About 90 minutes from now, I'm scheduled to zip off on an intergalactic adventure with a rag-tag group of spacefarers. Translation: It's game night.
Game night has been a regular Saturday night fixture in my life for nearly a year, with lengthy breaks while I temporarily moved across state for a work assignment, and now for about the last six weeks as the other gamers had other commitments. I've missed the gaming during this last break as it represents one of my only, okay the only social outlet I have outside of work and the Internet.
In the interim, I've filled my Saturday nights with reading or watching movies on DVD. I went to karaoke once -- formerly a fixture of my social life before that out-of-town work assignment -- but the fun surprisingly had disappeared, like air leaking from a tire so slowly you don't notice until suddenly you have a flat.
While I am looking forward to seeing the gamer group, I'm afraid the fun may be leaking from this activity, too, as I evolve into some sort of cave-dwelling creature who desires only solitude. I'm watching the clock tick and looking at the stack of books yet to read (at last count I have nearly 300 unread books in my apartment) and the unfinished short story I'm trying to write, and I just want to stay in. I have too many plans, too many desires, and not enough time to accomplish them all. And that doesn't even include the laundry or bathroom-scrubbing that should be done this weekend. In the words of the fabulous Greta Garbo, "I vant to be alone."
I want to dive back into The Artist's Way and start writing morning pages again. I want to finish this short story and a dozen others sitting incomplete on my hard drive. I want to read all of those books on my shelf, but these things require time, and I am nothing if not an impatient creature. Our days on this planet, after all, are finite, and each person can accomplish only so much in one lifetime. I've already allowed 35 years to slip by while crossing far too few items off of my lifetime to-do list.
But shouldn't an evening of fun, imagination and laughter rank high on that to-do list? Won't I be a happier person, if only for a few hours, if I go? I hope the answer is yes, and that The Artist's Way and those short stories and all of those books will still be there for me to tackle tomorrow. For while it's wonderful to suck the marrow from each day as though it's our last, sometimes we also must live as if tomorrow is another day.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Sunday, August 2, 2009
Dreams: Maniacs and Sharks
I'm back in Olympia, in a representation of the house where I lived last winter. It isn't really the house, and the images my brain is throwing at me at lightening-fast speed aren't really Olympia. They're just stand-ins.
I'm in the house, renting from the same guy. In my dream he and his girlfriend live there. I'm taking care of a little girl who isn't his daughter. She's someone else's child, but I have to take care of her. We're at the house and I ask her if she's hungry. We talk about going out to eat. But then there are other people in the house. Dangerous people. A man wielding a knife. A teenage girl who's crazy. I think they must be ghosts. But the guy who owns the house is suddenly there and he says they're real people who used to live there. The man is a killer. The teenager is his daughter grown into an adult. She's crazy because of the killer. The killer was in jail but got out. The killer is chasing all of us, and I'm trying to protect the little girl and get her out. We climb through a window and the killer slashes at me with his knife and misses.
Then we're climbing on top of a network of bunk beds sticking out of the water in an aquarium, like the skeleton of some kind of fort. Three giant, dark blue sharks circle in the water. I'm conscious that we're re-enacting scenes from the movie Deep Blue Sea, and I'm the Saffron Burrows character who dies a grisley death at the end. I know this and I'm trying to stop it from happening to me. I'm also trying to figure out how to get the little girl and several other people past the sharks and out of the aquarium. The sharks keep attacking the bunk beds we're standing on. They shake. Some of them collapse and broken bits jut out of the water. There are fewer and fewer places for us to climb to get away from the sharks.
A large window with a ledge wide enough for us to stand on leads out of the aquarium. But there's another strip of water on the other side and we'd have to swim across it to get to solid land and get out. The sharks keep attacking. I'm sitting on top of one of the bunk beds with a man -- the Thomas Jane character? -- and a shark leaps up at us. Its teeth are at our toes, just barely missing us. We jump to another bunk bed, one that seems to be solid. Others are crowded there, but the sharks are circling and we know it's only a matter of time before this last island of safety is destroyed.
Then everyone decides to get married before they die, and the man I'm with wants to marry me. I'm surprised by this, but I agree. Everyone cheers. Apparently, they've known all along that we should have been together. The noise of their cheering attracts the sharks, who start thumping against the structure where we're standing. Someone falls into the water and there's a streak of blood. We're screaming and scrambling, trying to get higher, to stay out of the water.
Somehow we strike an unspoken bargain with the sharks, my new fiance and I, that everyone else can go free if the sharks can have us. We climb up onto the window ledge and the sharks allow everyone else to cross the strip of water at the top and scramble to safety.
We're down to the last two or three people, and I'm making plans how to kill the sharks before they come for us. I have a chemical in my pocket that will make them explode if they swallow it, but I have to get into the water for it to work.
I get in and swim across the strip to the other side, letting the chemical flow into the water as I swim. The sharks are coming as I reach land. They swallow the water with the chemical. I can see them react to it as I climb out of the water. Two of them explode in a rain of water and blood and skin and teeth. But there's still one left.
My fiance -- perhaps he isn't now that it seems we might live -- swims to me and we try to think of another plan for the last shark, the mama shark, the biggest and most powerful shark. As we talk, a train vibrates by overhead. The concrete shimmers and cracks, and we realize the mama shark is trying to make the train crash down on us and there's nowhere we can go to escape except back into the aquarium.
I wake. My body is tensed, stiff as a board, and I still have to go to the gym yet today for my daily laps in the pool.
I'm in the house, renting from the same guy. In my dream he and his girlfriend live there. I'm taking care of a little girl who isn't his daughter. She's someone else's child, but I have to take care of her. We're at the house and I ask her if she's hungry. We talk about going out to eat. But then there are other people in the house. Dangerous people. A man wielding a knife. A teenage girl who's crazy. I think they must be ghosts. But the guy who owns the house is suddenly there and he says they're real people who used to live there. The man is a killer. The teenager is his daughter grown into an adult. She's crazy because of the killer. The killer was in jail but got out. The killer is chasing all of us, and I'm trying to protect the little girl and get her out. We climb through a window and the killer slashes at me with his knife and misses.
Then we're climbing on top of a network of bunk beds sticking out of the water in an aquarium, like the skeleton of some kind of fort. Three giant, dark blue sharks circle in the water. I'm conscious that we're re-enacting scenes from the movie Deep Blue Sea, and I'm the Saffron Burrows character who dies a grisley death at the end. I know this and I'm trying to stop it from happening to me. I'm also trying to figure out how to get the little girl and several other people past the sharks and out of the aquarium. The sharks keep attacking the bunk beds we're standing on. They shake. Some of them collapse and broken bits jut out of the water. There are fewer and fewer places for us to climb to get away from the sharks.
A large window with a ledge wide enough for us to stand on leads out of the aquarium. But there's another strip of water on the other side and we'd have to swim across it to get to solid land and get out. The sharks keep attacking. I'm sitting on top of one of the bunk beds with a man -- the Thomas Jane character? -- and a shark leaps up at us. Its teeth are at our toes, just barely missing us. We jump to another bunk bed, one that seems to be solid. Others are crowded there, but the sharks are circling and we know it's only a matter of time before this last island of safety is destroyed.
Then everyone decides to get married before they die, and the man I'm with wants to marry me. I'm surprised by this, but I agree. Everyone cheers. Apparently, they've known all along that we should have been together. The noise of their cheering attracts the sharks, who start thumping against the structure where we're standing. Someone falls into the water and there's a streak of blood. We're screaming and scrambling, trying to get higher, to stay out of the water.
Somehow we strike an unspoken bargain with the sharks, my new fiance and I, that everyone else can go free if the sharks can have us. We climb up onto the window ledge and the sharks allow everyone else to cross the strip of water at the top and scramble to safety.
We're down to the last two or three people, and I'm making plans how to kill the sharks before they come for us. I have a chemical in my pocket that will make them explode if they swallow it, but I have to get into the water for it to work.
I get in and swim across the strip to the other side, letting the chemical flow into the water as I swim. The sharks are coming as I reach land. They swallow the water with the chemical. I can see them react to it as I climb out of the water. Two of them explode in a rain of water and blood and skin and teeth. But there's still one left.
My fiance -- perhaps he isn't now that it seems we might live -- swims to me and we try to think of another plan for the last shark, the mama shark, the biggest and most powerful shark. As we talk, a train vibrates by overhead. The concrete shimmers and cracks, and we realize the mama shark is trying to make the train crash down on us and there's nowhere we can go to escape except back into the aquarium.
I wake. My body is tensed, stiff as a board, and I still have to go to the gym yet today for my daily laps in the pool.
On purchasing A Poet's Bible: Rediscovering the Voices of the Original Text
Once upon a time, I was a young girl creature who went faithfully to Sunday school each week. I climbed on the bus wearing a pretty dress, the week's Bible verses dutifully memorized, and eagerly anticipated singing hymns and making macaroni crafts in the Sunday school class taught by my aunt. My parents didn't force me to go. I wanted to go because I liked Sunday school. I liked the Sunday school teachers, liked the pretty stained glass windows in the church, liked riding on the bus my uncle drove. And I liked believing, liked having faith as much as a child of 6 or 7 can understand the concept of faith.
I grew older and my family moved to a different part of the city, so I stopped going to church with my aunt and uncle. But I sought new experiences of my own, went to church with my friends. I seem to recall I even tried vacation Bible school once. But none of the new ones really stuck, and I was becoming more sophisticated and more cynical about religion as I realized the only reason most kids got on the bus was because the driver passed out free candy.
I had always been a bit odd anyway. I was never quite devout to any particular Christian doctrine, having attended churches Apostolic, Pentecostal, Baptist and I can't really remember what other denominations, but there must have been others. I was Christian as a child and adolescent because that's the religion I was exposed to, but I recall telling one of my Sunday school teachers back in the day that I thought the various gods people worshiped and all of the different religions were really all the same. I have a vague recollection of an expression of shock.
Somewhere along the way, I could no longer see any logical reason why someone would choose one religion over another. None of them seemed any more right or wrong than any other.
In 8th grade, I learned the words "agnostic" and "atheist" for the first time. They were on a spelling test. By then, it had been a couple of years since I'd been to church, and something about those words seemed to fit. By high school, I had lost interest in religion altogether and embraced my identity as a nonbeliever, but some part of me missed having faith.
At age 19, I read St. Augustine's Confessions for a college course. A year or two later I read Mahfouz's The Beggar. Both nagged at something in my soul that wanted the comfort of belief.
After college, I tried church again with a friend who invited me to her non-denominational church, The Vineyard. It was one of those megachurches with a coffee house and dance ministry and a "Christian contemporary" band, and no stained glass anywhere to be seen. It just didn't speak to me. I sat there with my friend, watching people with their hands raised to the heavens and dancing to the music, and I waited to feel something. Anything. But nothing came. I concluded that Christianity was no longer for me.
But that nagging never really went away.
I came close to feeling something like faith once about three years ago. I had to cover an event at a church -- a choir of young African orphans singing cheerfully about how their lives had changed through God. It was the people who almost inspired me to go back. They were open, accepting, friendly. For a few moments, I thought it was a place I might be loved. But I never went back.
I've tried other forms of religion or spirituality. My inner feminist tends to like the goddess-based religions a little better than most, and the compassionate part of me finds certain tenets of Buddhism appealing. Again, nothing ever really stuck.
But now I'm having a life crisis (Again? Still?) and discovering that what I thought was depression is really malnourishment. I'm starving in my heart and soul and, try as I might, I can find nothing to fill the emptiness. I've tried food, shopping, relationships -- all were illusory balms. So my thoughts have turned once again to religion. Perhaps spiritualism would be a better word for it, since I don't think I'll ever be able to embrace organized religion the way I did as a child. I've changed too much for that.
I also think that religion is, in fact, an illusion to which we cling to repel darkness and pain from our lives. I don't believe god is a real entity hovering out there in heaven or space. But I do believe there may be a divine spirit emanating from humanity, dwelling within us, if we can tap into it. So, perhaps delving back into religion, or spirit, is illusory, but no less so than the human relationships I've looked to for comfort that I haven't found.
Anyway, when I came across this book on the clearance rack at Hastings, I thought reading a poet's interpretation of the stories of the Bible -- distilling them down to their essence and, I hope, stripping them of the bits that are so maliciously twisted in service of hate and oppression -- might spark something.
I do know that any god I could ever embrace has to be one of compassion, tolerance and love, not wrath, hate and spite.
I grew older and my family moved to a different part of the city, so I stopped going to church with my aunt and uncle. But I sought new experiences of my own, went to church with my friends. I seem to recall I even tried vacation Bible school once. But none of the new ones really stuck, and I was becoming more sophisticated and more cynical about religion as I realized the only reason most kids got on the bus was because the driver passed out free candy.
I had always been a bit odd anyway. I was never quite devout to any particular Christian doctrine, having attended churches Apostolic, Pentecostal, Baptist and I can't really remember what other denominations, but there must have been others. I was Christian as a child and adolescent because that's the religion I was exposed to, but I recall telling one of my Sunday school teachers back in the day that I thought the various gods people worshiped and all of the different religions were really all the same. I have a vague recollection of an expression of shock.
Somewhere along the way, I could no longer see any logical reason why someone would choose one religion over another. None of them seemed any more right or wrong than any other.
In 8th grade, I learned the words "agnostic" and "atheist" for the first time. They were on a spelling test. By then, it had been a couple of years since I'd been to church, and something about those words seemed to fit. By high school, I had lost interest in religion altogether and embraced my identity as a nonbeliever, but some part of me missed having faith.
At age 19, I read St. Augustine's Confessions for a college course. A year or two later I read Mahfouz's The Beggar. Both nagged at something in my soul that wanted the comfort of belief.
After college, I tried church again with a friend who invited me to her non-denominational church, The Vineyard. It was one of those megachurches with a coffee house and dance ministry and a "Christian contemporary" band, and no stained glass anywhere to be seen. It just didn't speak to me. I sat there with my friend, watching people with their hands raised to the heavens and dancing to the music, and I waited to feel something. Anything. But nothing came. I concluded that Christianity was no longer for me.
But that nagging never really went away.
I came close to feeling something like faith once about three years ago. I had to cover an event at a church -- a choir of young African orphans singing cheerfully about how their lives had changed through God. It was the people who almost inspired me to go back. They were open, accepting, friendly. For a few moments, I thought it was a place I might be loved. But I never went back.
I've tried other forms of religion or spirituality. My inner feminist tends to like the goddess-based religions a little better than most, and the compassionate part of me finds certain tenets of Buddhism appealing. Again, nothing ever really stuck.
But now I'm having a life crisis (Again? Still?) and discovering that what I thought was depression is really malnourishment. I'm starving in my heart and soul and, try as I might, I can find nothing to fill the emptiness. I've tried food, shopping, relationships -- all were illusory balms. So my thoughts have turned once again to religion. Perhaps spiritualism would be a better word for it, since I don't think I'll ever be able to embrace organized religion the way I did as a child. I've changed too much for that.
I also think that religion is, in fact, an illusion to which we cling to repel darkness and pain from our lives. I don't believe god is a real entity hovering out there in heaven or space. But I do believe there may be a divine spirit emanating from humanity, dwelling within us, if we can tap into it. So, perhaps delving back into religion, or spirit, is illusory, but no less so than the human relationships I've looked to for comfort that I haven't found.
Anyway, when I came across this book on the clearance rack at Hastings, I thought reading a poet's interpretation of the stories of the Bible -- distilling them down to their essence and, I hope, stripping them of the bits that are so maliciously twisted in service of hate and oppression -- might spark something.
I do know that any god I could ever embrace has to be one of compassion, tolerance and love, not wrath, hate and spite.
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