Didn't write yesterday - still in Boston with my sister and mother and somehow the days are full even though we are not doing much. I'm enjoying just "being" with them, agenda-less, chit-chat about the merits of pomegranate seeds and how best to eat them, rearranging her furniture, helping her organize her basement, going to the farmstand for perfect honey crisp apples. Saw Moonrise Kingdom again with them - loved it so much, I wanted to share it and they, like me, were touched and amazed by the perfectness of the film. Friday I fly back home and back to my regular crazy life, work, toilet seats that are up, living in a house of men (Shay and the tenants), worry about my girls and wishing for deeper relationships with them, singing, dating (a platonic date with Christ on Saturday night - he and I will collaborate musically and a not so platonic Sunday with Mike (remember him? - the dreamy, impossibly tall and handsome doctor/boxer,songwriter?)
New England is amazing. I forgot how wonderful it is. Don't get me wrong - I adore Chicago but New England is a dream from the gentle rolling hills and the meandering roads that seem to have no rhyme or reason (certainly not plotted on a grid like Chicago - cabdriver told me they were built on cattle paths but I believe they go back to old well-worn Indian trails), the houses that occupy land in a more stately way than in the Midwest, the copses of trees almost everywhere (not just relegated to forest preserves), and even the shopping strips have a charming sensibility. Roads are mostly two lanes, sidewalks optional, and every trip we've taken out has taken us past historically significant areas that the locals just take in stride. Drove through Lexington and Concord while running an errand with my sister - on every block or so there was mention of some historical Revolutionary War event - the site of squirmishes between the Minutemen and the Redcoats.
I reminded my sister of the time I took my girls for a pilgrimage back to my roots - told them I'd only take family members who memorized The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere in its entirety (oh, and one of the fields we passed yesterday had a sign "Paul Revere capture site"). The kids were gung ho to memorize the poem and accompany me to Boston and so we all worked on the poem, learning a page at a time. Quickly they lost enthusiasm and I ended up being the only one who committed it to memory. They also knew me well - mother=saber rattler, and as such weren't much concerned that I wouldn't take them on the trip. Don't think I can still recite that poem - it's pages long but I don't think it would take long to brush it off.
And while this trip is quiet and seemingly not earth shattering, really it's a watershed event in my life. It represents the culmination of a lot of self work - many years of therapy, lots of hurt (given and received), estrangement and a needed time out, a redefinition of my role. Now, wisdom, acceptance, love, and a desire to make a difference in the lives of the people who are on the stage with me. My visit is intense for all of us (me, my mother, my sister, her husband and even her dog). Take a force such as I am and add it to an already dynamic mix and wow, things get shaken up. Even Daisy feels a shift - she is an alpha dog with some undesireable alpha habits. I've been deliberately dominating her this week, getting her to submit to a human which she despises but loves in a weird kind of way. Funny, I think she is no different than many of us, trying to be top dog but secretly craving being mastered, i.e. Taming of the Shrew.
The reason I didn't write yesterday was because I hoped to discuss an amazing series of articles in New Scientist on reality. It's a big important spread with contributions from the best minds of our time. It was too ambitious of me to think I could blog about this so soon - need more time. Here's the preamble:
WHEN you woke up this morning, you found the world largely as you left it. You were still you; the room in which you awoke was the same one you went to sleep in. The outside world had not been rearranged. History was unchanged and the future remained unknowable. In other words, you woke up to reality. But what is reality? The more we probe it, the harder it becomes to comprehend. In the eight articles on this page we take a tour of our fundamental understanding of the world around us, starting with an attempt to define reality and ending with the idea that whatever reality is, it isn’t what it seems. Hold on to your hats!I spent many hours reading and digesting the eight articles, read them over, read several of them to my mother who amazingly grasped many of the concepts better than I did - amazing to see her through a less cluttered lens - she is really smart! Read one of them to my sister who originally said the subject bored her but who, after being read an article on existentialism remembered her passion for the subject - she was, after all a Philosophy major at Wellesley College.
This reading is so apropos to where I am in my life these days, having come out of Landmark with a different life lens. In the basic class, we did an exercise, a "journey" through a concept of human beings as "meaning making machines" - apparently humans are hard wired to find meaning and patterns in absolutely everything. The class came to understand that life is absolutely meaningless and random (that was hard for most of us and I'm not sure that, until I read these articles on reality, I fully embraced that concept). If you were a French philosopher that is where you dwelled - in the knowledge of the unreality and randomness of life - thinking it must have been a crazy, suicide-inducing kind of knowledge to arrive at for those early philosophers. Luckily for us, Landmark took it a step further. After you find yourself standing alone in an empty field, looking up at the stars, surrendering to your insignificance, you turn and find you're not alone after all - someone reaches out their hand to you and says, "Rejoice and have fun. Make art. Nothing else matters."
I will ponder these articles and synthesize them in a way that makes sense to me and share with you my insights - for what they're worth. Thinking you will be as amazed as me - these are powerful new frontiers of knowledge. It's all coming together - the knowledge of ages, the philosophers, the shamans, the mathmeticians and physicists. What's happening now with discoveries like the Higgs Bosun is mind blowing. This is not woo-woo science or pop psychology - the finest minds of our time are saying "Holy Shit!" Like the article said, "Hold onto your hats!!!" The world as we know it, isn't.
Peace,
Sarah
Challenge today = none.
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