My Unwritten Memoir/Self- Portrait/Manifesto

Time rolls steadily along, but the moments of my life don't seem to disappear with the seconds. They jot themselves down, notes waiting to be weaved into a story.

* The first major harvest on our organic flower farm; Arthur and I grinning in the dim glow of sunrise, quickly snipping stems while behind us the dry brown mountain banks stood firm along the cool, deep Lake Chelan.

* The Tibetan girl picking pockets at a crowded Shanghai intersection, handing the loot over to a gang of Chinese men in an alley, while I ran from reactionless bystander to reactionless bystander looking for help.

* The nurse who met my sister and I in the lobby of the nursing home that cold, eighth night of Chanuka in 1995, "I'm sorry, your mother expired two hours ago."

As I live them and then move on, moments fade into dusty filing cabinets of my memory, or perhaps onto a giant hard drive deep under the earth's surface, waiting for me to compile them into a publishable document.

A few days ago, I was in an old barn in the mountains that had been converted into a used book store. For a split second, I thought I saw a copy of my text on the shelf. My book, as yet unwritten, is so real to me.

What drives this urge to record the life I am living? Is it Art? Is it Ego? Is it Activism?

I wonder if the faithful feel less driven to lay their lives down on paper. If I believed, as some do, that an all knowing god perched up on high was doling out destiny, would I need to record the doings of my days for other humans to read?

My memoir/self-portrait/manifesto is not yet compiled much less ready for print. I have such a busy schedule of being alive, creating recordable moments, but there are other factors too that keep me from writing the text. Perhaps it is a lack of genius on my part, a lack of patience, a lack of motivation, a lack of audience, a lack of quiet personal space. But more than anything I know that writing my life down would narrow its meaning. Writing it would distill it, flatten it, tell one angle when truly the angles are infinite. It might be worth it though.. for Art, for Ego, for Activism.

Of course, the possibility remains that the thing is already written; that my steps, my thoughts, my quotations and my dreams are ink filled. Perhaps the plot is already compiled and edited, resting on a shelf in some used book barn I haven't yet happened into.