Life in the Multiverse

Here we are, on the very first days of 2011.  How is it finding you?  Do you feel any different?  It's kind of like a birthday, the start of a new year - you think you'll feel older, somehow, maybe wiser or stronger or mysteriously "new," but you usually don't.  This year, however, seems to be delivering a marked "something different."  Standing on this edge, I find myself thinking deeper, feeling freer, embracing harder.  Everything feels like a possibility, like hope.  And yet, the ghosts hover ever closer.

I decided to give Notes from a Sentient a face lift for the new year - something to better reflect this new frame of mind.  Do you like it?  I'm satisfied with my choice.  It's brighter, more colorful and dynamic, and it has my tree.  Yes, that one, over there - the one without any leaves, like a thing standing between worlds, between the living and dead, between the real and the imaginary, and do we really know on which side we reside?  It's a question worth pondering.  I do it all the time.  

There are lots of things I wanted to talk to you about.  With the constant babble of New Year's resolutions flying around, I thought I might talk about addiction and breaking bad habits (from my own personal perspective, since that's all any of us really has), but that's another post.  This one will have to be about writing - not the how but the why.  Why writing instead of habit-breaking, as would be so much more apropos for this time of year? Because that's where my head is at.  Sorry for the abrupt change in subject and the misplaced preposition, but that's just how it is tonight.  It's all I can do.

I was driving and thinking earlier, pondering my story, the one I've been working on, off and on, for too long now - the one that just won't shut up, never goes away, but never seems any easier to write, for all of that.  My son's head was stuck in his new manga book and a long, dark highway stretched out before me, the radio muttering just loud enough to know what song was playing, but low enough to become background noise to my thoughts.  I went away, snagged again by that other realm. (It's so close to this one, it's almost an overlay - like a nearly imperceptible caul.)

This novel won't let me be.  I've tried writing other things when I get exasperated and feel stuck with the plot, but I can't seem to get into anything else.  I think this is my Big Story - not Big in a NY Times Best Seller List kind of way, but Big in a this will gnaw at you until it's written, until it's done, kind of way.  What's funny is that it's not even the most personal story I intend to write.  That story is down the road a bit (the irony of this statement is something most of you will never get).  But this one is telling me to write, poking and prodding and whispering incessantly.  

I believe most people are like that tree (yes, that one up there), existing between worlds.  We are alive, but we're dying even as we live, will be dead some day, and weren't alive (does that mean we were dead, or simply did not exist?) before we were born.  We can be conscious, yet our mind, our attention, can be in two places (or more) at once.  We could be driving a car, for example, down a dark strip of highway while simultaneously seeing and experiencing somewhere else, another world, one that could be a memory but is more likely a figment of our quite considerable imaginations.  And this imaginative place where ideas and dreams and stories and paintings and songs come from is also a place divided, existing in and from different realms.  Our imaginations, our stories, seem to be part past experience, part anticipated future, part hopes and fears, and part the out-of-nowhere-from-nothingness that gives rise to those thoughts and ideas which we can't explain.  Not comfortably, at least.  

I think this is a piece of the puzzle, one of the core reasons why we create, why, if we are writers, we write.  (Of course, if you're a painter or an architect or a musician, you create in those way - I think it all comes to the same.)  Because these worlds, all of these realities we exist in, must be paid homage to, must be expressed.

Do you ever feel that way?  As if some fictional character, some moment in your mind, some feeling or glimmer of insight, is going to push against the confines of your being until it finally gets out?  Some people say, "I felt like I would just burst if I didn't get it all out!"  

It is like that, isn't it?  Like a living entity trying to be hatched or freed.  We, their surrogates or their creators (the jury is still out on that one), we don't have any choice, do we?  

Mmm... (as one thought leads to another) but we do, don't we?    We have a choice.  We can ignore the imagination, the other realms that are speaking to us.  We can pretend we don't hear the voices, don't see the vision.  But we know what that means.  It means the death of the soul.  Art is self preservation.  It is the soul's struggle for survival - the only sustenance there is, the only chance.  The only difference between we, the creative people of the world, and those that don't seek a creative outlet, is that we understand this one simple fact.  Art is life.  Anything else is suicide.  Or voluntary zombieism - and when it comes down to that, is there really any difference?

Rain Driving Zen

I wrote this one on Monday, when I had a little time to appreciate the day.

I'd also like to note that the photo on the left is from  http://www.flickr.com/photos/houseofsims/3544875574/in/photostream/ via Creative Commons.  I'm not much of a photographer, so nearly all of the images I use here are borrowed from this site.  Now, getting back to it...

It's a good morning.  Contemplative.  The kind of morning when your thoughts are clear (if a little groggy) and you settle into a nice Zen place of accepting who and where you are.

You wouldn't think you'd find much Zen on the morning of your first dentist's appointment in literally years.  But my appointment isn't until 10:00 and I had to have my son to school by 8:00-ish, so I planned to use this gap to write.  Of course, my "plan" was primarily to work on my fiction story.  But after dropping off my son and driving halfway across town, my thoughts wandered (as always) and I felt a blog coming on.

I thought about a friend of mine to whom I had loaned a relatively decent chunk of cash about a year ago when she was further down on her luck (and health) than anyone should ever be and was in danger of losing her lights.  Now, I say loan, but I wasn't married to that money and let it go mentally when I let it go physically.  I could have gone my whole life without giving those dollars another thought.  But then, a couple of days ago, there in my mailbox was an envelope… with a thank you card… and a check… a year after the fact.  But she never forgot it.  I have such amazing friends.

I took some side roads on my way to the coffee shop, roads I don't typically travel, just for a different perspective.  It's a rainy, overcast day, and it occurred to me, not for the first time, that this town looks best against a backdrop of grey.  Maybe every town does (Lord knows I've seen enough of them), or maybe it's just me.  Maybe I can only really appreciate it without the sun's distracting glare.  On a grey, rainy day there isn't the contrast of light and shadow.  Everything, the houses, the leafless trees, the evergreens, get an equal chance to show off what they've got.

I thought about these two cool kittens I've met via Blogger.  I figure they're almost two in cat years, but they've blown me away with their insights and raw human honesty in a way that you just don't see everywhere else.  And I thought about how this chance connection has made my whole world a little brighter, given me hope, shown me there are still people out there that care about something, that are true of heart and spirit.  It's renewed my belief in kismet and caused me to marvel at how people can come together from across thousands of miles, drawn only by ideas and expressions and the power of their words.

And I thought about myself, where I am right now.  In my Zen state, I was able to watch myself for a moment and assess the situation without too much emotional haze obscuring my view.  I am standing on a precipice, about to jump off, and hoping that when I do my wings will appear, and, if they don't, that I at least managed to throw a chute on my back to save me.  Or that maybe the bottom won't be sharp, wicked crystal shards after all, and only cotton and marshmallows to catch me.  That would be ok.  But things are changing so rapidly, and it seems they're only going up, up, up, so I've been a little scared to look down from here.  There's a Zen saying (while we're feeling Zenish) that goes, "Leap and the net will appear."  That seems right… but it's ponderous.

Driving clears my head like nothing else.  Those who know me personally will understand the significance, and why there are times when a car feels more like home to me than any immovable building.  The rest of you will have to take my word for it.  Or perhaps you'll start to understand through my stories.  But I will tell you that roads are my thinking places.  And that drive was like medicine.
  
So I finally made it to the coffee shop.  The barista made my coffee just right (hazelnut latte with extra hazelnut), and he even made a pretty little leaf in the foam.  They have new artwork on the walls (always local and always for sale) that was right up my alley; all richly colored with whimsical owls and fantastical creatures and exotic designs that made the place feel draped in gypsy light.  And though I didn't (couldn't) buy any, I breathed in all their colors and held them in my mind, just happy to know they exist.  So many things in life are like that.  You don't have to possess them to be enlivened by them.  You just have to know they exist, and that knowledge makes everything ok.

If you made it all the way here to the end of this little journey with me, I'd like to ask you a question, because I feel we've grown closer and I'd like to hear your thoughts.  You don't have to tell me, but I would be so delighted if you did.  What makes you happy to know it exists?  What fills you up, just knowing this reality allows for it to be?  I'm so very eager to know.