Egocentricity

Sometimes I wonder what the purpose of life really is.

I live so much longer than an ant or a dog, 

But before I become excited about that, there are the parrots and huge tortoises and of course what appear to be less sentient things like trees and mountains.

Obviously age isn’t everything, or if it is, I don’t really understand it.

I suppose biologically it could just be keeping our species going.  We do seem to be geared in that direction, living long enough to rear children until they are old enough to rear their own.  I just read about a Galapagos tortoise who had her first baby at 90 with a 45-year-old father.  They can expect to live around 150 years, but then they don’t really have anything to do with rearing their children.

There is also quality of life to consider.  I’m pretty sure ants and trees don’t have the equivalent of our books and technological advances, but then I’m not an ant or a tree.  Perhaps they have developed something more pertinent to their own species.

In fact, the more I think about it, the only perspective I am truly capable of comes from being a human being.  From my point of view it seems our species is the center of the universe.

Looking at that idea on a universal scale… I wonder.

Smile, you're on tawdry camera

On one hand I understand people are twittering everything they do in a mad attempt to be noticed and possibly reassure themselves that life is what they hope it is.

On the other people seem to be desperate for privacy, afraid that big brother is coming closer and closer with things like social networking sites and satellite monitoring systems for cars that supposedly promote safety first.

It is now possible that running a red light may be seen on film and your friendly neighborhood store makes any indiscreet action, like picking your nose, or adjusting your clothing, a photo op. 

In an age of reality TV and bare it all lifestyles, I suspect the next great turn may be total anonymity.  Burkas may become the dress of the future for both men and women wishing to move undetected through a world where every tiny action has become a matter of public perusal.

Some people may feel this totally open style promotes honesty and better living, but I have seen more dishonesty and more tawdry lifestyles in the last five years than in all the fifty odd ones before them.

It makes me wonder if we were always such a tacky species or if the camera just sucks it out of us.

I’m all for candid shots and unposed photos in the family album, but let’s keep in all in the family! 

Birth Right

Why would I do something if no one paid me for it?

What is the point of spending hours of my valuable life doing something if it does not make money?

Why not just do what I want if I don’t need the money?

We have a work ethic in this country, a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages.  Ideally children are brought up under this plan and grow up to instill this idea in their children.

It’s not a bad plan at all.  In fact, it is a pretty good one.  One that has served us well until recently when much of the popular entertainment appears to show people who have it all without working.  People are beginning to believe that there is an entitlement to living without working.  That whether you are a trust fund baby, or a welfare baby, if you can get by doing nothing, why do anything else?

I can tell you why.

It is because those wages I wrote about in the fourth paragraph are not necessarily money.   We have just forgotten about all the other wages in this world.  Remember the old “wages of sin” idea?

Some of the wages are self-esteem, self-respect, honor, being a good Samaritan, doing unto others, and simply feeling good about making life better for another human being, or being useful and just plain enjoying what you are doing.

Noblesse oblige, the idea that with nobility comes responsibility.  It’s one fraternity you don’t have to be born into.

The Link To Life

Once people worked to raise food to eat, build shelters to live in, collect herbs to heal and make clothes to protect our bodies from the elements.

Now the be all and end all of existence appears to be making money.  Most of what I hear on the news is about how we need to create more jobs, so people can make money and build more businesses, so people can work there to make money.

We cannot eat money, nor drink it.  It does not heal us if we lay it on our bodies and it surely does not keep us warm in the winter, or cool in the summer.

We have created a false god whose symbolism has grown so out of proportion no one seems to remember what it really is.

Money is only a link to life enhancing things and it is only a link because we have cut off all the other ways to reach the food, water and shelter without it.

Now the pharmaceutical companies are no longer too interested in producing some medicines, because they don’t make enough money from them.

Seems to me we are at the beginning of a very terrifying trend.

Seeking The Source

People sit in churches offering silent oblations.

Or kneel upon their aching knees, while hands and hearts unfold.

Others sit on mountaintops in holy contemplation.

Walk along tree lined lanes, each step a meditation

Or sit upon a park bench in pure people watching mode          

Even lie beside a stream in open supplication.

Tonight I drown myself, in a printed inspiration

Thoughts and feelings, some memories, in black and white so bold.

Poetry the source, of my personal transformation.

 

Band-Aids

Everything I do; I do it for you.  Words to a song that was popular some years ago, but also the theme song for nearly every parent and grandparent out there.  We do what we do for our loved ones because we love them.  It’s that simple.

We would never consciously do anything to hurt our children, or grandchildren.

Unfortunately that means that some of us go to great lengths to fool ourselves into believing what we are doing is right.  When in fact it is just easier than doing the really right thing. 

I convince myself that it makes me feel good and it makes my child or grandchild feel good, at least momentarily, so it must be good.

The acid test is not really what happens in this moment though.  The real test is what will be the result of my actions down the road. 

If what I am doing makes the loved one a healthier, more successful, self-sufficient individual in the end, it probably is the right thing to do.

If it only puts a band-aid on a bad situation and allows that situation to fester and continue growing, perhaps I am not being honest with myself, nor loving and good to my child, or grandchild.

Why would I do that?

You can’t fool the future.

"Do not go gentle into that good night" .................... by Dylan Thomas

The universe is always speaking and I’m always listening – sort of.

That “sort of” is probably why things come from every direction.  It’s not that I don’t pay attention, because I really do.  It’s that I don’t want to pay attention to some things!

To acknowledge them is to give them a reality and a power I don’t want to.

Autumn is my favorite time of the year.  There is something clean and fresh and exquisitely beautiful about fall to me.  Back to school time, new shoes, new clothes, new books, relief from the heat and oppression of late summer, I always feel my best at this time of year.

And yet Autumn heralds winter in ways I rage against.  I don’t want to admit to the cataracts that are now forming in my eyes and the teeth, which are beginning to yield to the pressure of sixty odd years of work. 

My heart is as young as ever…well, actually it’s not, but my spirit is.  I think my spirit may be even be stronger as I walk ever closer to that wintertime only the luckiest ever experience.

But my friends and my world remind me with poetry and thoughts what my body tells me too.  Time is moving inexorably onward and what I do with it is important…to me if to no one else.

I found myself singing a song, which once was almost a mantra in my life, while showering this morning.

“Seek ye first the kingdom of God and it’s righteousness.  Seek and the rest shall be given until you.”

The seekers in this world stay young, because in relation to time and the universe we are young.

Irony

In 1961 my English teacher gave us an assignment.  We could give a speech, or memorize a poem.  Despite the fact that it was an advanced class for children showing a little more promise than might be expected, I made my decision to memorize a poem instead of giving a speech because I was terrified of getting up in front of my class and speaking.

How I did not equate standing up before a class of my peers and reciting a very long poem with public speaking I do not know!

As usual, I asked my father what I should do and, as usual, he just told me and I just did it.  He was an English teacher.  Why he simply gave me a poem, I'll never know.

He simply said, “Xanadu.”

And, after looking it up,  I said, “How do I learn a 47 line poem?”  Yes, I still remember how many lines were in it!

He said, “Write them down until you know them.”

And that is what I did.  I wrote them and wrote them and wrote them and eventually I knew them and on the day I got up before my class I recited them.  Flawlessly.

Then someone asked what it meant.

I had no idea.

And that was the beginning of a strange fascination with poetry and dreams and writing that has stayed with me ever since.

 

Why

I remember sitting on a chair when someone asked,

“Why did you do that?”

I didn’t know.

Sometimes I still do things and don’t know why.

Somebody! Turn on the lights!

Once upon a time, before the age of enlightenment, when we had no other resources, we invented stories that explained floods and droughts and bad luck in general.  Along with those stories came all sorts of ways to deal with them.

Throw a pinch of salt over your left shoulder, cover your mouth when you sneeze so your soul can’t escape, throw a virgin in the volcano!

Sometimes these things appeared to work and because we had nothing else, they became gospel.

Our search for control continued and we began to look for scapegoats.  The masses believed it helped to persecute these creatures and even if it didn’t, it felt good to have a dog to kick when times were bad.

The scapegoats changed over time.  Women were bad luck on ships and in mines and during that time of the month when they were “unclean.”  Old women living alone with only a cat for company became witches.  Foreigners were suspect because we didn’t speak their language, or understand their customs.  People with disabilities were being punished by vengeful gods and could bring that wrath down upon the rest of us.  Anyone who differed from our own personal understanding of normal was fair game.

“First class citizens,” were always quick to designate those who were “second class ones” so there would be a constant supply of dogs to kick.  It’s a hold over from the dark ages.

And it’s still pretty dark out there.

Over and over and over again

Once is enough.

I always felt that reading a book once, or seeing a movie once was generally enough.   If it was bad, it was more than enough and if it was good I was usually so engrossed I didn’t miss much the first time.  I will admit to sometimes rereading and with the advent of vcrs, rewinding things during that one time.

But as time has passed I am discovering that there are some books and some movies that not only merit being watched again and again.  They almost demand it. 

Small children will watch movies, or read favorite books an almost infinite number of times.  I didn’t have that option as a small child.  Television could not be replayed and no one read to me, but I am beginning to understand it now.

I didn’t get it as a younger person because I don’t think I saw enough of the right kinds of movies, or read the right kinds of books. 

Just as everything is new for a young child, not so much is new for adults.  But when it is and when it is well done, it pulls me in and makes me feel like I am in a room with people I admire very much and want to get to know better.

That happens less with mainstream stuff and more as I branch out into areas I hadn’t really ventured into before.

If I can “get it” in three explosions or more and the music blasts me off into outer space with sheer decibels and the picture on the screen is dark and murky instead of intricately creative, once will do it.

But when the characters and the plot and the story line are intricate and detailed and layered and reach out to weave me and my thoughts in and out of what is going on?

Then I am like a little child.  I can’t get enough.  I want to see it and hear it and read it, again and again.

Happily Ever After

Once upon a time little girls were led to believe their job was to groom themselves to care for a handsome prince who would come into their lives and carry them away to happily ever after.

Most of the people I knew, knew better and really wanted so much more for our little girls and little boys too.

Still, I grew up hearing those fairy tales and there were times when I gazed down on sleeping babies, both girls and boys, and wondered what gift I would bestow upon them if I were one of the fairies that came to welcome this sleeping beauty.

As a parent there were so many things I wanted for my children, but I have to admit I have often wondered which one was the most important, outside of love of course.

Love was a given, the way in which I expressed that love determined what the other gift, or gifts were and fortunately I did not have to choose just one.

But if I had – I think it would have been confidence.  Growing up confident that I have what it takes to be all I can be, to believe that I know where to look for real support, to realize that everyone makes decisions and the better informed those decisions are the more likely they are to make me feel good about my life, is probably the best gift I can think of.

Now I am a grandmother and I feel so good when I look into the eyes of the new babies coming along.   It seems they have been given the gifts that count.

Lunch

Today I ate lunch with five university volunteers at our aviation museum’s fundraiser.  I was so impressed with these students.  They ranged from freshmen to senior and from Marketing major, to Early Childhood.

If I were to meet these people under different circumstances I would probably have thought they had nothing in common, but it turned out that would not have been true.

Beginning with a desire to help out in the community.  Each one of them showed up eager and willing to work at whatever we needed them to do and jumped in with lots of enthusiasm that quickly built into a quirky, wonderful relationship with the people they were helping.

None of them were big television fans.  Three of the five grew up in households that had one TV!  None of them had a television in their room growing up, nor did they intend for their children to have one in theirs.

All of them felt it was important to be involved in and willing to volunteer in today’s world.  I got the feeling that they thought their professions were for them and volunteering was for their community and both were a necessary part of making this world a good place for everyone.

I enjoyed my whole day, but I have to say, lunch was the highlight.

Wisdom

I come here to play.

If you are looking for wisdom, you won’t find it here, not in me.

The trickster blows the scent of a million nuances my way.  He sends me “Aha” moments by the handful.  He is always lurking around the next corner ready to fill me up with doubts and false pride and lots of hot air!

If you are looking for wisdom, you won’t find it here, not in me.

Wisdom is an excavation, the stripping away of extraneous “stuff.”   Chipping away at ego, brushing off the dust of outmoded thoughts, gently polishing the incomprehensibly rough until it begins to shine.

If you are looking for wisdom, you won’t find it here, not in me.

But if you want to play you’re in just the right place.  Take my words and run with me.  We’ll be kites flying on the wind of our own thoughts, soaring up, plunging downward, and wisdom will find us when it’s ready.

Power

Sometimes I think we underestimate who we are and how much control we really do have over our lives.

There is a tendency for people to downplay who they are, well most people, not all of them of course.

If something bad happens we are quick to say it’s our fault, so why not if something good happens too?

I am often amazed at the things that take care of themselves in my life for no other reason that I can see other than I wanted them!

This isn’t like Tea Party want.  I don’t want to change science or history.  It is more like childhood want.  I wish I could watch Jeopardy, or meet someone who likes to do the things I do.

Want Power!  One of the simple little pleasures in life.

"Home is where my friend is, and there I never go." by Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory

 
“I am so excited."  I say. "I just saw the best movie, A Christmas Memory.” 

“You should listen to the book.”  He tells me.  “I don’t remember who reads it, but they do such a good job.”

I get the book, but the only way I have to play it is on my computer and I can’t hear it unless I wear my headphones.

I don’t like wearing them.  I want to lie down in bed and listen so that I can immerse myself in the story, but I have to wait until my new CD player arrives. 

It comes and I step into the kitchen. 

“It’s fruitcake weather.”  I say.

We count out the money and go to buy the ingredients. 

He’s my buddy, my best friend and I rely on him to tell me things.  Like...

“If you get the chance, don’t watch Capote’s movie, Children On Their Birthdays.”

“I won’t.”  I promise. "I'll read the book."

“It's hard to get Capote down on film because he has a sentimental sinisterness in his style that can be hard to approximate.” He tells me.

I close my eyes, but then I say,  “Buddy are you awake?  I can’t sleep a hoot.”

I know he hears me.

“When you grow up will we still be friends?”  I ask.

“Always.” 
 

Decisions

There are so many ways to be in this world and I have only discovered some of them.

Assuming that the others are wrong would be arrogantly simple and yet…

I do know that there are ways that are certainly counter productive.

And yet, again, counter productive to what and to whom?

I suppose it really depends on what the goal is.

For the caterpillar the goal is to eat as much parsley as he can, believing it will make him a butterfly.

For the robin it is to eat as many caterpillars as he can, believing it will make him fat and happy.

Both are right.

So, what’s left?

A Meeting Of Minds

Two entities in two different universes

Totally compatible, totally symbiotic

Both better off because the other is.

Should these universes collide

And Eden take on dimensions only imagined up to this point

Will both entities survive and thrive

Or will one of them devour the other and disappear?

Emptiness

How I deal with emptiness defines who I am.

Emptiness is a strange container.

It can be embraced, but not denied.

To deny it, fills it.

Filled with anything, it disappears.

I try to keep it light.

 

Duality

I was reading about duality tonight and, at the same time, eating an ice cream sandwich that was chocolate wafer with chocolate ice cream on one side and vanilla wafer with vanilla ice cream on the other.

What is the point of putting both of these into one treat I don’t really understand.  I tried eating it from both sides and did notice that whichever side was closer to my tongue seemed to be the predominating flavor, but why not just package all chocolate and all vanilla ice cream sandwiches in a box together and let the eater choose which she wants?

I suppose they probably do that and yet I bought this one.  Well, mostly I bought it because my daughter was so enthralled by the fact that these exist in this form.  For her these are the best.  I may never know why.

Just like I may never understand the duality of men and women.

First of all there are so many different kinds of men and women and each one seems to define masculinity and femininity differently.  Each one of us really only knows who we are and even that is often suspect.

Sometimes I find it amazing that any of us can communicate at all, but maybe that isn’t the point.  Perhaps the point is only in the tasting and the trying.

Love One Another

Each human being is worthy of praying to his god, feeding his children, being allowed to love and not being used as part of political or commercial leverage.

Violate these basic premises and great tragedies occur.

They occur because our current base is not stable, because human nature tends to find exclusiveness natural.

The old, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, is really the most basic advice anyone can know if we want this world to survive.

No matter how it is said, or who says it, the idea that the well being of the weakest link determines the viability of all the others is an absolute.

Block building 101.  Pull out the bottom block and the tower falls.

Held Hostage

I went to the local big discount mart tonight to buy three things.

One was moldy and one was out of stock, but I settled for second best for both of these and then added that impulse purchase of ice cream, which I really didn’t need.

I stood in one of the two lines they had open as midnight approached and listened to the checker visit and gossip and finally come out to make a long detailed announcement about how she would have to close her register at midnight and move us all to another one.

I was one of the people who was eventually taken hostage by modern retail store policy and placed in a new line to wait some more.

It finally occurred to me that I was going to pay them for a CD player I didn’t want, a bag of not very fresh veggies, a loaf of bread and two boxes of exorbitantly priced melting ice cream treats.  And….I was going to do it in their time frame and at their convenience!

I escaped just in time.  It didn’t cost me a dime and I won’t be any fatter tomorrow either.  I came home and ordered the exact CD player I wanted, at a better price, on line.  I can wait a week for it to come.  In fact I would prefer to wait a week rather than stand in that line one more minute!

And people wonder why local stores are losing customers to the Internet.

Imagination Reigns

If you can think it, you can spout it.

It’s the new politics, the new science, the new way!  It’s a new brave world!

No bibliographies needed.

Truth unnecessary.

Facts change faster than a lizard’s color on a madras dress.

Welcome Music Man your time has come!

No Other Choice

I like to think that I am a turtle, but I know that is only a pipe dream.

I am a rabbit.  I have dreamed I was a rabbit and it fit me like a winter coat designed exclusively for me.

I am a rabbit who writes.  I have big ears and I can be a good listener, but mostly I am just a writer, a dreamer who puts into words what some people only think.

Sometimes it is my only claim to being, writing those words others think.  Writing is my only real skill.  All the others are just past times, things I do in between the writing.

I only act brave when there is no other choice.  I feel like there are things I must do whether I want to or not.   My nest is my world.   When I venture out of it I am skittery, always afraid I will run into dogs, willing to walk all the way around the block to avoid them and only looking carefree and brave because I am too scared to do anything else.

Listening

I listened for the wind thinking it could portend great change.

I listened for the rain knowing it could carry me away in a wash of feelings.

The trumpeting of the French horns and the booming of timpani stirred my soul.

Libraries and museums, concert halls and ancient ruins left me in awe.

Drowning in tears of gratitude, I never thought to listen for the whisper

That was listening to me.

Tell Me A Story

Story telling is a sacred profession.

It makes me a Creator.

I make the people in the images I like and give them words that touch my soul or fill my heart.  I create whole worlds where it rains when I want it to and sun shiny days can appear in an instant.  The adventures and words can be soft and sweet, or wild and woolly. 

The mood can be somber and dense like slow jazz on a steamy summer night or carefree and innocent like lambs dancing among the high meadow’s daisies.  Everything is up to me.  I paint the pictures, set the stage, write the music and tell you how to listen.

Because it is my story.

When I ask you for a story, tell me one that you like.  Tell me your story.

Because that is the very best kind you can tell.

Learning To Breathe

I always knew I would get old.  I just didn’t know the day it would happen.  Getting old is sneaky like that.  It just creeps up on you when you least expect it and sort of settles in.

October 25, 2010.  I’d been to funerals before, but before they were always “them.”  Older people.  Other people.  Not us.  Not the people I laughed and cried and played with.  Not us.  It was the day I realized my body had aged, even if the rest of me hadn’t.

When my mother died I couldn’t breathe for five years.  I think I was afraid every breath took me farther away.  I kept dreaming that I’d find her, that she was only lost, but I finally learned to breathe again.

I wonder if I’ll learn how not to be old again?

I’ve found a new little friend. I call him Bestest and he’s almost like an imaginary friend.  He just drags me along with him and I lift him up so he can see who he is. It’s amazing how much younger I feel when that happens.

Metamorphosis, sometimes it’s less about dropping tails and more about writing tales.  It’s about allowing the real me to change into something more whole.  It’s about breathing and living in the mystery and going with the flow.

A Portable Hug

If life is a journey I’d like to write the travel log!  

Honestly, sometimes when I am doing something I hear the story line running in my head.

Stepping out of her car in the searing heat she limps slowly across the parking lot.  Heading for the air-conditioned Mecca, only twenty feet away, but like an oasis in the desert, shimmering ephemerally, never seeming to come any closer.

And then, once I am inside.

The refrigerated air revives her and she goes straight to the aisle where the yarn lies, bins of it, soft and wooly, lying snuggled up together like sleeping bunnies in tiny square hutches.  Magical bunnies in all the hues of the rainbow, just waiting to be chosen, lying there twitching invisible noses and tweaking hidden tails, hoping they will be the ones to go home.

I reach down and pull one of the skeins out of its nest and it is perfect.  Exactly the colors I want and precisely the softness I need to create the magical scarf I will knit tonight.

One stitch at a time, fifty stitches per row, hundreds of rows, a scarf is a labor of love.  It is a perfect manifestation of good thoughts and warm feelings infused into loop after loop until the finished product can be worn.

A talisman of exquisite charms, more powerful than Superman’s cape, more magical than Spidey’s fingers, guaranteed to keep its wearer warm from the inside out. 

And then I think that perhaps this is a travel log only I can really enjoy.

Life At Any Cost

I have been watching a series of science fiction programs on my Roku box and I began thinking about what it is that sparks my interest in these things.

I’m not interested in all science fiction programs.  The ones where creatures from outer space invade us, or attack us don’t hold much interest for me, with the exception of ET.  I liked that, a lot!

Mostly, though, I prefer those based around genetic mutations, whether natural, or man made it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference.  It does matter how they interact with humans even if that interaction is a dismal failure.

I have a friend who likes horror movies and I sometimes wonder where the interest in those comes from too.  He seems to prefer zombie and vampire type movies.

Tonight I realized that we both probably like these movies for the same reason.  We’re just coming at them from different angles.

It’s the same reason religion holds the interest of a lot of less than holy people.

The idea of eternal life in any form intrigues us.

Whether it is God made, or man made, makes little difference and the fact that it may have no redeeming characteristics in the long run doesn’t turn us away.  Hope springs eternal.

As long as there is life, the rest may follow.  Looking at mankind through the ages I think this kind of irrational optimism is a necessity. 

Job

We read in the Bible about the plagues that descended upon different folks as if they were some rare and distant exotic diseases that no longer exist today.  And I am sure they are there as a way of helping regular people understand that bad things happen to good people, a way of explaining the unexplainable.

In the end, though, the fact that they happen seems less important than how people survive them.

In the seventies I might have gone out and beat a pillow with a baseball bat to “work out my frustrations.”  In the nineties I might have tried to rephrase them into positive statements about how I would fix them.

Expressing my feelings is good, but a better solution might be to examine the way I feel them.

Anger and frustration seem to be a natural response to such things, especially when they pile up, one on top of the other, but those things really don’t help in the long run, at least not for me.

Anger and frustration are like that little engine who could.  They build up and build up and build up until I am a huffing, puffing, steaming little bundle of power.  I think I’m mad.  I think I’m mad. I think I’m mad.  Until I am truly madder than a March hare.

I have a friend who sent me the following via his phone late one night:

car...dead.
Internet...down.
Ac broke in house today.
Now no water.

Boils will surely be next.

It seems to me that humor is much more beneficial than punching the pillow at relieving the tension of this moment.

And it surely stuck with me!  I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said.