MOONSCAPES AND MINDSCAPES

Reposting from August 16, 2024

Love Note to Tomorrow #8 / Mixed media painting / Russell C. Smith

The darkness of the room mingled with the glow of the streetlight. After what could’ve been two hours or two thousand years, Marie appeared in the room and switched on the lamp next to the bed. Coming to in unfamiliar surroundings. A common experience during those years. Everyone’s place was indistinguishable from everyone else’s place. Black light posters. Lava lamps. The scent of bongwater lingering in the air. Hearing murmuring and laughter, I thought about going into the living room to rejoin the small gathering. But they wouldn’t see me. They would’ve seen a stand-in, a stuntman, a cardboard apparition strung up by wires inserted randomly into cracks in the ceiling. Marie said she’d be back in a while. I slid along the scribbled and scrawled-on art project hallway wall. Made it all the way to the kitchen screen door. Where the night called out to me. Outside, insects played intricate orchestral arrangements. In the backyard, I took in the full moon. Less than five years before, astronauts had first walked, jumped, and threw a hopped up on gravity or lack thereof party on the moon. One of those events of a lifetime moments. People seemed to be more consciously creating events, music, writing, art, and things to fill up the space of living a life. We were all existing within the confines and confusions of history. Pinwheeling from the moonscape to the internal mindscape again. How are some of us lucky enough to make friends with our minds, while still not ready enough to wander into the dangerous neighborhoods hidden within. Time would tell. As it does. During this time period, I was a bird molting, a dog scratching its back against a couch corner, a snake shedding its skin. There were many deep discussions about the universe back then. At someone’s house, I’d found a halfway read Krishnamurti book sitting on the coffee table. One of those books concerning life, death, the cosmos, as well as turning around to face yourself kind of books. Creating ourselves was the name of the game. Every day making something out of nothing. In the movies, they say an idea or event came out of nowhere. For some reason, I thought of this night. A night like so many other nights in the mid-70s. Where plans were spoken of at great length and then disappeared into a smoky haze. And one day it happened. My slow-motion escape was underway. While staring out the train window in the early afternoon, a feeling overcame me – knowing all of those nights led to my escape from the land of blaring sunshine, unrelenting humidity, and an invasive swampy atmosphere. After a long train ride of seeing the landscapes rolling by, reading, drifting and dozing, never quite fulling sleeping through the Eastern Seaboard nighttime lights and monuments of Washington, D.C., and rural backyards of North Carolina, lit up by back porch lights. I pushed myself up from my seat and stepped into the Amtrak bathroom, locked the metal door behind me. Splashed cool water on my face. Stared at my reflection in the water-stained mirror. It was the end of May, in 1978. The train had taken me from St. Petersburg up through Georgia and the Carolinas. We’d just pulled out of the downtown Philadelphia station and were less than three hours from New York City.