Cratering in Craters of the Moon

And here's a picture of me falling on my head. Talk about metaphors -- it could go either way really: knocking sense "into", knocking a bad idea "out of." Like most idioms of conventional wisdom, they largely come in pairs. So I wonder which it was. Yes, I apparently snapped this photo in flagrante delicto while the rest of me was forming a perfect whale-like breaching and graceful pirouette, head first, into lava. Yes, it hurt. And yes, hardened lava (because that's the only kind I'll walk upon) is peculiarly abrasive. And yet: it was one of the best days of my life. As Spaulding Gray says in his performance piece "Swimming to Cambodia", life is about an assembly of perfect moments, if you're lucky enough to get them.

Despite the injury, or perhaps in spite of it, or maybe even because of it, I was knocked into the moment in a way otherwise inaccessible to me, and the moment became clear.