Thirty-Four Elephants

"Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm." --Publilius Syrus I spend an excessive amount of time firming the narrative of my life.  If I believe anything, it is that purpose gives the details meaning. My details, you see, are scattered.  For a while, it has been a slow leak.  Drip. Drip. Drip.  Then one event crashed through the dam and my details are spraying, like a geyser, all over the wilderness.  Can you imagine trying to stop Old Faithful?  Can you imaging wanting to stop Old Faithful? Perhaps I am a park ranger, sent here to tend to a natural phenomena.  I observe.  I take furious notes, capturing every detail.  The sun sets and I leave at day's end.  The geyser erupting, out of control, but now alone. Perhaps I am a tourist, come for the day.  I read the signs, "Danger" and "Stay back".  For ten minutes, I drink in the beauty with my eyes.  I let little puddles of water build on my poncho.  I l...

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all."   --Helen Keller Life is a tricky thing.  It is easy to find the extremes (too much, too little) but takes a great deal of practice to hit the sweet spot. Travel seems to help.  It gives you enough distance from your daily life to have perspective.  From 30,000 feet everything looks like a Monet.  Beautiful, but longing for definition. Travel, the act of being away, is communion for me. It awakens my sense of self, a beast I cage everyday to survive.  And that is just it, I am surviving. In the long game, survival is a beautiful thing.  It is a gritty, desperate enterprise.  But survival deserves a foe.  What is it that I am surviving?  A life?  Is life the foe? See this metaphor shines light on a truth that is too bleak for most.  We must introduce creation.  I believe artists create their way out of surviving life.  So here I am, back....

“There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.” --Albert Schweitzer She left us.   Yesterday.   At 5:30 pm.   I tried to be late to the appointment.  My hands shook as I took the final turn into the lot.   It was the end of 16 years.   Words' failures reek when you try to explain grief.  It's like feeling your insides sucked out through a plastic straw.  That cat was made of love.  Her magic was that she shared it with us all.    Goodnight, Bella. We love you.  

I am too huge for love. No one, male or female, has ever dared to approach me. They are afraid to scale mountains.  --Jeanette Winterson , Sexing the Cherr y So the latest in my reading buffet: Sexing the Cherry and The Powerbook, both by Jeanette Winterson. You may be sensing a pattern here. I trust Winterson, as an author, to indulge me in the fantastical, if it be only in the manipulation of metaphor. But sometimes it is much simpler - sometimes she simply writes me: "I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow down my intent I expand it, and yet those straits and canals still lead me to the open sea, and then I realize how vast it all is, this matter of the mind." While there are often false starts in what can only be called Winterson's fau...

"Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from our home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere." --Jean Rhys In the past few months I've rediscovered reading. Like most things I used to expect too much ... not of reading but of myself. I read or only wanted to read non-fiction books - books that promised to make me smarter. Books that when you mentioned them at gatherings people like myself thought, "Oh I don't know anything about that. " But reading, much like running, needs to be a personal endeavor. The moment you start the comparison is the moment you lose the joy. This a hard fact for me to swallow - at least the part of me that is a competitor. But, I'm striving to do things more because I love them rather than because they help me compete... "What could I do? My needlework teacher suffered from a problem of vision. She recognised things according to expectation and environment. If you were in a particular p...

"If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things."   -- Albert Einstein Albert Einstein, a physicist (yes, I agree this is too narrow a definition), is often tied to his discoveries which are most rooted in science and cold logic. That is why it always seems most brilliant when I come across a quote, a picture, a moment where Mr. Einstein is lost in imagination, philosophy, and the grandeurs of life that often defy pure logicism. It's not that these things can't or don't coexist - but rarely does one person live simultaneusly in both worlds. The body and the mind - symbiotic - both driving the other to see more. I hope that I can learn to draw on all parts of my sense to see and to know. We too often throw off ways of knowing simply because they are untested or unrecognized by others. I would love to trust all the bits of me - bodily/mentally/and otherwise. But back to Einstein - I have often tied my happines...