Why are you so angry and afraid?

Accidents can happen...and they can be weird...and beautiful...catastrophic...and mythic. Three fates? Variation of Rublev's Trinity? Magic and mystery, sorcery and holiness, comedy and wisdom are all founded, sourced in the number three (as are past, present, future; beginning, middle, end). Fly Geyser in Nevada is the result of an accident---folks were digging a well in 1916. and this happened.

I had set today aside to go exploring...i simply need to hear myself think and, more importantly, feel. i have some questions (tools needed for digging) that don't have answers, perhaps, but that might provide lamp light to this current emotional path i have wandered onto. i hope to bring myself back into the balance of this listening to myself more intentionally, listening for and to the Voice i love.

so far this morning i chose to catch up on a few insights from Nadia Bolz-Weber. "Unable to pretend we are not in need," from October 1, was a providential place to start. Then "The Little Apocalypse: Superhero Showdown of Crumpled Time" carried even more of the ideas and questions buzzing my core (also a nod of recollection to T.S.Eliot---all time is eternally present; what has been and what will be are both perhaps contained in time present and time present contained in time past. that's from memory, don't hold me to word-for-word quotation, it's from Burnt Norton of the Four Quartets. looks like i'll have to dig that out, too).

took a break to eat some oatmeal and warm my cockles and everything else; i usually watch something specific on tv while i eat. yesterday i embarked on watching all of the eps of Doctor Who from the 12th Doctor (Capaldi)---another significant number in my realm of symbology. SO * MUCH * FUN to live in the open space of synchronicity. Anyway, i just happened to be up to the third, i believe, episode called, "Listen." Their adventure into the heart of listening to fear of the dark...it is a magnificent episode ("free" on Amazon Prime) and has opened a lovely TARDIS door into my own inner-exploration.

the episode is steeped in so many different ideas that resonate for me---particularly the dreaming. and i am reminded that listening to my own dreams will be as much an imperative part of this trek as anything else. i dream wild and crazy and significant stuff with story and images every single night. i have gone through phases of tracking those dreams and images; once again it is time to seriously take it on.

then when i opened the computer to get to the page upon which to begin writing today, the image of this Fly Geyser was the (i don't know the proper word for it) screen with the password window that has random images. this was the first time this image came up. i don't think it was this very image, but the image i did see clearly (and with romance in the composition of the shot) showed the three protrusions and i was immediately delighted by the sense of the Trinity Icon by Rublev as well as the mythology of the fates and so many stories involving three persons. and when i read just a smidgeon, it was too funny---digging a well, accidentally tapping into thermodynamic watchiedoo and creating this phenomenon in 1916 that still blows water today. Strikes me as a fair companion image.

i love synchronicity. magic and mystery of things that come together as you listen to the inside and outside of being. i always like to get started on a journey early so this was quite a prolific morning. it remains to be seen how faithful i will be to return to the well-spring hidden in my soul and imagination in the coming days.

it sounds schmaltzy to pose the question that i've typed and erased three times (yeah, i know--"three" again, but it's true) because asking this question in this platform sounds stupid ... the truth is i would go to each of you, my friends, and ask you face to face and facebook or this blog for all its cool advantages and possibilities doesn't really let that happen unless you "tag" someone so that's why a sincere and personal question on this platform can come off sounding kinda hokey. but i really do wish you'd also write and share what you're looking for in 2018. i'm listening.

may 2018 bring you many blessings and delightful surprises (even those that are cloaked in sorrow, loss or pain i hope will bring those unexpected joys)....

between death and resurrection october 4

100414  Emotional bombs keep exploding at the sight of things I’d forgotten.  Why do I weep?  Does it matter? I weep.   Dad, dead now only five months.  Like yesterday and forever alive but I can’t reach him or talk to him or roll my eyes when he hangs up the phone without saying goodbye.  Except for that one time just before we had to move him to hospice, I got home from a visit, they live three hours away, and I called him to say I’d arrived home safely and we chatted about how wonderful the weekend was (as we always do) and then in childlike fun we exchanged all kinds of goodbyes—his voice, my dad’s of all my life so familiar so right so him, but in light-heartedness so rare for a man so serious—we played with, exchanged, all the different words for bubye...see you later alligator, tata for now, ciao, ciao bella, so long, see you next time, it’s been real, sianara, toodloo, adios amigos, bubye...and it went on for awhile and I was giggling and he chuckling, so great to hear joy in his voice, and mama was in the background saying, “Jerry!  Hang up the phone now!”  Dad and I were gloriously stuck in some delightful spin of timeless, spaceless connection that of course now is weighted down with all the grief of time violently chiseling away at such precious moments of being and connection, forever here separated by a violent, traumatic death that quickly followed that call.  It keeps roaring back at me like the relentless ocean waves storming onto the beaches of my memory and I can’t swim there any more.

Now Mama stands in her new, smaller, more cost efficient “garden apartment” sorting through for the third time in as many months, what she treasures.  This last time she sorted without me and so I picked up boxes labeled “for Kim or for garage sale” (my friend and I and others are having a garage sale next month).  This morning, back at my house, I opened one box she’d filled and in it, carefully wrapped, are the blue delft plates she so dearly loves from Holland they bought when they traveled there, permanent fixtures in every kitchen since, emblems of my youth and the certainty of a loving, mostly stable family and there they are in a box labeled “for Kim or for garage sale” and the whole world again crashes down on my heart and soul and it’s like the earth opens and swallows me into the shards of no longer being. And I hear echoing mama’s voice last weekend as she stands in her new, smaller, more efficient “garden apartment” say, “I just don’t really care about any of it any more.  I’m over it.  I look at things I’ve loved for so long and I’m just over it. Is that horrible?”  I don’t remember what I answered (didn’t know she meant my childhood, our whole lives together, surely she didn’t mean that exactly) probably responded that it might just be the numbness of so much grief and loss happening all at once that this is kind of a defense mechanism.  I’ll keep everything for you, Mama.  Maybe one day soon you’ll want it back.

Then again maybe not.

As keeper of the treasure I feel the weight of all who have gone before more profoundly than ever.  I have furniture and wall hangings and treasures with rich, variegated stories, swords and knives from all over the world, figurines and plates and, plateware, a window from Mama Ruth’s house, Chinese praying Jesus from Mema’s house, quilts from grands I never met, a village carved from a single piece of mahogany three feet long, and I can’t let go of any of it because I want my Dad back.