*Transcendental *Logic

It’s the middle of yet another crazy dream:  Something about cell-phones giving away the fact that I’ve been doing something immoral with or on top of a desk, and my ex-husband apologizing for calling my phone and explaining that it wasn’t nearly so bad as the fact that I slept in his car while he cheated on his new girlfriend two blocks away.

Seriously, that dream got so weird that I decided, in-dream, to check out for a while and take a break.  As the dream was happening in the neighborhood I used to live in long, long ago, and it was kind of chilly and there was nothing really to do, I decided to go for a run.

Normally I hate running — "Do you run?" the joke in Real Genius goes; "Only when chased!"  But this time, it was different.

An excerpt, just for the hell of it, from Ch. 2 of my novel, which opens with the exhausted main characters fleeing for their lives through a strange and confusing land…

—–

Everything blurred into running.

Hiss of grass on legs–first tickly, then abrasive–and scrape of breath in throat, harsh throb of muscles, permanent pain in ribs — the unleavened taste of the Plains, the insistent beauty of the now purplish sky hovering like a quiet kalidoscope over their heads — it all fused, became a god, became Running, and they worshipped and feared it, suffering along, heads bowed straight down like good little mortals.
—–

Then, later, when the first of them realizes one of the things that makes this place special:

—–

Then it hit him.

It was like somebody’d turned a light on, changing completely how everything looked without actually changing it at all…it was as though he’d suddenly woken up to see the reality of what he’d been dreaming about all day.

It was a more profound experience, he’d say later on, than his death had been. Who was Daniel Graff? Just some guy…But this was the death of Running.

He wasn’t tired. He didn’t hurt, anywhere, at all. He wasn’t running, he was floating at extraordinary speed. But he wasn’t flying, either. He looked down, and stared stupidly at his hooves, the sharp dark things on the ends of his sticklike white legs which flashed in and out of existence, blowing the grass into a flat path beneath them, apparently on their own power. His throat was a little raw, but he swallowed a few leisurely times and it was soothed.

What he’d just accomplished was nothing short of freeing himself from bondage to a powerful god, and Nova felt the awe of it in a place deep in the dark center between his lungs; a place where gods were obvious; a place he’d…forgotten.

—–

That’s pretty close to what I dreamed, except that it was just me and my sneakers on old familiar sidewalks, and I realized suddenly that I’d hit it, hit the stride, could feel every millimeter of the movement and yet had time to adjust anything.  When I turned, the strain on my ankles annoyed me; I learned quickly to put a foot out, if there was a tree or pole, and use it to launch myself around corners.  I thought I must be going a zillion miles an hour, but it felt like floating.

I remember thinking, "Wow, taiji really helped with my ability to run…" –and it was something like taiji, actually, in that it was total attention and total control coming together as perfect ease.

Here’s the funny part:  In the two days since this dream, I’ve tried running several times.  Obviously I don’t feel like Nova does in my story, or quite like I did in my dream, but there’s definitely something there that wasn’t there before.  Even funnier, in the dream I met another runner, an older black man (who smelled archetypal, like Elvis) who told me that if I worked hard, I might be allowed to remember this skill.  (This was before I finished my run and had to go back and deal with the desk-phone-love-triangle BS again.  ;)

The heel lands first; the whole foot rocks over the ground; the energy builds and the toe shoots it up the leg; it comes from the earth up, not the body down.  It pulls me right into a trance.  And it feels pretty darn wonderful, actually.

I think…I want a treadmill.  ;)

(P.S.  The prose I quote from my own work here is uncharacteristically purple (flowery), fyi.  Most of the piece is in much plainer language…but it seemed to warrant some texture, here.)

The process of working my way into grad school has begun.  It could take less than a year, or less than a decade, or more than a decade, or maybe I’ll be one of those crazy old people working in the bookstore who never got admitted to the program.  Don’t care, really, because I can honestly say the process itself is worth it.  On the other hand, wouldn’t I make a badass PhD?

I love Ann Arbor.  Not only is it probably the best city in Michigan, but it’s really odd (and yet somehow fitting) that Michigan, home of one of the worst cities ever, is also home of one of the best — AA was voted Best College Town in the USA quite a few times, and being there it’s not hard to see why.  I’m gradually moving my way there, oddly enough — grew up south of D-town, moved to D-town, now I live northwest of D-town, about halfway between where I grew up and where I’m heading.  Funny!

I now live with my best friend, who’s been my best friend for a decade without ever having shared even a state with me since the first three months we knew each other.  It’s weird to take someone so entrenchedly long-distance and plant them into your house!  Things are going very well, but it’s a big change.

The reason we moved in together like this, or the biggest reason anyway, was to Change The World.  Now we need to figure out what that means — turns out that a decade of conversations didn’t even clear up whether we meant Change THE World or Change OUR World.  I’m playing a video game right now where the objective is to change two worlds, which just seems ridiculously perfect, considering.

What do you want to change? 

Me, I’m a believer in "there is no spoon" — the only real change happens by changing yourself.  But that still leaves me wondering what the purpose of the lifelong project my friend and I are engaged in is…do we change ourselves such that we change the world for ourselves and our family, or is the actual goal a bigger one?

I’ve made some big personal changes lately, and am making more as we speak…some of it is to Bend The Spoon; some is just to keep my sanity somewhat intact in this crazy place and time.  I never realized when I was younger how big a part of adult life is caught up in Sanity Management, but it’s true — what’s scary is how true it is for people who don’t know they’re doing it, too.  Sometimes I think that more grownups would be happier with themselves if they realized how much of what they’re doing is for Sanity Management purposes…for one thing, they’d probably realize that they could be doing a better job.  But it’s hard to do a job right when you’re not aware you’re doing it!

(Funny — I just wrote "Sanctity Management"…and maybe that’s a part of it too.)

Most of us have vices that we don’t realize are our way of dulling the pain caused by something fundamentally wrong with our lives … I just finally got the courage to give up a big one last week.  And now, it’s not living without my vice that’s hard (that’s been surprisingly easy), it’s living without that protective gear on … things are louder, clearer, higher and lower, and I can no longer pretend I don’t see them or feel them.  Still, I decided that it’s better to die of exposure to reality than to live forever wrapped in blankets.  Without your protective gear, the world is big, layered, haunted, meaningful and magical — you know what I mean, because we’re all born without that gear and we all experience the world that way as kids.  Moments take lifetimes, emotions are grenades, everything matters and yet everything also flies out of your hands so quickly; it’s only insulated by the blankets that anything can really linger.  I dunno.  Maybe I’m full of it … but it’s not bad stuff to be full of!

I guess that’s all for now.  I have no idea where this site is going, so for those of you who still read it, hang in there and I’m sure eventually it’ll cook into something — cake, quiche, mud pie, who knows? — but with any luck and a little help from the Great One, hopefully it’ll be a tasty something.  Sleep continues, but I just feel like I ran out of things to say about it — if you’re here for polyphasic information, it’s all here (follow the links on the right or buy the book (thankyou!)), but I’m not sure I’ll be adding to it any time soon.  I’d say it’s because I bore easily, but two solid years is hardly being flaky, is it?  Anyway it’s an interesting topic and I’m sure I’ll come back to it.

Happy Spoonday!

Why yes, I think I will.

…From FFFFound!

I bet you didn’t see this coming: The Food Issue (NY Times)

Excerpt:

Dear Mr. President-Elect,

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food.

Since [Nixon's administration], federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

…It’s an excellent, BIG article on all the issues impacted by and connected to food production, including health care reform, climate change, and economic inequality. 

Expect more on the topic from me, as starting next year I’ll be a bona fide gardener, growing hopefully more than enough for my household in what used to be my lawn — what will soon be my massive permaculture garden.  (See How to Make A Forest Garden and Food Not Lawns if you want more background on what that means.)

I’m becoming quite convinced that this kind of gardening is going to be a HUGE metric for successful living in any kind of non-dystopian future; and that by doing it now, we’re not only offering our support to the environment and to smaller, simpler living; but literally, making a revolutionary statement about the future of our society.  Read the article and you’ll start to understand why, in addition to spades and gloves and trowels, I’m buying myself a black armband to garden in. 

Exhibit One, your honors:

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there. -Yasutani Roshi, Zen master (1885-1973)

…That’s a representational exhibit, mind you, since that saying or versions of it have been floating around literally for centuries now, and if you look you can find them everywhere from books to t-shirts to churches to the mouths of babes.

It’s a really common saying to run into…but how many of us have really heard it, for all that?

The “I’m in here, you’re out there” feeling is very, very fundamental to the usual human experience, I think.  I remember realizing it when I was about eight, and thinking, as I bet most people do, that what I’d found was a core truth.  Many years later, after much reading and pondering and yelling, I decided to agree with the Zen masters — the feeling of being separated from everyone else, everything else even, IS a delusion.  I won’t go into why, but the longer I work on the question, the more it seems like that has to be the answer.

But this is not a realization that I have real-ized (”made real”), so much as decided to agree with because, on balance, it makes more sense to me than the way I actually feel.  It’s a tough thing, to decide to believe that you’re delusional about something; it feels like stepping onto a dangerous plank, where you violate the evidence of your senses in favor of what works in the abstract, or in your guts.

Still, years later and I haven’t been talked out of my position yet — and it’s not that people haven’t tried!  I think I’ve come closer to actually real-izing the truth of the fundamental oneness of life (Life, actually, since if there’s only one of it, it’s a proper noun, yes?) — I’ve caught glimpses of it, with my senses as well as my mind, and it’s seemed more and more solid, and more right, the more I contemplate it.  But it seems to be one of those things that many people will just have to believe in first, and work to understand later.

That’s not usually an M.O. I’m okay with.  I mean, in this case the belief itself seems to be harmless (it only seems to inspire compassion, tolerance, etc.), or even helpful, so there isn’t much to object to; but in general, I don’t like pre-validated beliefs at all, at all. 

*sigh*

Some days it seems like the Universe is deliberately tailoring the challenges you get so they require the very hardest things you could be asked to do, doesn’t it??