I love Halloween. Do you? What has made you love or hate it? I seem to hear a lot of mixed feelings about this “holiday.” And it makes me reflect on what is it that makes me adore it so much. I’m not sure when my love for it began. Perhaps it was when, early on, it was an excuse to bob for apples and have parties with my school-age friends, eating and drinking whatever we wanted for once. Perhaps it was being raised Catholic, and the spectacle of Halloween was somehow a bit of accepted sin and mystery, wrapped in fiction and stories and movies and tall tales spun by bonfire and candlelight, one where being safely scared was highly guarded. Perhaps it was because it hearkens back to the night I lost my virginity on a porch in our neighborhood, both thrilling and taboo, where he quoted: “If the stars refuse to shine. I would still be loving you. When mountains crumble to the sea. There would still...be you and me.” Perhaps it was because my brother always had the best ideas for costumes and executed them with such aplomb for the both of us my whole life, even in college, that it sealed the everlasting awe I still have of him to this day. But perhaps, it is truly because it happens to fall in the month of change, where we watch each leaf take its leap into the unknown of this thing called death, and we see ourselves in each one of them. One by one, they each fall, some gracefully, accepting the inevitable respectfully, maybe even hopefully; and others, fighting to hang on long after their time is up, not going “gentle into that good night,” forcing us to ask ourselves if they’re fighting on purpose or if they simply don’t know what’s in store for them until they sit on the earth to be taken away with the wind to who knows where, they, our mirror image. And it makes us ponder why some people fight and grow and rise above strife in the same exact circumstances while others crumble and lash out and give up, our fates all the same in the end. Halloween is that one time a year, it’s about us. No obligatory presents or killing of perfectly vibrant trees or endless wrapping of paper to waste and clog and destroy our environment after. No obligatory family gatherings or meals or meaningless football games. No obligatory drives far out of the city to sit and gorge on things we hate and conversations we loathe, only to drive home miserable. But instead, perhaps it’s that we get to focus on just ourselves, mostly, selfishly for once, surrounded by like-minded individuals with the sole purpose of levity and kinship, and where we get to put on a mask and be someone we wished we could always be but were too afraid to…and reflect, that maybe, just maybe, this year, spring will be different.
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It’s that time of year. Halloween is upon us. That mischievous feeling (just how do you pronounce that word anyway?) is in our blood. We remember our childhood antics and everything seems to be in tune with what is about to happen. The wind is cool. The leaves are falling. And the branches brace for the change of time. And so do we. The other night I was driving, and the moon, a rather plump moon, more half than whole (I’m sure someone could tell me its phase), was playing a game of jump rope or hide ‘n’ seek or tag, lighting my way as I sped down the road, first bright on one side, then on the other, and I smiled big as it played its game with me, smiling its big smile back. I have these moments where I want to believe it’s my dad somehow, and it’s impossible not to when I think back to his tale: “Look. The moon is following you,” and for a moment, I remember a simple time, a time of childhood and carefree bliss. No bills. No worries. No fear of acceptance or success. Just simply one goal: To get that moon not to turn its back on me, to keep following me as we bumped along, not understanding how, no matter how far my dad drove, that moon still followed. I would prop my body around as best I could in the back seat the whole drive, craning my neck uncomfortably, to see if the moon was, in fact, still with me, ducking his face occasionally behind a building or a tree, causing my heart to race until Dad would yell: "There it is again." I was amazed by it. Enamored. Mystified. Felt special. And I believed...in magic. Nothing else mattered. Time gets us all to the same place, and the ride best be ridden with bright lights on our sides. A friend keeps telling me to pay attention to events and things that happen around me. That all of it collectively speaks to each one of us. I’m not sure I believe her. I’m a skeptic you know. But it’s hard not to notice when the weight of everything at once all add up, and we feel ourselves drowning; and then something like this happens, impossible to ignore. Perhaps it is simple coincidence. Does it matter? For in that moment, I remembered the feeling of unconditional love in the light of my dad’s memory, and all my troubles faded to jump rope with a moon. Do you believe in Karma? Whenever I get up to my lake house after a school year ends so I can exhale among the stars, my mind often goes to philosophical ideas. It’s hard not to when surrounded by the beauty up there and the quietude. There’s just so much about the universe we don’t understand, CAN’T understand. And why do we have to? There’s so much written about being in the moment, but of course we can’t just BE in the moment, because it’s too fleeting. The next moment has already started before we can be in it and ends before we can take our next breath and so it goes, over and over. But we can be MINDFUL in moments. We can be mindful in what we eat. How we treat ourselves and others. How we speak to ourselves. How we temper judgement. How we pause to think before we speak. I sit on the beach and try to do just that. I look around me, and I see so much beauty, this moment of sun on water that seemed as if I had faked the photograph, the glitter on the water so surreal it looked like a trick of the camera. It’s hard not to pause at moments like that. It’s funny how at that moment I snapped the picture, I was battling with a persistent spider, none too large, I might add, and I know most would squish it…but I didn’t and rarely can. So what? It’s a spider and tiny and who cares, right? But it lives. As do all insects, the mosquito the only one I wage war with. And so, I let it be and marvel at its tenacity and strength as I will a few minutes later with the industrious ants whose homes will soon be destroyed by summer laughter and excitement in dancing feet. I don’t know where or why I’ve grown to treat these infinitesimal creatures as if they’re human. I have a memory of a childhood friend’s mother who taught me about nature, who espoused often: “Spiders are our friends,” and I hear myself echoing that. No one had ever talked to me about those kinds of things before in my household. No one seemed much to care about that. Of course, there will be casualties, but my knee-jerk reaction isn’t to kill them. We need them more than they need us. For we are all connected with pollination and plants and oxygen and the whole lot of it. But I don’t do it out of some great cause or a belief in karma or fear that I might be a spider in my next life. No. And herein lies my question I posed at the beginning. Do you? Do you believe in karma? And does it only apply to humans in your view? I hear so much about karma. That what you do will come back 3x to us, as if that will somehow even the score and give us the motivation to do the “right” thing, to be kind. What a lovely thought to think, that if I just do right, good things are inevitable and even deserved. You can imagine, knowing me, what I think. I think it’s a load of rubbish. I don’t beat down those who believe that. Just as I don’t beat down those who believe in god or gods or whatever they have come to accept as true. But what I don’t like is that it presumes that when BAD things happen to people that it must be deserved. That’s the problem I have with these belief systems. They are so heavily unbalanced that it makes little sense to me. Certainly, the atrocities of the pasts, the Holocaust for example, tells us this simply is not so. And it bothers me. It bothers me a great deal, because people have tried to use those excuses to explain evil, even applying it in that case. And we’re better than that. I don’t care if there’s karma or a god or not. I live a life that feels right in my soul, in my conscience, in the pit of my stomach, my gut, whatever you want to call it. Whether I’m rewarded or not is of little consequence to me. I am not here to say I’m perfect. Please. Who is? But what I do believe is that there is intrinsic good that exists, outside of anything we can possibly understand, just as there is bad, not because of laws, but because it just IS. It has no beginning and it has no end. I feel it. And that’s all I need. I don’t care to understand or have answers to the rest. Instead, I think I’ll just be quiet, and continue to let this moment--head back, mind open, and face to the sun--be enough.
We all dream. That much is a fact. But do you remember your dreams? Do you write them down after? Do you think there is anything to them? Is it our subconscious surfacing, or as Freud said, our unconscious minds, that are giving us our deepest answers to our true selves? Or is it complete imagination that has no bearing on, or connection to, our ‘real” existence? Is it actually an alternate universe, where we live for as many hours a day as we allow ourselves to sleep? And what of nightmares, the ones where you wake up in a cold sweat, struggling for air and breath, remembering and not remembering? What the hell are they? As a child, I always had the same recurring nightmare until I outgrew earaches. Gruesome and frightening nightmares, I’d rather not talk about. And last night, I woke, panicked, to believe that my significant other was having an affair with…wait for it…Britney Spears’s sister, a la Zoey 101. Gasp! It felt so real, so true, I woke, breathless, ready to give him a piece of my mind, until I began to howl in laughter. Really? Zoey 101? What the hell goes on during slumber? We all know the childhood urban legends about falling in our sleep, that we’ll die if we crash and actually hit the ground. Or the grandmother who told us that guilt is the cause of vivid dreaming and nightmares. Or the dream dictionaries that have specific meanings attributed to specific things, like if your teeth are falling out in your dreams, x, y, and z are true. Or even more difficult to swallow, that perhaps we live out our past lives in our dream world, which then, of course, would beg the question of whether or not you believe in past lives. In an article from Psychology Today, it states that basically all this talk, from ancient Egyptian beliefs of mystical revelations to Freud and Jung espousing the secrets of ‘self’ to today’s ‘online dream dictionaries,’ has been deemed very unlikely, that while we think we can unlock “secret codes” to glean meaning into our dreams, essentially there is NO secret code, but instead that dreaming is rather random. What do I think? Like many things, I’m content to say I don’t know. I’m not ashamed either. When my mind really goes down the path to make sense of it, I start envisioning Richard Bach’s novel One, of myriad alternate lives we’re leading, each choice, a new path. Or I begin to think that we live two lives and do not know it, the one that is me right now, and the one in slumber. Or that we don’t exist at all really, but that we’re just energy with no beginning and no end. And then, my brain just hurts. What is wrong with just saying: I haven’t a fucking clue? And in admitting that, I can find a semblance of peace…just as long as I never have to dream about Jamie Spears again. 😊 For further reading, click here: www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/supersurvivors/201801/do-dreams-really-mean-anything
In The Nu Romantics the other day, this question was posed: If you were given an envelope with the time and date of your death inside, would you open it? Why? Why not? My knee-jerk reaction was, of course, “No,” harkening back to Julius Caesar’s famous quote: “Death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” But on further inspection, I realized that wasn’t true, not for me. Not at all. I’m not old. Not by societal standards. In fact, one may argue I’m still but a babe in the womb. But I’m not young either. Life’s experiences, responsibilities, they make us who we are. No two people are the same or see life the same way. Two people may look at the sunset and know it’s beautiful, aesthetically we may agree, but what of the person who doesn’t see color? What is his vision of it, who can’t see the orange and yellow and red like Nature herself had painted it just for our exhalation, where we sigh and believe for one infinitesimal moment that god exists? Is it the same as yours or mine? What of someone who has a memory that isn’t pleasant or had an experience tied to that moment of Nature’s story? No two lives are alike. And neither, then, is beauty. Almost everything we see is tied to experience. And that is very personal. If I had the opportunity to know death in an envelope, a necessary end to life, I would, indeed, open it. And here is the sad truth that, perhaps, on first reading the question, I didn’t want to admit. It doesn’t matter when. It will come. I get that. But I don’t often live my live as my imagination would have me, the way my dreams play inside my soul. I’m responsible. I’m loyal. And often, with it, comes obligations. Much of my life has been lived this way. What I realized after pondering this question, is not IF I would open it, but what I wished for it to say. What I realized is that I began to envision, hope, for what was inside, and the words I longed to read. Words that penned the story of the life I often wish I could lead but do not. Yes. Some may think this sad or pessimistic or depressing. Maybe it is. But it's nothing if not honest. I wished, for one brief moment, that the envelope I opened would tell me my time was drawing near. Selfish you may say? Yes. It is. It's not that I don't have happiness. I do. And would not change much of my life. But it' a safe one. For once, I'd like to live a little "un" safely. Alive. In the moment of only right now, where my heart is. Hop on that plane. Hold that forbidden lover in my arms. Skinny dip for hours without worry. Take a train without knowing where my long, extended leg's foot will touch. Never wear lipstick again. Visit and talk with people I have no language in common with. Sip wine and not worry about its cost. Stand on the top of a mountain, alone, and breathe in the air. Jump off a cliff. Spend my money. Look in the mirror and not utter a single, negative thought. Touch a rainbow.
Fear is a terrible thing. But it’s part of who I am and how I was raised. For once, yes, I’d like to just not care…I'd like to live, selfishly in one blissful moment of only right now, and see my life play as I often watch it in my mind. But I know, the truth is, I can't touch a rainbow. But the thought alone has made me smile. And for that, I am happy. Do you believe in ghosts? Why or why not? Has something personally happened to you that makes you feel the way you do? And if you do believe, what exactly do you think ghosts are? I watched a fascinating film last night: “A Ghost Story.” Has anyone seen it? It takes a very interesting approach to the idea of ghosts in a traditional visual but quite an existential non-traditional way. Besides one of the best endings I’ve seen in cinematic times, the idea of time is explored. We think so linearly about time: beginning, middle, and end, that to ponder it this way is intriguing. The way the director creates this is brilliant. And like any really good movie, it has stuck with me, as in, I keep coming back to it, its idea and content. I recommend it. In a fascinating article here by Live Science, they state: “If ghosts are real, and are some sort of as-yet-unknown energy or entity, then their existence will (like all other scientific discoveries) be discovered and verified by scientists through controlled experiments — not by weekend ghost hunters wandering around abandoned houses in the dark late at night with cameras and flashlights… In the end (and despite mountains of ambiguous photos, sounds, and videos) the evidence for ghosts is no better today than it was a year ago, a decade ago, or a century ago.” For the whole article, which is quite beautifully objective for a change, visit here: www.livescience.com/26697-are-ghosts-real.html My mother used to espouse the existence of ghosts. She had two stories. One is too personal to share. But one she would tell us as kids was about the house in which she grew up. Each night, she said, a little old lady took her hand and walked her to bed. Every. Night. She said she later discovered who he woman was through research and pictures. Nothing horrific or terrifying. Just a woman who lived there a hundred years ago. Could my mother have seen pictures somewhere she didn’t remember? Had she heard a story in her youth? Or was there in fact a ghost. I, myself, had a strange experience with a Ouija board. But the details are fuzzy, and I wonder to this day what really happened. Sometimes I wonder if I created the story from a real experience that, through embellishment and fabrication over the years, has blurred the truth of it. I’m honestly not sure. I don’t think I embellished at all. But to think otherwise, leaves me so baffled, I know of no other way. Even writing about it here frightens me.
I invite anyone to share their views with me. Personal stories. Stories shared with you. But I guess the big question is: Does it even matter? For either they exist or they don’t. And really, what does knowing do to change that? |
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I LOVE to write and read. I particularly enjoy reading erotic romance that has tons of emotion in it. I hope you will ask me questions and share your favorite authors and novels. I welcome all feedback.
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