“The moments of our life are not expendable,
And the [possible] circumstances of death are beyond
imagination.
If you do not achieve an undaunted confident security now,
What point is there in your being alive…………”
pg 9 The Tibetan Book of the Dead
I just wrote the other day how being insecure in my understanding of reality was the one thing that pushed me to truly question whether life was worth living at all. You can find my trail of thinking if you follow the link below.
When I was at my lowest point what it came down to was my family. My children and Ben are the ones that I couldn’t live with out. I know it’s not healthy in a way but that is the way it is. They tether my feet to the ground and they give life–color and meaning. My connection to them is deeper than that really. I’m not sure how to put it into words.
I want to be strong for them and for me. It may sound flattering to be the one that is holding a person on the earth but I think it’s a huge weight to carry.
I had a boyfriend tell me once that I didn’t have confidence in myself. He literally pulled me aside in one of the hallways in college and looked me straight in the face to tell me the news. It felt as if he had ripped a layer of my skin off and left me naked. I could see clearly for a moment the one major thing that was holding me back from everything.
Undaunted confident security-how much better life would be with that.
My lack of confidence in myself and my lack of trust that everything will work out finds its root in my ability to torture myself with thousands of random catastrophic thoughts of what may happen in any given situation.
I was reading in Stephen King’s “Danse Macabre” last Monday. He talked about how imaginative people live in a lot of fear because they can imagine many ways for things to go wrong. This is me in a nutshell. I’ve never put a label of imagination on the never ending trails of terror that my mind travels down for just about every aspect of my life. This is probably why if I don’t write or access some sort of creative outlet I’m not in a good place at all.
“…the circumstances of death are beyond imagination.” All outcomes are beyond my imagination. Doesn’t mean I can’t imagine them but I need to stop taking what I imagine so seriously?
So I suppose what I want is to be able to boldly live life. Now I need to figure out how to do this. How powerful are thoughts? What would happen if I were to turn my mind down another path, one not so filled with terror? Would it hurt to try, to let go of the fears that grip my insides like a vise. Just as an experiment. Temporary. I could always go back to torturing myself tomorrow if I need to.
“How needing of compassion are those who are skill-less,
Those who are tortured by ignorance and past actions,
Those who indulge in actions conducive to suffering-
Even though they desire happiness!”
pg 10
Maybe the start of a more positive outlook on life comes from compassion, especially for ourselves. We all do things that brings us unhappiness and stress. I think too when we show compassion for other people we are taking a giant step in helping them see how they can be more loving with themselves. Then maybe instead of living in viscous circles of pain our compassionate actions will stop the negative cycle and spread joy like wild fire from one human connection to the next.
“Start with what you know, then re-invent it. Art is magic, no argument there, but all art, no matter how strange, starts in the humble everyday. Just don’t be surprised when weird flowers sprout from common soil.” Stephen King Duma Key—How to Draw a Picture (IV)
Below are three stories two drawn from my real life and another completely made up but born from tiny seeds of everyday life.
My First Real Kiss (real life)
When I was 14 I had a desperate crush on a boy. He was a stoner, which for some reason made me like him all the more. Around that time I had a really fuzzy dream about kissing someone while sitting on the ground somewhere. It wasn’t so much what was in the dream that made me remember it and deem it important but it was how I felt in the dream. I felt amazing.
A short time after the dream I finally had the opportunity to talk face to face with this boy. We happened to find ourselves sitting next to each other, on the floor, at my friend’s house. He kissed me and oh my gosh that dream was nothing compared to what it felt like to be in his arms. Butterflies fluttered up and down my body from my toes to my head.
After we finished kissing he gave me an Ozzy Osbourne pin. I kept it and still have it tucked away in an old jewelry box. We started dating. I self-tattooed his initials into my leg. When I went to visit my dad for two weeks in the summer he broke up with me for a 17-year-old with boobs. I was crushed for at least two weeks.
The Pin (fiction)
We were 14. He reached out his hand to mine. I stared at it. I knew his rings well but I hesitated. I stood there frozen. The train tracks were just feet away. We were alone back packs full of food, water, and clothes. He turned completely to me. I turned to him. He took an Ozzy Osbourne pin off of his shirt. I looked down at it. He held it in his hand. His older brother had given it to him. It meant more to him than a pin should and there he was giving it to me. I slowly reached for it turning the tears back down my throat. “Are you sure?” I asked.
He stared at me with those eyes that haunt me still. Pain had been so much a part of his life that his pupils seemed to pulsate with a beat of something that no one would ever understand. This offering I knew was more than he had ever given. I reached out and brushed the tips of his fingers with mine. Just as we touched he clamped his hand shut around the pin. Was that anger that just passed across his face or fear?
Then he brought his fist up to his lips and slipped the pin into his mouth. He smiled with his lips smashed shut. He looked playful. The fear that had been pounding around in my heart ever since we had decided to take our journey together started to unwind. I looked up into his face, stood on my toes, and pressed my lips up against his. He took my hand in his and using his tongue he pushed the pin into my mouth.
I didn’t sleep well again last night. I’ve had this disturbing question running through my mind. Am I the only one who feels that the true understanding of reality is impossible? The more I skim the surface of physics, biology, chemistry, psychology ect… The more I realize that there is so much more out there that our puny little minds don’t grasp and from what I can see are incapable of grasping at this stage in our evolution. I think people find comfort in believing in certain things and maybe that is the best way to be but… What happens when you just can’t believe? Are some people better able to handle the uncertainty than others? Am I one who needs a belief system?
I’ve been reading in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I’ve mostly only read in the introduction and the glossary so far. Today I understood, from what I read, that only through understanding the true nature of reality will we be released from suffering.
I can see this as being true but is it possible in our life time or do we try to understand and grow as much as we can and accept the suffering that accompanies being a human with limited senses and brain capacity?
The other morning I stood in my bathroom with a huge weight in the pit of my gut. I was uncomfortable. Not because of something I ate but maybe a little bit due to the fact that I have been up every night this week at 2am not being able to fall back asleep.
I used to be comfortable with coincidences, in fact I thrived on them. They gave meaning and structure to life and often proved to me that as small and insignificant that I am there was a god who loved me and paid attention to me. Since then I’ve lost my faith in a solid male god.
However, I’ve traveled down other roads of belief.
Two weeks before I learned that my step father was dying of pancreatic cancer I read a random book about vampires. The main character in the book was a young girl who learned after becoming really ill that she would be dying soon of pancreatic cancer. The first few chapters gave detailed information on the disease. Like my stepfather she thought it was her gallbladder that was giving her trouble. So when my stepfather told me the horrible news I had a tiny bit of knowledge under my belt that acted like a pin prick of light in a darkness so thick that it would take me more than a year to pull myself out.
My stepfather’s quick and painful death knocked me on my butt, took the wind out of me, and changed the way that I viewed my world instantly.
That one thing, reading that book, opened a door. I hadn’t thought about tiny little coincidences being anything other than random things for a long time. But this one thing was too much. It was uncomfortable. I came to the conclusion that maybe just maybe there was a universal force out there and that maybe the coincidence had something to do with the strangeness of time. Maybe when something so huge and significant happens in our lives time folds in on itself, gosh who knows? I decided to feel loved and just a little bit less uncomfortable. Since then I’ve lost my faith even in that.
That one tiny coincidence has multiplied itself by a thousand at least. Am I looking for things like I used to when I was Mormon? I remember opening the bible or the Book of Mormon up at random and reading a scripture. More often than not the scripture fit my situation and emotions perfectly. Much like a daily horoscope sometimes sounds way too familiar to my own situation.
In the past when strange coincidences would work towards some awe inspiring moment I was totally comfortable with that because I believed in a god that paid attention to those things.
Since then not so much. So yesterday as I stood in my bathroom I was uncomfortable with all of the coincidences that seem to have bombarded my life over the last year. Yesterday I was reading in “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” A Buddhist text. I was trying to understand what dualising consciousness means. I randomly opened up the book and holy crap I landed on the pages that discuss this topic. I started flipping through the book to find out how common this term was and couldn’t find it any where. Well poop. That book has over 500 pages in it.
Here’s a movie I found on Dooce.com called “Two Men”.
If that was the only coincidence I would be fine but it’s not and so I’m uncomfortable.
However, I refuse to just blindly grab a belief to make myself feel better. Over the last year I’ve been grasping and pulling trying really hard to understand the universe. I’ve exposed myself to a lot of information but never really understanding one topic thoroughly. One thing I haven’t done is allowed myself to learn to be uncomfortable. Equanimity maybe. How am I going to gain new insight if I keep falling back on old patterns of thinking and reacting and my old belief systems?
Here is a poem I wrote about discovering new ideas, new ways to view our situation, and new ways to live. Sometimes I think it is important to be patient, to be uncomfortable to not decide right now how I am going to solve a problem or get what I think I want.
The other day I watched a van from a flower shop pull into my driveway. I thought for sure it had gotten lost. It wasn’t my birthday or anniversary or anything like that. I asked the driver who the flowers were for. He flipped open his clip board and read my name.
What? Really? Had I won the lottery or something? “Who are they from?” I asked.
He looked at me funny. “It should say on the card.” He swung the van door open.
There on a wooden crate sat a bunch of red long stem roses sitting grandly all by themselves. He picked them up and handed them to me. These flowers were so pretty and the stems so long that I felt like I should at least be wearing Sunday best clothing or have an acceptance speech ready. I pulled out the card. It said “Love Ben”. He has done a lot of sweet things during our 13 years together. He gives himself to me and our children every day. But he has never had flowers delivered to our house on a non birthday or un anniversary event so I was surprised and……smitten.
I called my friend. She brought me a vase. It seemed like blasphemy to cut the stems but it had to be done. The tips of the roses were safely covered by tiny plastic containers filled with liquid. So not only did mom get roses, holy molly the kids got 12 tiny plastic containers to catch bugs in. The flowers could have been made of diamonds and gold and the kids would have brushed them aside for those precious containers.
If you know my 8 year old son at all you might be able to guess what he caught in his containers. A black widow? A flesh eating giant red ant? And your guess would be very close. He caught an ugly angry wasp, which of course stung him.
I am allergic to bees and wasps and I’ve had a feeling that so is *Little Einstein, we are a lot a like in many ways. Except that he likes cooked carrots, will be a lot smarter than me some day, and the plants he tends grow 10 times the size they should while mine wrinkle up and die.
In our old house we had a ton of wasps. They liked to take up residence in the kids hallow swing set. Little Einstein, despite my warnings, would stick his face right into the opening of the swing set poles and watch the hornets fly right out into his face, sting him on the ear, nose, cheek, and then howler for several minutes while his face pulsated with pain. Then he would blow up like a balloon.
We don’t have as many wasps here but we have quite a few. Last year after the kids started school I decided to go rest on the hammock. The house and yard were quiet and the thought of some relaxing alone time was thrilling. I think I picked up a Harry Potter book then plopped down on the hammock. The hammock even has a pillow to rest your head on. So I’m laying there loving it but I keep hearing this really loud buzzing sound come and go. I finally, after several minutes, get up to investigate. I step back from the hammock and notice that wasps are flying back and forth from it, a lot of them. And then I notice they are coming from underneath the pillow. Oh my God! I tip toe back over to the hammock and lift up the pillow. Holy crap there are like a dozen wasps there attempting to make a nest. My head had been on top of them. I turn and run into the house while all sorts of horror images run through my mind. If those hornets would have decided to eat me for dinner who knows what would have happened. I don’t think an epi pen would have been sufficient.
Yesterday when Little Einstein’s hand started to swell, and kept swelling I became a little concerned because my allergic reactions to bees and wasps didn’t start until I was an adult. Apparently my grandmother had to carry epi pens around for my dad and his brother because they were so allergic.
I gave Little Einstein a half of a Benadryl, which helped but I knew it would make him sleepy and possibly emotional like it does me. I really dislike giving my kids any sort of meds, makes me just a tiny bit nervous. So all of this is why I suppose I freaked out so bad when I saw Little E’s head lying on the counter top, his eyes wide open, and foamy drool running down his face into a pool below his chin. My first reaction was that he was resting then I looked and he was so still, his eyes blank and I thought omg how long has he been like this with out me noticing? Then fear and terror hit me like a giant hand swooped down and strangled me.
That reaction maybe lasted 10 seconds before E jumped up smiling. He was joking. Wow what a great actor, for sure. But it wasn’t funny to me and I told him so. I felt like I was going to break down and cry so I ran up the stairs not wanting the kids to see me like that and shut myself in my closet. Really mature I know but that whole incident really freaked me out.
Little Einstein came up crying. “I am sorry. I am sorry.” He kept saying. What ever fear that I felt was gone now. I felt bad for making him cry. It took a while to console him. He was so upset that he had made me sad, that he had hurt me. I kept telling him not to feel bad he didn’t mean to hurt me and I am ok, really. He just means a lot to me and if anything happened to him I would freak.
As I was thinking of this whole incident this morning I thought of my own feelings for my mother. The worst ever were the times I felt like I had hurt my mom. Like the time I ran away. I still have the image burned into my head of her sitting on the edge of her bed sad as hell because her kids had run away that evening. I was 8ish and had no idea that I could hurt her like that. I hated it.
The worst though was when I got married. It was a wonderful day because I was marring Ben. That day with him still brings a smile to my face. Sometimes I wish we had time like that together. The time we had in the beginning with out so many worries and responsibilities.
We got married in the Salt Lake temple. Since my mom was not Mormon she could not go to the wedding but she was there supporting us the best she could, even though it hurt her not to be inside with us. When I left her standing there in the waiting room of the temple she was crying. That was it. I couldn’t take it. I started bawling. I cried so hard I couldn’t stop.
I think that was the first time Ben’s mom saw me, crying my eyes out at her son’s wedding. She looked at me really worried and said. “This is supposed to be a happy day.” It was. It really was a happy day and when we were married and we walked out of the temple together I felt more peace than I had in my entire life but hurting my mom like that was truly the worst. To be the cause of her pain killed me. So when Little E was lying in my lap crying because he felt like he had done something to make me sad, I got it. I hope he knows that I am ok and in no way do I want him to feel guilty because I know that he wouldn’t hurt me on purpose.
A couple of days ago the poor wilted roses had to go the way of the garbage can. Ben was the one who had to do the deed. I would have let those roses crinkle into red dust and the water grow a whole new world of micro organisms before I would have thrown them away.
That’s the thing with flowers, they are transient and delicate but they inspire. Eckhart Tolle says about flowers in his book A New Earth “As the consciousness of human beings developed, flowers were most likely the first thing they came to value that had no utilitarian purpose for them, that is to say, was not linked in some way to survival. They provided inspiration to countless artists, poets, and mystics.”
The roses have inspired me. They’ve inspired me to dip into my past, into my true love story, the non-fiction one. So today I am going to download some Phantom of the Opera. That music reminds me of Ben and how, way back in the beginning, I was “Omg kiss me all ready!”
*I’ve decided to give my 8yr old son the internet name of Little Einstein because he is curious, smart, a little bit absent-minded and reminds me a lot of how a child Einstein might be.
I don’t know what to write today, again. I feel like I need to jam my head full of information. I love writing. Nothing better than diving into a pretend world and really feeling a part of it. I am so excited that my derby team is making me go to Canada for our bout this weekend. I was thinking I wasn’t going to go because I won’t be able to skate very much. I hurt my neck the Sunday before last skating with the Shewolves. Also I don’t want to leave Ben here with the kids all weekend. He will get burnt out for sure.
Any way I am reconsidering derby a little, which makes me sad. That fall I had when the girl fell on my head really scared me. My head was definitely not supposed to go that far in that direction. It hurt worse than when I got rear-ended at 45 miles per hour a few years ago. The car accident cracked one of my vertebrae just a little and took forever to heal. Luckily when I went to the hospital this time the x-ray came back clear. While I was waiting to get x-rayed they gave me a pain pill. As I was lying there I started feeling really peaceful and I’m like omg I’m feeling the spirit. I wonder why. (This used to be my train of thought when I was Mormon.) Then I realized that I was a little bit high. LOL
The people there were really nice and loved the fact that I had gotten injured while playing roller derby. There was a lady down the hall yelling for the doctor and for a blanket most of the time I was there. The nurses ignored her, for a good reason I’m sure (like maybe she was high), and when the doc came in I think he said something like he wanted to strangle someone. I could be remembering that wrong and I would have totally judged him but I’ve had that feeling before so….I’m guessing he wasn’t serious.
When I went to use the bathroom for the second time I noticed that there was poop or vomit all over the toilet. I turned around and decided to hold my pee. I’m still a little bit sick that I even used that bathroom at all but I don’t seem to have any major diseases so it’s all good.
I am excited for this bout and a little sad because I really wanted to be a kick ass derby girl and now I will mostly be watching. After all of this time and all of these falls I have to get injured right before a bout. It reminds me once when my drill team was going to be in a parade. I was so excited. The day before the parade we were camping and a bottle of vodka fell on my foot, busted, and ripped a big gash (ok probably more like small gash) in my flesh. I was so sad to miss the parade.
I am mostly excited that I will be spending a lot of time with my team. I haven’t seen them nearly enough. Tomorrow we will be at Wal-Mart in Richland for another bake sale to raise gas money for our trip this weekend. I was amazed last week how popular it was.
I pushed the match along the thin black strip of the match box, rip. It’s hard to say when the flame starts. I try to see it, watch it, sort of like the opposite end of watching water boil. The flame just happens. Eyes wide and fascinated I watch as the flame bursts to life, hanging above my carpet, a breath from the tender flesh of my finger. The heat rolls to the tip of my finger, once I even burn my finger nail. That’s one memory that is crystal clear, the way the fire ripped into my nail, slithered behind it and left dead painful skin behind and a blackened nail to remind me of what I had done. Did I tell any one about this injury? No way
How many times did I repeat this ritual? Several. So many that all the memories combine together to create one meshed up multicolored reality. Have you ever tried to watch a flame burst into life: catch a glimpse of that first yellow or red? It’s so tempting.
The flame catches, I watch it for a split second, pushing my limit each time I work this experiment then pop, drop that baby down the round hole of the pepsi or coke bottle (my memories not that good) watch as it floats to the bottom, slowly dying, until it rests up against the bottom of the glass.
Poof circles of smoke twirl upwards then expand into a cloud. The bottle fills with smoke.
I repeat this again and again until several used up matches crisscross each other at the bottom of the bottle.
The taste of molasses for some reason goes hand and hand with these deviant experiences. Was I suppose to sneak the molasses out of the fridge when no one was home?
Once my mom found the burnt up matches and scolded me. I can only imagine the jolt of fear she must have felt when she discovered that her daughter was playing with matches when she was at work.
Yesterday I walked into the kitchen and smelled a familiar burning smell that I couldn’t quite place. I tried to ignore it but the smell persisted, never disintegrating but building.
So me and my nose went snooping, following the smokey like smell until I discovered the source. Curious George (aka my 10-year-old son) had plugged in the small crock-pot and turned it on high. Who knows how long it had been like that but long enough for the plastic measuring cup to cake itself onto the bottom of the pot into a black melted gooey mess and for the basket meant for steaming vegetables to turn its corners over and head in the direction of liquid form. The smell was horrible, burnt plastic on the verge of smoldering into a mini flame.
I scolded my son much like my mother scolded me and I thought: holy crap what if he would have pulled something like that when we were sleeping?
I was reading some of my old journal writings about my husband. Ben and I met selling pest control a little over 13 years ago. During the day when I was out knocking on doors I would write on the back of Orkin’s flyers “The World’s Best Pest Control” with please call Alicia stamped on each one. I always feel a little better if I can just get a few words down on paper. Any way just to show you what a nerd I was here’s a quote from the back of one of those flyers “I am tired but I am mostly distracted. Hopefully Heavenly Father can help me get focused. I have been thinking a lot of Ben lately. I am really starting to like him. I can’t explain exactly why. I think we are a lot a like in many ways. Mainly in the way we think. I like the way I feel when I am with him and who I am.”
So I have who knows maybe 100 or more of these fliers all tainted with my “feelings” for Ben and my struggle to stay at the top of our pest control selling team.
I think I would have made a butt load of money (lol for college student standards) if it hadn’t of been for the way I was so distracted by new love. Even after Ben and I were engaged and maybe even married he had no idea about all of the feelings I had been harboring for him all summer long.
I was always worried about what he thought. I was nervous around him that whole summer. I loved the first time I saw him. When I went up to his apartment to meet him I expected to find a really young guy freshly off of his Mormon mission but when I walked in I saw Ben, my age, and his eyes. His eyes woke up as soon as I walked in the door and me well I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.
I went down stairs to my apartment right a way and called my good friend and first roommate from college, Julee, and told her all about him. Of course I never let on to him how freaked out I was about him. How much I liked him from the very first time I saw him.
Last night I had bad dreams. I don’t remember most of them. One guy came into my house and ate all of my favorite cereal. LOL But one dream haunted me the most. Around this special time of month every month I have a strong negative dream about someone important in my life. Last night it was about Ben. He had given up on me. We were done and there was nothing to fix it. My heart broke. In that dream I felt so lost. It was as if it really happened.
Today is the 9th anniversary of 9-11.
I remember 9-11 well. It was the day after we came back from a trip to Canada. We were living in a comfortable apartment then, one that we only lived in for 6 months. Life seemed scary at that time but looking back wow, were times simpler.
That morning Conner had an appointment with a speech therapist or something. I called and cancelled because I was feeling nauseous, really ill. When I called the therapist she asked me if I had seen the news? No. I hadn’t.
I turned on the tv and just as I did one of the planes crashed into the second building. Oh my god. Ben and I sat there stunned. Life turned on a quarter that day. It was one of those moments that I am sure many shared. When we thought we lived in this safe protected world and then bam….the mail service was down, people were scared, life was unstable, boundaries shimmered and dissolved. We become a little bit more apart of the wider world that we were so sheltered from.
After the news settled a bit into the pit of my stomach I pulled myself up and drove to the grocery store where I purchased a pregnancy test. I went home and took it, maybe my hands were shaking. Life was scaring me. The test was positive. I told Ben the news and his grin was huge. His eyes lit up just like they did when he first saw me.
Me of course I was excited. I was also scared. I was no longer living in a sheltered cocoon where hurtful things happen to other people. Our first son wasn’t quite one-years-old yet and all ready had a few minor surgeries and close calls.
The whole first year of parenthood and experiencing 9-11 sort of catapulted me into adulthood. It was like bathing in a nice warm bath where you keep nodding off then being yanked from there and dunked into a river of ice water. A shock to the system, painful yet clarifying. Bitter bitter bitter, death and of course sweet-life.
Life was uncertain but I had Ben right by my side and something about that brought a sort of stable solidness to my life. He was real and solid and right there. Not that he was my protector but we were in it together. Side by side. Oh I miss seeing him so much. During those days he spent a lot of time working from home.
A hiking trip we took up badger mountain last week.
