Chaosophistication – the subtle art of change

Thom A Speake.  This was his facebook user name.

Young Thomas

Thomas was more than a word smith, he was an artist with lexical paint.  In response to the news that Thomas was dead (sadly delivered not in person, or in comfort of voice but by Facebook message) my good friend and mentor Dr. David Ray wrote:

It’s impossible to live as if one actually believes it, but there is truth in that saying “Tomorrow is promised to no one.”

I completely agree with this sentiment, living in this way would be akin to enlightenment, understanding the vanishing nature of time and being able to be “aware” of it as you live is in fact impossible. It is not surprising that Buddhist monks live in isolation and meditate all day long. This is simply what is necessary to concentrate fully on self-awareness.

Fundamentally this approach is flawed however b/c it lacks actual interconnectedness.  While it make create a connectedness with the wonderfulness of the universe  it loses a connectedness with the NOW as it vanishes, it eliminates the  grief from the loss of time and thereby reduces love to universal constant, without variance and therefore without the illusion of specialness.

For  my part I will take a middle road, and try to remember more often than when a friend passes away, that I love the friend…but love is a verb.  And simply to feel love no matter how deeply or in how enlightened a  state, to feel without acting is an illusion of a different sort and I am not hungry for such dreams.

Thomas and I use to joke, sitting around drinking a beer at his house in Home Park that we were doppelgangers.    I think the idea was that we had come from very similar backgrounds, similar upbringing.  We both had older, more intellectual brothers.  We both believed in doing stuff more than talking about stuff.  T Peake was almost 3 years older than me.  He taught me most everything I know about appreciating music, and about opening my mind, and listening harder to find the true beauty of things.

I remembered that advice well when I moved to Arizona, and began to see the beauty of the desert by looking harder, learning to see what the desert hides, at sunrise and sunset, a place full of life, not barren and harsh.

Sometime in the early 90s not long before I moved away from Atlanta, I ended up in Hilton Head with a girlfriend, and Thomas and I took a ferry across to Dalfuskie Island in SC.  What a strange little trip.  We had not seen each other for most of the summer, and ended up being there together by accident.  Thomas had brought a boom box, but left his tapes behind.  We scrounged around my backpack for a tape and found Pharcyde.  Not a favorite of either of us, but we put it on, and the 4 of us (I can’t remember who he was with) rode on this little electric golf cart through dirt paths of the island until we came across a beautiful patch of beach.  It so funny, b/c we all agreed that hip hop was not the music score you would have expected, but it combined perfectly and gave us a wonderful little time.  We all stripped down to our underwear, ran out to the ocean and then basked in the sun on the sandy beach for a few hours eating snack bars and drinking bottled water.

Not long before this trip Thomas took a Whitewater Rafting trip with his family and firends down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon.  When he came back he talked about it for hours.  How amazing it really was, beyond the normal Wow, it was a life changing experience.  “I can’t wait to go back there and hike down to some of the places we rafted by…”  I don’t know but I do believe he returned to the river a few more times.  For certain he and his bride Dena went there again to go camping this year, and after a fantastic, peaceful and beautiful trip Thomas set off on a last hike down to the river.  Along the way, he slipped and fell.

I saw this video and it made me think of him.

His Professional Profile Photo, does the man justice

Hanging out with Thomas, life was like some kind of Journey, it always felt like an adventure.  He was one of the most enthusiastic people I have ever met, and no one I have ever known savoured every minute of life as much as he.  He picked up friends every where he went.  Someone commented that he never knew a stranger, only friends he had not met yet.  For more info on his funeral and other ways to tribute to him see here.

I regret I won’t be able to make it to the service/memorial party on Tuesday, but I am hoping I can arrange to be there to celebrate him in December with the rest of the hundreds of people whose lives he effortlessly changed.

The Service of Thanksgiving and Celebration of Thomas’s Life will be celebrated at the Trolley Barn in Inman Park in Atlanta on Tuesday, September 29th from 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM. There will be a private graveside service earlier that day. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the East Atlanta Kids Club, 659-A Gresham Avenue, SE, Atlanta, GA 30316 or to the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America, 322 Eighth Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10001.