ADIOS O.S.!

What?
Everybody else is doing it!

Besides, it is not entirely untrue.  Tomorrow morning I am driving my 19 year old daughter to Scottsdale, Arizona from Kansas City, Missouri in her tight little black Nissan.  She is going there to attend Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Institute having decided against Nuclear Physics as a career and opting for that of Pastry Chef instead.  For the next fifteen months she will be sharing a two-bedroom apartment with three other female students.   I am slightly concerned for their mental well-being.

Am I a bad mother because I am looking forward to an empty nest?

We've already shipped five boxes ahead to my brother and sister-in-law's home in Scottsdale, but I am quite certain that she plans on transferring the remaining contents of her room into her compact car insisting that the trunk is MUCH bigger than it looks.

I already have that familiar gastric knot in my gut in anticipation of the histrionics that will ensue once she realizes that lampshades are not collapsible and it probably isn't a great idea to strap an oversized, stuffed platypus to the roof no matter how many childhood memories it holds.

Once we arrive, it will be fine.  It is the three-day road trip that has me worried.

Out of my three kids, this one is my toughest critic.  She is bright, beautiful, energetic and independent.  She also contains enough moxie to easily run a small country and has the genetic disposition of her father in that she does not suffer fools lightly.

According to her subjective inventory, I hover in ranking somewhere between one and three.  I don't know exactly who occupies the number one and three slots, but my guess is that number one is most people in the world and three, everybody else.

But I have to give her credit.  The girl knows what she wants, who she likes and almost always has a well-thought out plan as to how she will get wherever it is she wants to go.

Up to this point, that usually involved heavy emotional and financial investments from her father and I, but we take it in stride as part of our job description.

In any case, I've noticed that it is deemed routine to alert those among the OS Crowd who care of any departure that might be regarded as permanent or otherwise lengthy, and since I have no backbone, I'm just following suit.

I am assuming that two weeks is considered lengthy.

If I am wrong and won't be missed for such a brief period of time, can we please pretend I never wrote this?  I've got enough self-esteem issues as it is without adding conjectural hubris to the mix.

Hopefully, I will still find it possible to check in every now and again while I'm away. I will be staying with my parents, whom I don't often see since moving to Kansas City five years ago, and want to spend quality time with them; time when I am not otherwise obsessing about what to write for OS and fretting about whether or not I've read and commented on as many of my favorites as possible.

I don't know that I can go cold turkey, so my laptop is coming with me and I've scanned a bunch of old drawings that I can throw up on my page from time to time just so I won't be forgotten.  I don't want to have to start over here, and I don't want to miss out on any news from my OS friends and the stellar writing I've come to count on to color my days.

For the next three days, however, I will be on the road.  I am trying to conceive of it as being a non-violent, non-sexist exploration and bonding opportunity aka Thelma and Louise, which we rented and viewed together the other night.  (No way would I ever let this kid anywhere near a firearm.)  If Mussolini and Eva Peron had a love child, I'm quite certain my daughter would still scare the hell out of her.

So, off we go!  And if I fail to resurface on OS after couple of weeks, please send a search party to the desert Southwest, as it is a certainty I'll be tied to a cactus somewhere, likely also bound to an over-sized, stuffed platypus.

RE-RUNS

Tried and True

Amazing Grace

Opening portals

Just to taste

Forbidden fruit

Behind closed doors

What's done is done

For rich or for poorer

Life is for living

Tomorrow can wait

A watched pot won't boil

The hour is late

With heart in my hand

I'll keep truckin' on

To reach for the stars

To sing a new song

The bigger the better

The harder they fall

I can't live without you

Just give me a call

Tomorrow's a new day

But heaven can't wait

Just call if you need me

I'll be home by eight

The clock on the wall

A bird in the hand

A babe in the woods

A small grain of sand

If ever you need me

I'll be by your side

And into the sunset

Together we'll ride.

a poem for K.

The Writes of Passage

There is too much to question in this world to ever arrive at a perfect understanding of why we are here, and if we spend all of our time in myopic traction doting on those larger questions, we are bound to miss the point.

Answers to big questions are almost always found in small and benevolent movements.

They seldom come in thunderbolt revelations and almost never gift flawless enlightenment.

They may inspire but rarely are they able to sustain an unabated and life-long transformation.

Answers to our questions are going to be flawed by our interpretation because we are flawed in our constitution.

When I posed the question, "Why Blog?" the comments from everyone were just as subjective and individualized as each person is themselves.

Obviously, we blog because we like to write.  Some aspire towards publication.  Many have already achieved that honor, but we write here because of a desire to measure our worth against the crowd and gauge the impact of our efforts by their response.

We blog because we don't want to be alone, which is something that can happen whether you are surrounded by a bustling family, living in a frenetic city or town, or working in a vibrant office.

We blog because we have things we want to say and wonder if others might share in our perceptions.

We blog because we want to belong.

Soon, if we are paying attention at all, we realize that this is not a vapid exercise.

Is it narcissistic?  Of course.  But so is our daily preening.  We put on makeup, shave our beards, iron our shirts, wear hats, pretty dresses, variegated ties, and classy shoes.

When we look to another and smile, we hope to receive one in return.

Saints and sinners alike have the sublimely self-indulgent characteristic of caring about themselves as well as about how they are regarded by others.  It is called being human, and it is a noble calling.

There is an ineffable fabric of both kindred and disparate hearts that becomes embellished with deeper colors and unpredictably salient hues every time we step out from behind our cluttered lives and the deep tread of our personal inhibitions and apprehensions to write and to share our thoughts with people whose names and faces we may never know but whose hearts are often as present to us as our own.

It is a pure connection, this blind alliance.   We are not distracted or disturbed by appearances, by political or sexual orientation, by race, creed or color; by economic or cultural classifications or by ability.

Yet we despair when we read that someone's dog has been hit by a car or another is longing for a peace she cannot find in an abusive home.

We cheer when strides are made in the life of a writer  whom we know is struggling with depression and laugh in conspiring delight when one calls us all out into the unflinching light of clean parody.

It is not by accident that we are here or that we glance off one another's posts like stars caught in the pool of gravity.  Nothing is random in the universe and certainly not in this microcosmic literary reflection.

We may have originally come here in an effort to understand ourselves and to find our own voices, but we soon learn that the only way we can truly accomplish that is by finding each other and listening to those voices.

And while ratings and popularity and Editorial Picks provide the occasional high-five towards our human endeavors, the nod most worthy is the one we get from those lives we have touched; the ones we have reached out to and supported; the ones we have rallied around; the ones we have commiserated or laughed with;  the ones we have said goodbye to or welcomed back.

It doesn't matter whether two people read our post or two thousand.  If we trust that whomever is brought to us is exactly the person or people we are supposed to touch that day, then we are already ahead of the philosophical curve.
 
We are employed by a firm quite apart from this terrestrial warehouse whose purpose I doubt we will ever fully comprehend while tethered to this mortal outpost.

If we can sustain that kind of faith as we write your soul to a better place, then we know why we are here.

In our thoughts, we are always alone.  In our hearts, we never are. 


So, in the end, we blog because we can.  But we stay because we care.

Thoughts

"We don't see the world as it is.  We see the world as we are."
                                        - David Lewis Anderson

That is one of the most profoundly liberating quotes I have ever heard.  It originated from the mind of Space/time physicist, David Lewis Anderson, as I heard him discuss it on a radio show several months ago.

To fully comprehend the breathing potential this implies is staggering.

It tells us that the gold standard for sentiency does not lie in the 'out there'; in the functional, linear backdrop of our objective reality, but rather that all that is emanates from all that we are.

It tells us that there is no division apart from what we choose to regard as different, as other.

It tells us that there is no existing plan for perfection apart from the one we feel the need to implement.

It tells us that the color of love is every color and that the presence of hate is seeded in our shadow side; our unexamined bitterness, envy, sloth, judgement and resentment.

It tells us that we are not the oppressed, the victims, the captives.  It tells us that we are the liberators.

As long as I can remember, I've been attempting to drive home to my, now adult, kids that the only thing we have any control over in this life is our ability to respond to it.

 We can choose to see ourselves as hapless victims of an overwhelmingly brutal outpost of celestial consequence and respond to life with reactive bitterness or fear limiting our capacity to love, or we can willingly embrace the nature of a presence beyond time and know with unquestioned certainty that whatever we face in this earthen crucible of grace is truly a gift; one provided to refine and to transmute the husks of human dross into the flaxen gold of impossible love.

My father has always advised me to let go of retributive emotions.  He warned me against 'burning my bridges' because you never know if you might need to cross them again and you can't ever be fully aware of the hurt and injured you might have left stranded on the other side.

I see all these principles as one.  It is one that speaks in the faint tongue of conscience to the often proud enterprise of the soul and it says,  "Love, forgive, and let it go."

On my best days I hold these admonishments so close to the hub of my fallible humanity I can fairly taste their transformational pallor.  On my worst, I linger too far outside myself to appreciate anything beyond apathy and confusion.

Most days are somewhere in the middle:  caught between the pressing and peevish clamoring of my pedestrian sensibilities and the cloying persuasion of my human desires and the intractable insight of a divinity within me that begs no introduction yet is too often left unaddressed.

But the larger quest continues.  I suppose that one day I may come close to grounding logic in sacred thought, but for now I just get up each morning and hope to end the day having left better moments in my wake.

I don't have anything else to say for now, but I'm not done thinking......  Don't change that dial.