like nothing of familiar human metric. But it does normally involve a lift of face. And a surge in the heart I imagine not unlike what a pond duck feels as it gains enough momentum to rise out of water.

No matter my arrival at bliss over random plaid… I can be sure the ancient value-obsessed mental baggage of those shadows will show up again around my morning toast. I can be sure I will, again, not know whether to conjure my inner hunter or gatherer when facing them — or if those DNA tools even work anymore.

In truth, I’ve known those voices better than I’ve known the delight in the pink chair, or beaded glass perfect, or moment looking at a crumb like it were pretty enough to fill me right up. But I’ve found that just one ecstatic moment can power wash the residue of the accumulated, lesser, rest.

So filled with podcasts or filled with none, today, I am here. I am painted. I am a cave. I am even the grey whisperers. And I am joyously and joyfully, none of these. Free to love the colors, as me, or just as they are.

That, to me, is the victory of the ages. It won’t come with confetti, but it will be still.