Filtering the Past

I received Wyatt's Deep in the Heart today. He wrote an inscription in the book, and somehow I feel his presence. This book marks a return for Wyatt, back to the matters of the heart in the land that he once fled with a vengeance.

We filter the past in many ways, and Wyatt turned his back on his past for a time, and now returns to reconstruct a world, to give it a new birth and dedication. I am happy to travel along with him.

Although for a while we were cohorts in that Texas terrain, I come to his story telling as a stranger who has travelled similar paths, but now follow them through his eyes and ears. It is all strangely familiar as though I have been there before, but also wildly strange since there is a new luster, a patina that masks the moment in a new awareness.

The journey for him is so different from the ones I have been pursuing in this blog. I often am writing of the same place, but of quite different times, a kind of pre-Wyatt and sans-Wyatt sensibility. However, this filtering of the past also recounts the special nature of our friendship. We maintained separate spheres even though we were the closest of friends. Our connection was fundamental and intense, but our worlds were also separate and remote.