Moments of Madness

It's strangely fascinating how an idea can haunt me for long periods of time. This blog post is the child of one such incredibly long pursuit.

For years, I've been in the habit of thinking of life as a series of moments. Well, obviously, you may be thinking, but let me explain. Life is not just a series of moments. It's a series of decisive moments. Not just " will I wear socks today,"  but " will I say this thing that could change a life?"

A series of turning points, if you will.

One such turning point was the time I stood in a music store, my hoarded allowance grasped tightly in one hand, holding Carrie Underwood's first CD in my hand. Had I decided that music was more important to me than the latest Polly Pocket, I might be a country fan today. As it was, I really wanted Polly's dream  house, and thus it was that the first album I ever bought was Dark Side of the Moon.

Every once in a while, there comes a time when eventualities diverge, possible outcomes differ greatly based on one simple choice. A turning point could be as simple as delaying college for a year, or as important as quitting a job. So you stand at the crossroads of your life, and have to ask yourself " where next? "

In my life, these moments have generally been similar to the first time I went on a high ropes course. The course was great up until the point I needed to jump across what was probably no more than a two foot gap. However, those two feet happened to be between 25 and 35 feet in the air, so I perceived the gap as significantly greater than it was.

Don't laugh. 25 feet is very high for someone who fears heights. Why said person was on a high-ropes course is a matter for a different post.

Back to the point, though. I've always seen my turning points coming from a long way off. As they draw close, I start to imagine what my body would look like at the bottom of the 25 foot drop. It gets closer and closer, and now I think I can't make that leap. By the time I reach it, I stand on the edge with my toes dangling into space and think to myself " there's got to be a better way across."

At this point, I do my best to weasel out of making the jump. This generally involves enormous amounts of backtracking, all so that this indecisive person can avoid making a life-altering decision. Ironically, this is also a life-altering decision - it just involves a larger amount of energy to reach it.

The reason I call these moments of madness is because most of the truly life-altering decisions are risky in some way or the other. Pushing back college by a year to travel and do missionary work is risky - who knows what you may be sidetracked into? What if you never return, and never get a degree or a job?

Quitting your unfulfilling job to pursue a passion is risky - what if you give up your opportunity to the all-important American Dream? What if you never hold a steady job as a result?

Going traveling in middle age or a road trip as a teenager - any of those moments will make you walk out of life-as-you-know-it. And the thing about life-as-you-know-it is that there's no going back, and there's never a truly convenient time to abandon it. There is always a good reason to stick with the status quo. There is always something to hold you back.

Thinking about all the moments I've missed by using this technique is, frankly, more than a little depressing. That is why I'm not going to talk about actual moments, but rather philosophy. If you don't want to talk about something, just use big terms and no one will be able to understand what you're actually driving at.

So, as previously stated, my general philosophy is one of avoidance. This should hardly be surprising, given that I tend to operate under a policy of avoidance as a matter of course. But also unsurprisingly, there are other options.

Option one is to leap without looking. In a world dominated by the extrovert ideal, this option is often presented as the" best" choice. We're going to die young, so forget the consequences and go do it! You only live once!

Option two is what more people in my community are supposed to believe: namely, risks are not worth taking, look before you leap and then run away. Caution is the name of the game. Do the Hard Thing and choose responsibility. Teenagers aren't meant to have fun, young adults have no excuse.

I'm not, by nature, a cautious person. My parents have frequently observed what they politely term "a sense of urgency" in the way I prefer to go about things. In one of those rare cases of nature and nurture being at complete odds, my parents raised me to be thoughtful and to weigh the risks of things rationally. Combined with the philosophy of option two, this manifested itself as a total unwillingness to try risky things.

The thing about moments of madness is that they are often necessary to reach our destiny. One is not mad simply for the thrill of the thing (though thrill is, by no means, to be overlooked), but rather for the possibilities awaiting on the other side.

Can you tell I've been reading Paul recently?  I can. :)

But anyway, moments are there because the potential of a life forever changed is not actually a bad thing. I would argue that a disruption to the status quo is desirable, even necessary. One of the things that had been stressed here in Perth is that God didn't have a boring life planned for us. The comfort of a middle-class life may seem desirable in the long run, but wonders rarely occur inside our safety zones.

If anything, when that madness overtakes us, we should stop, look, and then take a flying leap into the unknown. Because ultimately, it's not so important if the distance was two feet or twenty - it's whether you we're willing to break a few bones.

A little light journey-work

I was feeling mildly ambitious tonight, so I borrowed a housemate's guitar and tried a cover. I've become one of those people. So sue me.

Watch "Starlight - Muse cover" on YouTube

Leave it unspoken

I was going to start this post by telling you that I was thinking about something a lot. But then I realized that I start all my posts like that recently. So I did the meta thing and told you how I was going to start this post as the start of my post.

When in doubt, meta.

But anyway. The particular thinks have been about words, and the conundrums associated with them. These thinks have come to mind because, given the time difference between the west coast of the USA and the west coast of Australia, there is such a short window of time where my family and friends are awake while I am that I have increasingly resorted to the written word to communicate with the ones I love.

Written language is a marvel. The fact that a series of symbols can communicate an idea will blow your mind if you think about it too long. The fact that I can communicate with someone on the opposite side of the world using electronic representations of those symbols even more so.

I use the symbols to represent intangible thoughts, concepts, experiences, ideas, dreams, emotions. If I do it correctly, a little bit of me enters those symbols, those written words, so that the recipient can recognize my voice through the text.

My voice.

Do you remember the first time you heard a recording of yourself speaking? I still haven't reconciled my inner ideal with the less-impressive actuality.

But voices. With my voice, I can imbue words with more meaning than a literal definition. With my voice, I convey emotion. My voice is the best tool I have to tell someone " I love you."  It's the best way to say " we need to talk." It's the best way to say " I miss you,"  " you are valuable,"  " this is really cool,"  " you'd love this! " " let's grab coffee."

Because no matter how marvelous the written word is, it is dry and sterile compared to the living vocabulary of interaction.  To write any of the above phrases would convey the essential idea. But there are no undertones, no hints or secrets or promises, to the written word. Novelists have devoted millions of pages of words trying to capture the unspoken potential of a word unsuccessfully.

We invented emoticons in attempt to fix the emotional desert of words, but even these fall short.

:)

:) cannot capture the glimmer in the eye, the smile licking its lips in the corner of a mouth, the biting of a cheek or the sticking out of the tongue. It represents the ironic smile, the flirty smile, the teasing smile, the innocent smile of delight. But it also represents none of them. :) is merely a symbol that just barely scratches the surface if subtext and context.

If these symbols are so inadequate at capturing a true relationship between thoughts and people, it stands to reason that maybe, just maybe, there are times when it is best to simply leave things unspoken. Why risk distorting the meaning, losing significance like the Hindenburg lost helium, when the voice is so vital to the message?  Is it not best to treasure those ideas and feelings for a time when they can be spoken? 

There is a beautiful ambiguity to the spoken language. The cadences of speech, the pauses and little speeds, the soft and loud. All serve to convey meaning to my recipient. When once I entrust the mere words to paper, however, they lose all ambiguity and since they were never spoken, can never be unspoken. Black symbols on white paper are absolute. They are not ambiguous, only unclear.

But at the same time, are there not ideas better said poorly than never said at all? Even a poor representation is better than none. Should I be silent because I'd prefer to leave you in the dark than give you a glitchy, pirated impression of what I would say were I there?

And on the third hand, how do I know the words would come more easily through my voice than through my fingertips?  Symbols are a poor substitute for an interaction, but can I truly know if the difficulties result from the medium?

Like stated earlier, I have been thinking about it a lot. I am no master of words, and as of yet, there is no easy answer.

Which means that until the rest of the world gets Skype, I'll be left wondering.

;)

A deeper, darker, [ocean] green

I think I fell in love today. This afternoon, I was introduced to the ocean. While we have met briefly in comfortable social environs, today was no such casual encounter.

The wind was gnawing at the shore, throwing sand and small children against me as I stepped off the bus. Over the crest of the hill, I could hear, or rather feel, the sound of Amphithrite breathing. A tough, ragged sound heavy with dreams and lullabies.

And as I reached the crest if the hill, I understood why so many artist have been inspired by the sea. It didn't roll or crash or lap. It simply advanced with the power of a butterfly's wings. Endlessly, capriciously, ever-changing but ever-minded, the ocean defies even now my attempts to describe that which has beguiled me.

I went to introduce myself, but was dismissed before making the slightest inroads. Undeterred, I tried again, and again, until I was more attuned to the endless motion. The more I tried, the less success I achieved. Amphithrite, it seems, is jealous, permitting no competition to its power. The waves caressed and pummeled me until I could take no more.

But even from the shore, safe from the stings and blows of the endlessly advancing waves, I was entranced. The motion, the mercurial temperament, the horizon stretching into a haze in the distance, the depths of the water and the power contained therein, the possibilities and the dreams and the momenta to be seized all came crashing into me as I stood on a stone at the edge of the sea and stared at the waves.

There is nothing like vastness to remind one of one's smallness. For that moment, I was sailing away from my old conceptions and conceits.

The sea restores, and frightens, and inspires, and uplifts, and ensures that man can never think too highly of himself. For no matter how hard you try, you will never be greater than that ocean.

I thought I knew that the ocean was a deep, dark green, but it was beyond my wildest imaginings. It is deeper, darker, an ocean green where the waves are both wilder and more serene. Do you understand?

Because I'm not sure I do.

The Subjugation of Identity

Been thinking about this a lot lately. It doesn't have much to do with a lot of other thinks I've been thinking. I guess that makes it semi-unique.

As I've been preparing for the trip, I've been pondering the idea of personality and significance. It seems to me that idolatry could be defined in identifying yourself with a false, external standard. Before you jump on me for that statement, let me explain.

When I was in speech and debate,a large part of the way I identified myself was that I was in speech in debate. Lady J Whimsy, extraordinary homeschooled forensic in a world full of ordinary teens. What made me extraordinary was not my skill in speech, but rather the fact that I did it at all. This identifier quickly became problematic when once I was done competing.

Or more recently, it was Lady J Whimsy, missionary anticipate. I was the one leaving for six months. This also was problematic when I reached Perth, where everyone had left friends and family behind.

Or take a rich man from near my old job. He drives a Mercedes-Benz, throws money around like he owns it, and surrounds himself with the equally prosperous. If, hypothetically, this man were to lose his fortune, he would have a wee little identity crisis trying to cope with his new situation.

The identity crisis. The day you wake up and realize you're not the person you thought you were, hoped you were, wanted to be. When you realize that what you thought made you unique was imaginary, irrelevant, obsolete. When you're self-worth comes crashing down around you're ears, where do you turn to?

In all likelihood, yourself. You go to find yourself. You introspect, or you flee it entirely.

But wherever you find your self-identity, it's still idolatry. If your value comes from your job, your boyfriend, your conservative politics or your skill as a debater, you are committing idolatry.

Why? Because we are fearfully and wonderfully made by an omnipotent Creator who designed us by hand. To say that anything beside our identity as God's creation, imago dei, gives us value us to say that God's word is insufficient. That His love isn't good enough, that He isn't truly omniscient. After all, if God can be wrong about your value as a person, He can be wrong about anything.

I've been thinking about another reason we seek validation from something other than God's promise that He loves us.

I would submit, dear reader, that a part of us is terrified of our identity in Christ. If we truly have been crucified with Christ, if it truly is Christ dwelling in us and not our self, then are we truly ourselves?

Why would God say to abandon all the things we hold dear, those things that we choose to identify with, if we really were fearfully and wonderfully made?

Why would God create me and then call me to be someone else?

Truth be told, this post really isn't for you. I strive to be honest, and this is for my benefit, not yours. I am desirous to subjugate my identity to the cross, but I am terrified of the consequences. Will I be myself at the end of my tempering? Will my ness still exist?

The only thing I've come to is this: God created me to glorify Him. That includes my sense of humor, my ill-timed comments, my eclectic taste in music. All of it is ultimately His, and when He calls me to empty my backpack full of junk, dreams and ambitions at His feet, it's not that I or my baggage is useless. It's because He wants to use them too.

I heard this analogy one time. That my ness is like a reed with those little fuzzy things and syrup inside it. That I should empty that stuff so that the Holy Spirit can move through me uninterrupted, but that cleaning will preserve who I truly am.

It is frightening, being in a program whose two goals" to know Him and make Him known" call me ever upward. I am both drawn to and frightened of that call I hear from higher up the mountain pass.

Come, trust your dreams on the altar. Give up your aspirations and desires, your false vanity and false identity, your fears and hopes and future.

Because while I know, intellectually, that they are safer in His hands, I just haven't gotten there yet.

Whimsy

Dichotomy//Redux

I'm finishing my first day in Australia. It is ten pm. Today has been two parts wonderful to one part bittersweet. Really, that's how life generally goes, but it is especially pronounced here in the land down under.

Numerous times I have caught myself thinking " oh, person [x] would so love this!" and then realize that said person is living a different day than I. Cassandra would love my singing Kiwi room mate. Lady Specs would be grand with Ash-Bob. There's a ravenbiutside my window - Escapist and Argentum would have choice things to say. Thursday would get on with Liza, the black belt in karate, tvtropes reading, Joss Whedon appreciator who loves talking about everything and watching Pixar. Which means Raymond wouldblike her too. It's more than a little surreal.

I was thinking today about how physical warmth can affect us so greatly. Humans may not be cold blooded, but there is a certain comfort, mental and physical, that comes with warmth. Mayhaps I feel it more keenly ( once I poured a glass of water from the refrigerator and swore it was warm), but physical comfort can do strange things to a body.

I feel like I don't think as much in the warmth, since I don't need to preoccupy my thoughts with not thinking about how cold it is.

I miss the cold. It has only been two days, but I miss 30°F weather. It was 82° today, and that was cool compared to what is forecasted for the weekend.

I'll be posting my first impressions of  Down Under over on Riding Thermals tomorrow. Probably.

Until then, friends, stay sharp and cold! ;)

Monuments Beneath the Arbor

 The first time they tell you that the world's turning you just can't quite believe it because everything looks like it's standing still. I can feel it. The turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour. And the entire planet is hurtling around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour and I can feel it. We're falling through space, you and me. Clinging to the skin of this tiny little world and if we let go...

If you haven't gathered by now, I'm rather fond of the Decemberists. Of course, by "rather fond" I actually mean ready and willing to bellow rough approximations of their wondrous melodies whenever and where ever possible. Shower, bus stop, trails, it makes no matter. There is always a Decemberists' song to fit the occasion. While I am especially fond of their album The Hazards of Love, their most recent album is mayhaps my second favorite. Or maybe it's actually Picaresque. Or what about The Crane Wife? Not being able to decide on my favorite album by one of my favorite groups is such a first world problem.

But anyways. The King is Dead. It came out in 2011, and while I've been listening to it year-round for almost two years now, I still somehow associate it with the change of summer to autumn. This is mostly the fault of "Don't Carry it All." You can go listen to it here while you finish reading. This song sounds golden and orange and brilliant blue and brown all at once. It hints at the death of a moment, the rebirth of something new, and our endless track around the sun.


Here we come to a turning of the seasons,
Witness to the arc toward the sun...

I have three days left in my corner of the world. Three days to go walking in the rain, to shiver when the lurking chill catches up to me, three days to soak in as much of my old life as I can. I say "old life" because, as I've mentioned before, January 1st, 2013, marks a monumental shift in the direction of my life. I have no idea what may await me. I don't know if I'll like what I find. And I know, for certain, without a hint of doubt, that I will miss you all.

We are all travelers, if not through space then at least through time. Right now, I am living in a state of apprehension. Everyone's path is different, and I don't want our paths to diverge, never to meet again. I'm apprehensive that my new traveling companions will not replace what I'm losing for six months. I'm apprehensive that my new traveling companions will replace what I'm losing. I don't like change - what was I thinking to get myself into this?

If I'm really honest with myself, though, I have been operating under a delusion. There is no "status quo." There is no comfortable state of being that will continue in stasis while I am away. There is no true "here" to return to. The past few months, I've been pulling the wool over my own eyes, avoiding bringing my friendships to cross-roads where changes could occur. And yet, last night (at what was essentially my  last public encounter) I realized that such tipping points have happened without my knowledge.

We all travel through time, and there is no stopping the clock. Much as I would like to freeze moments in time - walking through the waning summer day with friends, caroling in a sketchy area of town, sitting around a campfire listening to my beloved friends havering - those moments will never happen again except in my memory. And combined with those moments of warmth are the regrets. Things I've said or haven't, people I should have reached out to, opportunities that should have been seized. Memory is imperfect, memory is joyous and painful and bittersweet and it frightens me that, come July, I will have memories which you are not in.

We're falling through space, you and me. Clinging to the skin of this tiny little world and if we let go...

For [s]he did not know that beyond the lake [s]he called home lies a deeper darker ocean green, where waves are both wilder and more serene. 

 I'm facing an ocean whose far shore I cannot see. A great unknown, but unlike others that I've faced before, I have no companions to face the dark at my side.  Behind me are the lights and fires and warmth and comfort of home, familiarity and family and friends all keeping each other company on this cold night in the lonesome December.

You could say I've gotten my wish. I am climbing, higher, higher than I've ever dared before. And I cannot look down, I cannot look back. If stop now, I may never have the courage to continue. This is a one way rollercoaster that only goes up - but only so long as I don't look down.

Oh, my friends, I will miss you so! I will miss you like skin misses the warmth of sunshine. I have been so blessed to sojourn with you, and my biggest regret is that we have not the time. I am a creature made for eternity, and this accursed temporal nature is foreign, uncomfortable.

Winter is coming. The cold has well and truly caught me. I can feel it in my bones, in my core, in my soul. It is invigorating, lively, killing my apathy and forcing me higher. But the cold also chases away warmth. And I'm caught between the two, loving and despising them at the same time. If I remain in the warmth, I start my descent into the valley of maturity, apathy, and complacency. If I let the cold embrace me and run away across the deeper, darker ocean green, what I leave behind is more than just a handful of family and friends - I leave behind a sizeable chunk of myself. The trail winds ever higher, alluring and frigid and beckoning me come further up.

But at what cost? These currents are pulling me in toward shore, out to sea, but through it all, I can hear the cry of the gulls. Come on and wade out into the water, for you're drowning on dry land.

The water is tugging at my ankles, rising and hinting at uncertainties. As I looked back one last time last night, I committed to memory all that will be left behind, but not discarded.

So, friends, compatriots, co-conspirators, lovelies, raise your glasses with me.To days gone by, and to turnings of the season. To winter's fall, to summer's freckled knees, to deeper darker oceans and to letting go, to traveling gypsies and the mountain passes.

Kind friends and companions, come join me in rhyme
Come lift up your voices in chorus with mine
Let us drink and be merry, all grief to refrain
For we may and might never all meet here again

Whimsy.

A piece of unimportant news

Hello again. It's nice to see you all again. I apologize for the failure of posts in the past few weeks. What with the packing, the cooking, the planning of parties, the working, the trying to record a college audition, the losing of minds and the reconnecting with old friends, I haven't had the time nor interest to blog.

You see, it's awfully redundant to blog about something you've already talked about with someone in real life.

Well, my lovelies, I have six days left in the States. Six days. You read that correctly.

I'll be abroad for six months, and expect to have plenty of exciting adventures and challenges during my absence. However, I don't want to burden followers who read for my thoughts with the relatively inane "Today I tried [x] exotic food and thought [y]." For that reason, I'm popping over here to let you know - I am opening a second blog for my traveling experiences, while keeping this one full of pure and unpolluted Whimsyness.

Sounds like fun?

The blog can be found here: http://ridingthermals.blogspot.com/

I might update It's Raining this weekend. But then again, I might not. Who knows?  My next thoughtful post could very well be from Down Under.

There's a Place

I know we come to,
There's a field somewhere,
There are many ways to take you,
I will meet you there.

Kind readers, you may recall that over this summer, I read a particular book three times in the course of two weeks. That book, The Fault in our Stars, makes quite a few good observations. However, the one that stands out to me today us about the nature of intimacy.

Throughout the book, Hazel Grace and her friend Augustus have many conversations on the phone. Not those awkward, I just called you and now have nothing to say conversations, but the sort that feel as if both conversants have somehow meet in a third location, separate from the two physical locations they occupy. The sort of conversation where they can say a single word that speaks volumes. The sort of conversation that cannot be forced or recreated by design.

A dialogue, if you will.

I've been listening to a band called Brother a lot recently. You could say they are an independent band. You could say they embrace the ugly ducklings of music. You could call them Celtic, and none of these would be inaccurate. For those of you not in on the secret, Brother specializes in tribal fusion: didgeridoos and bagpipes have never sounded so good with electric guitar and a synthesizer.

Here's what you need to do right now: follow this finely crafted link to the Brother website, and when the automatic player pops up, click through until it plays A Thousand Ways. Listen to the song, then pass go and collect a thousand dollars for your good taste in music.
I'll wait for you, don't worry.

...

...

Back?  Congratulations, you are now officially a mongrel.
A Thousand Ways talks about a universal place existing outside of the purely physical realm that is open to all who wish to enter. Don't believe me? Go back and listen to it again. That'll do.
Now, it's entirely plausible they are speaking of something entirely different, with more to do about the continuance of the human species, but it is important to remember that in the realm of art, the meaning the listener ascribes to a piece is just as valid as the creator's intent, if not as accurate.
This song reminds me of the egalitarian nature of ideas. The great equalizer is not the government. It's not tolerance. It is found at the cross, but it can also be found in a discourse.


You may recall my post from a few weeks ago, covering a range of topics from community to conversations. Remember, dear friends, that I am a glutton for good conversation. In this particular post, I spoke briefly of the way the I feel after a good conversation. There is a sort of liveliness, energy, and exuberance that follows such a rousing discussion. Being the person I am, I have not rested until I've come up with a  good enough theory to explain this unusual phenomenon. And here's what I think.

In life, we face many inequalities. Inequality of money is the first that comes to mind, but there are others. While some in the public school system may say otherwise, there is a definite inequality in intelligence. This is not to be judgemental or eugenic in any way, but it certainly true that some people have the capacity for higher levels of thought than others. For instance, I could never replicate the sort of hypothetical thinking that led Einstein to formulate his theories of relativity.

There is inequality of beauty - some people can clearly be acknowledged as good-looking, while others are ... not. Inequality of personality or likeability, or how popular people can make themselves. Inequality of social skills, as demonstrated by the people who feel comfortable interacting with a variety of others.

And then there's inequality of confidence.  How confident am I in the person that I am? Now, make all the jokes you want about insecure female bloggers, but I definitely fall into that category. Not entirely, but there is definitely a part of me that is insecure. But then again, who in this planet isn't? The wonderful and mind-blowing GK Chesterton once observed that the only people who truly believe in themselves are the mad men.

But I digress.

We face inequality wherever we go, whether it's in fortune or favor or fascination or fate. Point being, there is always some reason to feel unworthy. There will always be someone more beautiful, more intelligent, more charismatic, more influential than you are. Where things get funny is that for some (literally) unearthly reason, humans rebel at the notion that we are not equal.

That's how you run into entitlement mentality, that the world somehow OWES you something because of how you look or where you were born or how much money is in your bank account. It's our attempt to validate our own experience. We want to be equal, even though in this broken planet, it's impossible.

Let me take you on a short trip into philosophy. In Ancient Greece, there was a smart guy called Plato. Now, Plato was a professional philosopher - funnily enough, philosophers earned a living in Greece by teaching the rich's children the arts of rhetoric and reason. So Plato wrote a lot of books on philosophy, and in one of them he brings up what we now call The Analogy Of the Cave. Note those capital letters.

A gross oversimplification of The Analogy Of the Cave goes like this. Say a man has lived his whole life chained facing the wall of a deep, dark, dank cave. Behind the man are objects that cast shapes onto the wall of the cave that the man constantly looks at. Now, the man in the cave would know only one reality: he certainly sees objects, and they appear to be the ultimate reality to him. However, what he sees are only the shadows of their real selves.

Say the man were to escape from his bonds. When he turns around, he would be startled to discover that the shadows on the wall were NOT ultimate reality as he formerly supposed, but actually rough representations of the true Ultimate Reality. That he's been living in a sort of Shadowland the entire time, but never knew it.

Sound familiar, anyone? Remember, Paul was a classically educated Roman citizen. For now we see through a screen darkly...

But back to the point. The point is this. Ideas exist outside of our physical lives the way the objects in the cave existed out of the man's personal experience. We are influenced by them, and may even think we've discovered them. Ultimately, though, we all are as new-comers in the realm of Platonic Ideals. No one can truly be said to have an edge when it comes to ideas. True, one may have discovered more of them for oneself, but that is meaningless when another discovers the same idea.

For example, a friend and I were talking recently when said friend started describing what was termed the "Universality of Ideas and Metaphors." On closer inspection, the friend had basically described the whole concept of Platonic Ideals without ever having heard of The Analogy Of the Cave before. This was an exciting conversation, because while I had already discovered what this friend was describing, the friend was still grasping onto its significance. And as my friend talked, I started thinking about Platonic Ideals in an entirely different reason.

I feel like I'm not explaining this well, so I'll try it in a different way.

Conversations make me feel warm and fuzzy and covered in Ewok hugs because they are truly equalizing: No one can be said to have a really important inequality in a conversation. True, someone may have more or less information than the other, a conversation is an exchange. It's a dialogue. A discussion. A give-and-take that flows like the tides and can never be duplicated. You can never lose in a conversation; you can grow and be challenged and forced to change. But you can never exit a discussion and say "Wow, I feel so bad about myself because I now know something I didn't know before."

There's a place I know we come to, because I've been there before.

There's a thousand ways to take you, and we will meet there under the stars glittering in the heavens and listen to the ululations of the didgeridoos as we clutch mugs of tea to ourselves and discourse until the dawn starts sweeping the eves of the sky.

I Confide in Wolves at Night

Ever since posting about my recurring nightmare, a certain part of my brain has been working overtime, trying to figure out some form of damage control. After all, you can't just end a post with "Yes, I'm a sick person" and then expect to have any followers the next day. So here's my explanation for why I find this nightmare so intriguing.

Let me preface this by saying that I am not a brave person. I've read plenty of books about plucky young heroines, captured by the Supreme Evil Bad Guy, "enhanced-ly interrogated" for information, who somehow gather the nerve to say bitingly witty and hilariously sarcastic one-liners in face of ongoing pain. "Hey, I think you missed a spot. There's some room here in my leg." Or the lovely young sidekick who tracks across the whole of the Universe with an epic Gentleman Adventurer, getting into scrapes and out of them just fine - and not always with the help of the main character. Or the girl who gets an adrenaline makeover - frumpy and nerdy before the fight, but in moments of crisis, she suddenly reveals unknown powers of awesome and, as it turns out, an unexpected hotness upgrade.

... Yeah, that's not me. I find the prospect of physical pain frightening - I would be talking before they knew the questions. While my persona may be of a self-controlled young lady, I know the truth. I am much more breakable than I would care to be. I am weak.

The reason that I find my nightmare fascinating is because it traps me between the person I am and the person I want to be. 


Like most recurring dreams, it comes with multiple iterations. I've already told you about the most common- in the warehouse, by myself, trapped into a predetermined outcome that I am too frightened to fight. The scary aspects are easy enough to identify: being hunted, the intense pain that comes before the end, the alien nature of the Wolf Pack, and the most of all, the Mist. But "scary" doesn't make a dream a nightmare. A nightmare is truly terrifying - the intense, sociopathic, true-born son of fear.

Fear is watching "The Thing" late at night in the winter. Terror is waking up to find the Thing physically in your room. Fear is imagining what Gollum looks like. Terror is discovering Goll -- I mean my brother -- crawling over the foot of your bed muttering about twisting neckses. Fear can occasionally be entertaining; Terror is the clammy feeling of millions of wet spiders dancing on your spinal cord.

What is truly terrifying in my nightmare is how I effectively become a passive observer in my own dream.

One of the most pivotal moments of the dream are the events surrounding the finding of the Vivacious Friend. The one that the Fog ate. The one in physical suffering who is no longer a person. This friend is technically vital, but not truly alive. This moment is perhaps the most terrifying in the entire nightmare, because this is the point I become powerless in the dream. Effectively, I become two persons in the dream - what I'll refer to as Dream-Me and Lucid-Me. Dream-Me is the one moving, running, acting. Lucid-Me is the voice in Dream-Me's head screaming that this is the wrong move, the wrong way to run, the wrong action.

As I said, this moment is terrifying because as Dream-Me stumbles upon the Vivacious Friend, Lucid-Me knows exactly what will happen, and has already started screaming. Dream-Me, in an attempt to relieve the Vivacious Friend's suffering and stop the Friend's eyes from haunting Dream-Me's thoughts, attempts to kill the Vivacious Friend. Lucid-Me, the part that knows this is wrong, has absolutely no power to stop it. In my dream, I can only watch myself. I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.

Occasionally, Dream-Me leaves the Vivacious Friend alone, but then the Wolf Pack catches up to my trail and finds the Friend. You know what happens next.

In a dream, time is more open to interpretation, though not negotiation. It loops back on itself or jumps erratically between events. Whichever poor decision I make with the Friend, dream-time replays it over and over again, subtly changing the scene everytime into worse and worse outcomes. 

This iteration is horrifying because of my complete, utter helplessness. I have the will to save my loved ones, but ultimately, posses not the means to save even myself. I wake up feeling like Ralph at the end of the Lord of the Flies, only there is no navy captain to save us. 

I mentioned there are other iterations. The other ones again twist and distort my empathy into a terrible weapon instead of what it is supposed to be. Sometimes, instead of entering the warehouse by myself, I have a companion. This companion is usually another distorted version of a dear friend. They invariably are both stronger and weaker than I am. For instance, they may be able to kill the Wolf Pack but cannot walk. Or are immune to the Mist but blind and deaf. And it is no longer my goal to save myself and as many of my friends as I can. When I have that other person with me, it is my duty to save everyone before even thinking of saving myself. 

I am always presented with the perfect opportunity to buy the entire set of loved ones a few precious minutes by distracting the Wolf Pack, but I never do because I decide I can't bear to part from them sooner than absolutely necessary. The focus has changed, but I fail just as miserably as ever.

Ultimately, the Wolves at Night play off of my frustrations and fear of inadequacy. Not inadequacy at life, but at Living.

We are caught in the in-between
Of who we already are and who we're meant to be.
We're looking for love, but finding we're still in need.
It's only what we've lost will we be allowed to keep.     

In my daily life, I am not the person I wish I were. I want to be so much more - more compassionate, more Christ-like, more understanding. I want to be the sort of person anyone could call at 3 am because they needed someone to listen. I want to be the person you can trust. I want to be safe, merciful, humble, willing, generous. But I am not that person, not when push comes to shove. I'm still selfish. I become angry. I am scared. I'm self-centered, not God-centered.

I've been having this nightmare ever since I was called on a long-ish term mission a year-and-a-half ago. It throws that incompleteness in my face. The two people I become in the dream are both perverted versions of myself. They are both afraid of the future, of the unknown, of making the wrong decision. They both try to do things on their own. They both try to save their friends, their loved ones but they fail.

I am looking to save love, but finding I'm still in need. I'm afraid that by literally dying to myself to save those I love, I will not be able to keep them with me.

There is a  tension we have to live with - that we are not who we will be. The knowledge that I can never save myself, that I will never help others on my own steam, these are all elements within my nightmare. Above all else, I am a control freak, and it's not easy to turn over control to the One who has already saved me from the warehouse.

Because while I may like to think the warehouse exists only in my dreams,  I live in it every moment of every day. 

Whimsy

Wolves at Night

I was intending on writing a different post this morning. I really was. It was about turquoise and silver. It would have been fascinating. However, when I logged in to start writing, I stopped to catch up on my blog list. And then I read this little gem.

Argentum is talking about The Wolf, a nightmarish creature who has a propensity for following him on dark nights. It's deliciously creepy, more than a tad bit frightening, and definitely not something I want to think about while closing up the shop at nights. After reading this post, I was reminded of a recurring dream on my part. Because almost nothing I do is original, I figured I may as well abandon originality entirely and share a memory.

When I was little, I had exactly one nightmare. I would be flying through a gigantic, never-ending canyon in a little red hover pod, and the construction equipment mounted on the sides of the canyon would try to destroy my little ship. This dream has long since stopped terrifying me, and for years I had no recurring nightmares. The scary dreams I had would almost always turn into lucid dreams where I ended up choosing my own ending and parachuting off a cliff away from the danger or something similar.

That time of relatively non-scary dreams ended about a year-and-a-half ago, when I fell asleep one night and found myself in an infinite warehouse. It has no walls or freezer section, and has fallen into disrepair. The electricity doesn't work. It is icy cold. Rows and rows and rows of rusting metal struts rise into the gloom. Fog drifts across the floor, sluggish and spotty, and you know that if you walk into the fog, you may never return.

When I arrive, I am by myself in the middle of a break in the shelves. I have a flashlight whose batteries are almost dead. The fog begins glowing a vibrant, glorious orange. My flashlight dies, and in the gloom, I can see the fog crawling across the floor, and I know that I must not let it touch me. I turn to run, when I hear it. In the indeterminate distance, a wolf howls. As the echoes die away in the distance, I hear something worse: Footsteps.

At this point, I am running madly through the night, avoiding the light that gives away the fog's presence. And there - something moves behind a strut. I spin toward it. There is a knife in my hand, and I grip it tightly. My best friend steps out from behind me. She's a bloody mess. As I turn toward her, another movement flashes in the corner of my eye - another close friend. I am surrounded by the people I care most about, and none of them in good condition. No one talks. As I tense, ready to defend myself, a growl comes from off-screen. We turn as one, and a monstrous shape looms out of the approaching fog. You can't see much - just enough to know that whatever it is, it's not good.

We split and run, individually, through the warehouse. We begin disappearing. As we run into each other occasionally in the gloom, we try to figure out who's left. We can't. It's confusion. As the dream progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that if the wolves don't get you, the fog will. The wolves aren't too bad. They just destroy the body, leaving bloody paw prints and scraps of tissue behind. The fog, though. The fog destroys you. I find a friend who was caught by the fog. He is impaled on a strut - but still alive in the most basic sense. There is no expression - no pain, no intelligence, no response. Just mute suffering. I kill him because I cannot stand to see the vacant expression of a once-so-expressive friend.

I wander the warehouse for twelve hours, finding more and more bodies - or at least their blood. I find what is left of my best friend - the fog got to her and she's drawing pictures with someone's blood on the floor. I'm trying to help her in whatever way I can, when I hear the steps. Wolves encircle me, back-lit by the glowing fog. It's going to be a close one - which way will I go?  As I reconcile myself to the inevitable, a raven flies overhead. I look up to follow the flight of the bird, and a flash of the most intense pain blinds me. Everything goes black. Maybe it was the wolves; maybe the fog - I wake up without knowing what got me in the end.

Ultimately, the warehouse scares me not because my outcome is predetermined, but because I am so frightened myself that I cannot help my friends. We are hunted through a limitless trap, and if I had just a little more presence of mind, I wouldn't be closing the eyelids on so many of my friends.

But at the same time, a part of me enjoys this dream. It's becoming more lucid - I have more control over my actions rather than passively watching. But I've never escaped the warehouse alive. I've never known why the raven shows up. I never know if I die bodily or spiritually. There's a mad adrenaline in the fear of that greatest unknown. Some of the best interactions I've ever had with people have been when they've entered the warehouse with me.

Yes, I'm a sick person.

A Crack in the Ice

There is something terribly evocative about 2 am on a cold, autumnal night. It's a time most sane folk would be abed, snuggled up in mounds of blankets to keep the chill out of their dreams. It's quiet, unnaturally so, and beautiful, oh so beautiful. The apple tree outside is just barely visible through the gloom. And here I sit, trying to explain an idea that's been going around for some time.

Have you ever had a thought that keeps haunting you for a significant amount of time, but when you try to remember what it is, you can't? That's what has happened with this one. I touched on it briefly in conversations with two different friends, and then promptly forgot it when I tried to write it down. But I think I may have grasped the elusive thought this morning.

I am an incredibly judgmental person. Now, before you go on to say that I'm not or some other such false nicety, you are entitled to know the truth. While what comes out of my mouth may not sound bad, I am entirely capable of scathing criticisms within the privacy of my own mind. This comes, in part, from the fact that I am incredibly opinionated - no more so than on the issues of the Arts and Christians witnessing in a secular culture. Those two issues will, without a doubt, cause some internal diatribe if I hear someone disagreeing with me.

But more on that later.

I also know what I like. I've been accused of collecting people the way some people collect stamps. Rather than having "true friends" I tend to surround myself with interesting people to observe and interact with. While this is a gross-overstatement, it is true to a smaller extent. I like my friends to be thought-provoking, and the best people to provoke thoughts are the ones who are not like me. This goes back to my addiction to conversations.

See, I like to hear other people talk, because I learn a lot about them. "Them" is interesting, so I want them to share their opinions and thoughts and dreams and, basically, their essence. Every good conversation divulges a little about the participants, and I love that slow unfolding of a personality. This desire for genuineness extends into my taste in blogs.

Now, before I go any further, I'd like to ask you to postpone your judgment on how much of a jerk I am until you've read the entire post. Your cooperation is appreciated.

There are a lot of blogs out there written by Christian young women that are essentially daily/biweekly/weekly/monthly devotional sites. The are polished and precise like the brain behind a gun should be, but I'm living in some kind of ecstasy and rational and often read very much like CS Lewis and there is nothing so theologically wrong with them that I have any reasonable reason for disliking them as much as I do. In fact, they are great displays of the strength of belief that the author(ess) possesses. More power to them for posting it online.

However, I cannot bring myself to read these sorts of blogs, because when I do, I feel as if I'm reading an exhibit intended to show off the authoress's spiritual prowess. Like the blog is more about giving a mighty fine showing of Christianity. The constant spiritual content overwhelms me and off-puts me, because rather than seeing a person writing their thoughts down in an almost permanent medium, I see someone showing off. I seldom post about my convictions, but when I do, it's always heart-felt. When I read these devotional blogs, part of my realizes that I would never be able to continuously upload that content without delving into fake reserves of spirituality and sanctification. Thus, I deem the posts fake and ostentatious and not something I'd like to read in the morning before heading to work.

But if I'm being perfectly honest with myself, I feel like a really bad person as well. If it's true that the mouth speaks out of the fullness of the heart, then what does that say about the contrast between a devotional blog author and me? What if these posts are genuinely meant and the devote, polite, well-spoken and reasonably well-educated author is actually like that in real life? Not only do I become the biggest jerk on the planet, but that would also imply that my daily testimony is insufficient and lacking. After all, I'm not a good enough Christian to be able to post multiple devotional blogs every month. I don't even manage one per month, as it is. So the fullness of the heart influences the mouth -  Polished Anonymous Christian Bloggers: + 1,000,000,000,000,000, Me: -0.

Not just that, but operating on the assumption that these blogs are the genuine article, why do I not enjoy them? You'd think that any true Christian would want to read spiritually uplifting content in the morning before going to work at a job where the boss is constantly ragging on Christians. Why do I not enjoy writing these blog posts myself? Do I not have a firm grip on the joy of the Lord?

These thoughts have been swirling around and around in my head, and here's the best conclusion I've been able to come to.

The Bible talks about various spiritual gifts and callings. It's clear that some people are called to be pastors or apostles or evangelists, the list goes on. Even today, some Christians feel called to wave signs and march on the State Capital and hold banners above crowded freeways. That approach has always rubbed me the wrong way - While it is true that laws "legislate morality" by enforcing certain standards of conduct, it is impossible to write a law that dictates what morality people subscribe to in their hearts. It's safe to say that I do not feel that calling at all, and have not the inclination to wave banners for the cause.

Yet, when I see a man panhandling on the side of the road, or walk past a very clearly mentally-ill person in the city, my heart breaks. I want to cry, I want to act, I want to scream at all the fortunate people going on with their daily lives while ignoring the oppressed because ignobility makes us uncomfortable. And then I shove a couple of ones toward the pan handler and wish I could do something more. What's more, it really, really ticks me off that some Christians do not feel that level of commitment to the poor and the outcasts of the world. In all likelihood, this is the same frustration the politically active feel towards me when I decline to wave signs or join their march on Olympia.

As near as I can tell, God created every personality uniquely. Everyone's essence is separate, describing them and them alone. God wants to use us to work His will, but not to the destruction of the person He created us to be - if He wanted His will without that uniquely human element, He could avoid all the troubles of humanity and just use angels. They're more reliable. ;) So persons are unique, and God purposes our persons to specific tasks. To some, He gives the desire to encourage other Christians. To some, He gives the desire to reach out to non-Christians. Regardless, God uses imperfect, eminently personable people to work His will in different areas.

That style of blogging doesn't do anything for me -- it clearly works wonders for others. My care for today's "widows and orphans" doesn't reach everyone I meet -- but it doesn't have to. It only has to motivate the one meant to hear.

So should I guilt myself into enjoying devotional blogs? Probably not, but knowing me, I'll continue to do it anyway. Should I continue passing out harsh judgment on them? No, and I'll have to struggle to be more open and understanding.

Ultimately, it comes down to this analogy my dad is fond of using. Heaven, he says, is going to be like the greatest jazz jam session ever - full of improvisations and personal touches on the same celestial theme. The instruments will all reflect that Melody through their work, but each one will approach it from a different standpoint.

I'll take a longer-term comfort from that, but in the meantime, I'm going to need all the grace I can get. :)

A Significant Gesture

I have just realized this post directly relates to the importance of Rumpelstiltskin. Hah. Funny how my mind works.

Gesture: Noun; A movement of part of the body, esp. a hand or the head, to express an idea or meaning: "so much is conveyed by gesture."

In the field of music, the smallest unit of musical significance is the gesture. Larger than a single note, smaller than a phrase, the gesture is a series of moving tones which impact the melody and mood of a piece. Granted, this is my poor, short - hand attempt to describe a much more complicated piece of theory, but I imagine most of my dear readers have neither the time nor inclination to learn all the nuances of gestures in music. For instance, the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony can be considered as a gesture forming the first part of his opening phrase.

In communication, a gesture is a physical movement that conveys significance to the accompanying words. "May the LORD do so to me," means little without the gesture illustrating what "doing so " looks like. Above all, a gesture is subtle. It is not the text, it can be context. Or subtext. Or the just an illustration. It is meaningful, but only when combined to form a phrase.

When I perform a piece of music, my attention is split between shaping phrases and creating meaningful gestures. However, if I do my job correctly, the listeners do not hear short little snippets of melody strung together like a four - year- old's bead necklace: rather, they hear long, fluid phrases flowing together to form a unified whole.

To a certain degree, gestures meaningful only when hidden. Like a secret, the gesture put on display loses it's original meaning and shifts the power more into the audience's hands -is the subtlety worth our attention? Should it live on as a meme or GIF or die on the authority of public opinion? It is worthwhile to note here that a gesture may be intended for a receiver without becoming a display - when I ask my father to help me treat my mother, I do it for her sake (a gesture), rather than for his (a display).

Because the meaning of a gesture is implicit rather than explicit, I hesitate to use this next example to illustrate. The gesture in question occurred on my birthday, and I could have quite easily crowed about it on Facebook that night and turned it into a big display. I am worried that by sharing the event I will lose its personal meaning and turn it into just another Big Fish story. But here goes.

My family went hiking in the Cascade Mountains for my birthday. The Cascades are, in part, named for their abundance of streams and creeks flowing off the snow line. So there we are, hiking alongside of a creek bed. Thursday and I hiked down off the trail (following Leave No Trace principles, yes) and into the rocky creek. Walking upstream, we had fun jumping on and off of rocks and over fallen trees, just for the heck of it. However, we soon reached a point where the trail was on top of a cliff, and the stream on the bottom. Not wanting to backtrack, I found a fallen tree that ran from the bottom of the stream to the top of the cliff, and exited my 18th year by crawling on a tree of questionable structural integrity about twenty feet above a rocky, stream filled ravine.

Yes, I got a crazy adrenaline rush. Yes, some other hikers stopped and took pictures.  Someone filmed it. But I wasn't doing it to give my mom a heart attack or get online. The gesture was for my benefit alone. I was facing my fear of heights and fear if the mundane.

In short, a gesture's significance comes more from intentions. It is, like a secret, internally defined and externally descriptive of the person making the gesture. Eavesdropping or accidentally observing one can tell you a lot about a person - which is why I enjoy people watching. Ultimately, it is the person one is when alone that is the real "person." It is the things one does with private meaning that has the most significance, and it is the actions one takes for the sake of one other that truly are a window into the soul.

Rumpeltstiltskin, I Name Thee!

Become more than a man and devote yourself to an ideal...

Do you remember the story of Rumpelstiltskin from when you were a kiddo? It goes something like this.

A jerk of a father needs to ask his king for a favor. In hopes of making him more favorably inclined to his request, the dad tells the king that his daughter can spin straw into gold. The king is suitably impressed and orders the girl brought to him. Turns out, the king's a loser too: He locks the girl in a room filled with hay and tells her to work her magic before morning on pain of death. The girl, impressed both by that knowledge and the fact that she has no freaking idea how to spin gold, starts crying.

Enter Magic Man, stage left. He agrees to spin the gold in exchange for a piece of her jewelry. The next morning, the king decides to do it again, this time with a bigger room. Free gold, right? The daughter cries some more, the Magic Man reappears, and spins again for her last piece of jewelry. The king is elated, so this time he locks her in an even bigger room, and swears to marry her. If I were her, the promise of marrying that jerk would quite possibly be more terrifying than death.  The girl cries again, but when the Magic Man shows up, she has nothing left to give him. They strike a bargain - the room of gold for her firstborn, and she's all set to marry the king. When the girl gives birth, the wee lil Magic Man appears and demands his payment in full. The daughter only escapes by guessing his name. THE END.

There are countless folk tales concerning the magic of names. By knowing someone's true name, they testify, you have intrinsic power over that person.

The funny thing about names is they act as both a way of identifying and describing someone or something - a sort of label. In a way, labels are humanity's attempt to describe something's essence. A "chair" is something we sit upon above the ground. A "squirrel" is a type of animal known for its inclination to mischief. A label brings to mind a certain archetype - however, the specifics of that "essence" differ from person to person. Case in point: The difference between my mother and my conception of a "hipster." Here's a hint - my mother thinks it's an affectionate endearment.

But let's get back to names and their function as a label. Let's talk about my imaginary friends. I have four of them, so let's talk about my imaginary friend Joe. Well, as it turns out, I have two imaginary friends named Joe. I'm specifically referring to Joe Black. He's pretty cool - I like hanging out with him as opposed to Joe White, who's a self-righteous little fella. Those two little words - "Joe Black" - bring to mind a very specific personality I have made up for a fictional character. They also make me crave peanut butter. But that's beside the point. The name of my imaginary friend identifies him among my many imaginary friend, and to a certain extent, describes him. He is NOT Joe White, and has [x], [y], and [z] characteristics. Get it? A label is an identifer (Which Joe are you talking about?) and a description (What sort of person is he?). You've heard of people saying "I'm just not a Bill," right? That's what I'm talking about.

Think about going into the canned soup area of a grocery store. You've got Campbell's, Annie's, Souper Meals ... all sorts of different brands. But then you also have types of soup: Chicken Noodle, Stroganoff, Minestrone, Tomato, Spaghetti-Os. If you send a friend out to buy you some "good soup," who knows what they may bring back? But if you tell them you want "Campbell's Chicken Noodle" they can identify the soup and have a general idea of what's on the inside. 

Now, I really like my name. I think it suits me admirably. In fact, I've had friends make comments testifying to the fact that I just "did a really Whimsy thing." That's cool by me. It means I'm being myself, that my label, or my name, has become inseparable from my personality, who I am as an individual.

But have you ever noticed how humans have this tendency to try and "find themselves?" I would relabel (ha!) this as humans trying to be the essence of themself - what makes Whimsy tick? What songs does she like? What food does she enjoy? Who are her friends and why?

Here's the rub. The most useless piece of advice ever given to mankind is To Be Yourself. A person not given to introspection will ignore it and continue just as ever. An introspective person will devote considerable time to angsting over who they are as opposed to someone else, and end up never truly finding themselves from too much navel-gazing. The process of discovering who Lady Whimsy is will take my lifetime, because who knows what person God intends me to be? I certainly don't.

So back to labels and names and essences. We've got these public names that people use on a regular basis. Cassandra, Matthew, Hannah, Grace. We know the people to whom those names refer. We use those designations to address them and refer to them. They're public knowledge - how you and I are known in our communities.

However, I would argue that everyone has a secret, "true" name. Not some mystical name given to you in a dream by a Technicolor rabbit the night before you turn 13, but labels that are self-applied and self-descriptive. Not how I describe myself to other people - "musician," "hopeless romantic," "dark romantic," "day dreamer" - but how I describe myself to myself.

And what other way to define ourselves than by the secrets we keep? Secrets are the "true names" of people. They are hidden, mystical, tied up in the very essence of the holder (why else keep it a secret?) which no one knows. The hidden actions, the clandestine thoughts, the beliefs and ideas and ideals so closely tied to the person's identity and security that they are shared with no one. Secrets are pieces of information that clarify and describe the person keeping them.

"Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."

Just like Rumpelstiltskin, releasing the knowledge of one's secret identity gives them the intrinsic power of the name. Once shared, the information can grow, mutate, or be used against you. Like it or not, the relief of sharing a secret creates a new, funky dynamic in any friendship or relationship. Once shared, the true name can never really be forgotten. It's a determined little thing, clinging desperately even when it's usefulness has passed. And of course, the awkward, messy dynamic it brings is both wonderful and despicable. It all depends on your standpoint.

Bottom line is, we all have a choice. We can "become an ideal" and save our real names from the control of another, or diminish and go into the West with what is left of our folk and share that privilege with others. By sharing, you give up something precious for the sake of something more desirable. By saving, you destine yourself for a lifetime of secret keeping. Personally, I choose to travel the path with my real name easily accessible [ Note: not readily accessible or displayed. Simply easy to access when I choose]. Why? Because I value that gritty, honest, this-is-who-I-am truth and openness with my friends.

But it is a choice. An adventure. A daring step into the open, giving power over to someone who may not have your best interests at heart.

Rumpelstiltskins of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your Name!

And if that's not an exhilarating thought, I don't know what is.

W

The Song of the Happy Shepherd

This poem has been haunting my thoughts recently. Read it aloud - it deserves it.

THE SONG OF THE HAPPY SHEPHERD
by: William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head:
But O, sick children of the world,
Of all the many changing things
In dreary dancing past us whirled,
To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
Words alone are certain good.

Where are now the warring kings,
Word be-mockers? -- By the Rood,
Where are now the warring kings?
An idle word is now their glory,
By the stammering schoolboy said,
Reading some entangled story:
The kings of the old time are dead;
The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie. 

Then nowise worship dusty deeds,
Nor seek, for this is also sooth,
To hunger fiercely after truth,
Lest all thy toiling only breeds
New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth
Saving in thine own heart. Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass--
Seek, then, for this is also sooth,
No word of theirs--the cold star-bane
Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain,
And dead is all their human truth.

Go gather by the humming sea
Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,
And to its lips thy story tell,
And they thy comforters will be,
Rewording in melodious guile
Thy fretful words a little while,
Till they shall singing fade in ruth
And die a pearly brotherhood;
For words alone are certain good:
Sing, then, for this is also sooth. 

I must be gone: there is a grave
Where daffodil and lily wave,
And I would please the hapless faun,
Buried under the sleepy ground,With mirthful songs before the dawn.
His shouting days with mirth were crowned;
And still I dream he treads the lawn,
Walking ghostly in the dew,
Pierced by my glad singing through,
My songs of old earth's dreamy youth:
But ah! she dreams not now; dream thou!
For fair are poppies on the brow:
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.

--
~ It is better to suffer an injustice than to do injustice ~

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