at the moment

There's a lot to be said for talking less and listening more.

the chord

Lastnight in my dreams, I heard the sound of boundless information. It was a sound that changed me simply by my hearing it. It was short, lasting less than 30 seconds, beginning with an oscillating wave form that was oddly shaped at its maximum amplitude, but not at its minimum, and morphing into synthetic tones patterned in what seemed like the slowed arpeggiation of THE chord: some sound that contains the factual information of the answers to the questions we all ask ourselves about the meaning of life. The sound started a vibration inside of me which was epicentered beneath my sternum. I was enlightened by the sound and the vibration. I awoke to the truth of reality for the first time. It was very quiet then, for a long time: for the remainder of the dream.

deer

Wild animals are walking into my dreams these days. I am, at times, frightened by their presence. I awoke into a dream lastnight that was, as always, as real as reality. As I searched for a small orphaned kitten amongst tall grass, I became aware that a deer was walking right up to me. There really was nothing scary about the deer, yet I felt terrified at the fact that it approached me so fearlessly. Something inside me couldn't accept that this behavior was okay. I immediately assumed that something was wrong with the deer, and felt compelled to flee. When I turned to run, I found that there was a pool behind some of the tall grass. With a powerful running jump I hit the water, expecting that it would provide me safety from the deer. But to my shock, the deer jumped right in too. Now I was frantically clawing my way out of the pool, climbing out on the side where there were no stairs, using the strength of my arms to lift me out. I then staggered to the ground beside the pool, the feeling of adrenaline coursing through my veins. I turned toward the water, and watched as the deer did exactly as I had done, and began to use it's front legs to lift its body weight out of the water. And as it did this, the deer became me.

a drink that doesn't quench

Alcohol is a drink that doesn't quench. No matter what it's perceived possible benefits are, it never seems to do the job. For instance, when something great happens, and i call in the alcohol artillery to help me celebrate, the end result will be either an evening romancing the toilet, an entire night spent in the shower with a gatorade bottle for a pillow, or someone's face getting punched. There are other terrible outcomes for situations where it actually starts out bad...for those times when the drinks are called in to erase a problem, the possible outcomes include kitchen fires, drunk dialing, and face punching. The problem here is that no matter the original situation, pre-alcohol, the situation post alcohol will blow. Face punching attacks can be the result of celebrating OR self-medicating. There's no predicting what will go on after 6 drinks. I might attempt to fly off of the edge of the second story porch with a running start, or I might decide i'm hungry and cook one single penne noodle, mistaking my "quadruple vision" for an entire pot full. There are times when everything goes smoothly, but if you can't predict when these times will be, you're just rolling the dice with 5 bad sides. Those are worse odds than a card table at a casino. With odds like that, there's only one thing to do....quit playing the game.

the sound of thunder

Nearly every summer afternoon in the south of Florida a thunderstorm rolls in. The sky turns almost as dark as night sometimes, and the air feels heavy and saturated with the rain about to come. The thunderheads build up like mountains in the distance. The wind begins to blow. Animals sense the storm and run wild toward the edges of their confines; the trees sway in anticipation.
Drops sprinkle down randomly at first without much coverage. Women who have blown dry their hair dodge the drops on the way to shelter. Tourists clear the beaches and move to the bars. From a mild sprinkle erupts a pouring river from the sky. The raindrops, so large, feel to the skin like falling nails. They fall so close together that it seems like there must not be any space at all between them. A flash of lightning illuminates the black sky. One mississippi, two mississippi, three mississippi, four mississippi, five mississippi........Boom! It hit five miles away. The sound of the rain is deafening on a tin roof. The front porch with no screen is like an auditorium for the show. The best seat is at the edge of the front steps with your feet in the rain. Another flash cuts through the sky. It looks like veins made of pure light. One mississippi, two mississippi, three mississippi.......BOOM! Three miles away those veins of light have reached the ground. The sound of the rain seems smoother now. Your ears have adjusted to its constancy. On the porch, the rocking chairs rock a bit with the encouragement of the wind. The land is covered with puddles. The laundry, still on the line, is wet again.
Electricity cuts through the sky once more, reaching for the surface of the soaked earth below. The long driveway, completely coated with a thick surface of ever-falling raindrops, looks like a mirror with a flashlight shined on it in response to the light show in the sky. One mississippi, two mississippi...CRACK! The ground shakes. Two miles. The crack is so loud that adrenaline courses through your body as you feel it. Leaves have been blown from the trees, and the dead palmetto fronds that had been hanging on now litter the ground. Water pours off the edge of the roof above onto your feet in a solid, narrow sheet, hinting at the design of the tin roof with its divided sections: presumably the only thing standing in the way of the view being obstructed by a solid sheet of water.
A fierce bolt of maybe a million volts lands a direct hit on the tree in the front yard while the simultaneous CRACKKKKK causes you to nearly jump out of your skin. The tree is charred, cooked molecularly from the inside out and scarred permanently. A deep gash shows, like a cut to the bone, filleted wide open is the secret inside of the pine that once stood like a pillar at the edge of the drive.

the rescue

Co-dependency is believing that you have the power to change someone else. It is thinking that you can save someone else from his or her own demons. It starts out innocently enough, but in the end, results in putting the wants and needs of others before those of your own. That may not even sound too bad to some of us, but here's the flaw in this. If you are always worried about others, and taking care of others, who is taking care of you? How can you be sure that someone is? Doesn't it just make more sense for each individual to be responsible for him or herself? From a logical perspective, this is entirely sensical: however, in the midst of the complicated specifics of life, I must admit that I can't see it clearly. Sometimes it feels like you CAN save others. Sometimes it feels like you HAVE TO.
Two years ago, I saw my Dad step dangerously close to death, and experience a psychotic break. I dropped everything. I quit my job and bought a one-way ticket to the town I grew up in. I arrived to find a scene more horrific than I could ever have imagined; he was amaciated, crying uncontrollably constantly, and had nail-puncture wounds covering his forearms. He had a plan, and a gun, and wanted to die. I took power of attorney, forced him into the psychiatric wing of the hospital, and ultimately attempted to force him to continue living. Ten days later, he left the hospital, and came home. At first he went to counseling, and it seemed like he wanted to change his situation, but then he went less and less often to his appointments. He quit taking his prescription meds. I made the decision to move closer to him for a while. I dragged my husband across the country to do this. We lived a couple hours away for almost an entire year. He never visited, despite my constant asking. So I visited him. There was no food in the house. Only alcohol. He started drinking by 10 or 11 am everyday. I took away his ability to choose death when I made him promise not to harm himself, but I couldn't make him want to LIVE. I still can't. There is nothing authentic about imposing my needs and desires on others. It wasn't his desire, and it's that simple. I always heard a saying about this when I was growing up, but I never understood the painful implications of it until now: you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. How do you know what to do in times like these? Do you take care of yourself? Do you try to focus on the fact that you can't change other people? Or do you fight as hard as you can even though you know the truth about your limitations? What is the right thing to do? What if you are laying on the ground with your arm reaching as far as it can into the black hole, and you still can't grasp the other person's hand? Or maybe you do grasp it finally, but you know you're just holding on, because you don't have the power to actually lift him out of the hole. How do you know when you've done your best? How do you accept that you do not have the power to save someone else? How do you accept your limitations when it's your Dad or your best friend you're trying to change? Is it better to have fought your life away in battles that aren't your own, or to deal with the regret of feeling like you did nothing to help? Where the hell is the middle ground?

tough monday

Learning isn't about not making mistakes. It's about making mistakes and then taking a good hard look at them.

purpose

For ages, my existence was governed by ideas that held me back. Fascinating new projects could not be embarked upon for fear of failure. Ideas could not be shared with others for fear of ridicule. New skills could not be developed because I was not a virtuoso. There was a basic theme in my life that I lived by for so very long: if you aren't Jimi Hendrix in the first moment, you never will be. I once bought a guitar after dreaming that I could play, and realized about 2 days later, after my warm-up period expired, that there was no skill already in me. Duh. I can see how that's obvious now, but at the time, it wasn't. I was devastated. I could have learned to play guitar, but that seemed dumb when I still hadn't even figured out what I was excellent at. The search for excellence continued. I went through a degree in printmaking, and a minor in mathematics still in search of my secret excellent skill. I spent 10 years as a professional baker, feeling like it came naturally to me, yet I still wasn't a virtuoso. I took some time off. I was burnt out. I was uninspired to create art anymore after suffering the bureaucracy of the collegiate system. Three years came and went. I gave up. I lived without creative comparisons and pressures. During that time, my life changed drastically. I fell in love, got married, and moved several times. All of a sudden, I felt inspired again. One day I went to the art supply store and bought some acrylic paints and a canvas. I wasn't Jimi Hendrix, so to speak, but I had fun with it, and it felt good. It dawned on me that I was good at plenty of things. Maybe I wasn't the very best at any of it, but I could do lots of different things. In the search for my secret excellent skill I had found a lot of interests and my life had become fulfilling in so many ways. I may not have super powers, and I'm definitely not Jimi Hendrix, but I'm me, and that's exactly who I'm supposed to be.

can't give up

Some days I'm a superhero who can complete several projects without blunder. Other days I am incapable of completing even one, and I mess up everything I work on. It is definitely ok to have these days, everyone does, but I can't seem to forgive myself for it. When I wake up in the morning and immediately break the french press, I should have some clue that it might be "that" day. But I don't. I continue in denial, fumbling and failing. The more I destroy, the more driven I become. I have to redeem myself. After a couple of hours of wasting materials, and accomplishing nothing but a record high blood pressure, I am really angry. That might be a good time to take a walk, or a break of some sort, but I won't. I am too stubborn. I will keep right on mutilating my supplies until I run out. Sometimes I do this for hours. After a long day of this kind of perpetual failure, I ought to reflect on what I could have done differently. How could I have saved my materials from this assault? I'll tell you how....take a damn break. Take a day off. Re-purpose the day into an inspiration day, and go out into the world to gather ideas and enjoy life for a while.

musings on time

As I near 30, time is speeding up. It's factual. I can nearly measure to what degree it's happening. Earlier parts of my life seem like another life entirely, while the past week has gone by in a blur. So I suppose it's really more truthful to say that time is warping, and no longer seems linear. Memories from childhood can seem like yesterday while six months ago seems to be years away. I heard my elder family members talk about this when I was a kid, and thought to myself, "You're a moron, time is always the same...it's time, it can't change." Ha! I was absolutely wrong. Time changes as your life does. Time warps and bends constantly to create the oddity of forgetting what you had for breakfast while remembering obscure moments from many many years past. Time also speeds up and slows down according to how much something is enjoyable or un-enjoyable. Even stranger is the fact that we often share similar experiences of how and when time distorts. Examples of this would include trips to the DMV. Time at the DMV passes by so slowly that one visit can seem to last days: days during which you never sleep or eat. Conversely, if something is incredible, it's nearly over before it began. Examples of this might include a trip to Costa Rica, or eating the most fabulous steak of your life. Those disappear faster than the flavor from a slice of fruit stripe gum. So what's a person to do, to try to live in the now when time distortion robs us of the most wonderful times of our lives? What would it take to turn time into a variable that each individual could control in his or her own life? What if you could trick yourself into valuing all situations equally? Maybe time would pass at a steady rate. If that were true, then maybe time could be controlled even further by completely believing that you enjoy the DMV, and furthermore, dislike tropical locations such as Costa Rica. What would be the result of an experiment on this? Would you create within yourself a chasm to divide one part of yourself from another? To tell one part of yourself you dislike swimming in warm tropical waters, while knowing entirely in the other that it is your favorite feeling? Would you be able to turn painful experiences such as visits to the DMV, or even larger more meaningful ones, into more enjoyable scenarios, or at the least, less painful ones? Let's assume that you could use these tools of controlled time dilation in your favor to savor the good times and breeze easily through the hard ones. What would be the results? Would you be the person you are right now if you could have done that? I wouldn't. But some part of me still desires to hold onto good times. I suppose that's only human.