“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 like he 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 may find it’s 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 don’t think I’ve ever confidentaly 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 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 viscioius 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 like they were on some sort of charity run.
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 ask.
He stares 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 reach out and brush the tips of his fingers with mine. Just as we touch he clamps his hand shut around the pin. Was that anger that just passed across his face or fear?
Then he brings his fist up to his lips and slips the pin into his mouth. He smiles with his lips smashed shut. He looks so playful that the fear that had been pounding around in my heart ever since we decided to take this journey starts to unwind. I look up into his face, stand on my toes and press my lips up against his. As I do he takes my hand in his and slips the pin into my mouth.
Two more fictional stories that may have tiny roots from the memory of my first boyfriend.
A short time before I wrote the above story Ben and the kids and I went hiking through an old train tunnel.
On the other side of the tunnel we found a bird’s next on a pole several feet off of the ground.
“Dad can you lift me up so that I can see better?”
Ben and I both laugh.
“You can see it just as well as me.” Ben says.
The large bird’s rump is peaking over the edge of the ledge where its nest hides. We are all looking up wondering about this bird. What kind? Does it have babies up there? Is it hot? Who built this pole? The pole has a number on it. Is it for study? The water looks pretty. It’s peaceful out here but is that a chemical that stains the rocks white at the edge of the water? That’s disturbing.
A train passes by above us. We decide to walk up the trail towards the train but the sand is hot and we are all wearing sandals. D and C follow Ben all the way to the top but E stops half way up crying that his feet hurt. I try to talk him into walking more carefully so that the sand doesn’t burn his feet but this is too hard and with each step up the hill the sand gets hotter.
So I pick him up and put him on my back. We start-up the hill then Ben and the other boys are running down the hill. C is crying because his feet are on fire. D runs all the way down the hill. I have to tell him to stop. “Wait for us.”
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”.
Maybe 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. Following the link to the poem are two links to journal entries I wrote after I created the above post.
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.
