What’s in a Brain?

Not only is my chiropractor enthralled by my crooked spine, he’s a great audience. I’m guaranteed to get a laugh every time I see him. He’s also a sports therapist, so I like to ask him random questions when I’ve been pondering the unique oddities of my compostable container. I’m so strangely wired, in fact, that sometimes we both learn something.

Lately I’ve had problems with my teeth aching, but rather than going to the dentist like a normal person, I decided it was a nerve issue better addressed by chiro—and I was right. A couple of visits and some postural instruction later, and my teeth are quiet again. It also got me thinking about my nervous system. So I asked him:

“All our nerves are contained in the spinal cord, right?”

“Yes,” he said, “except for seventeen facial nerves. (He knew this because my teeth quandary had sent him back to the manual; boy, we had a laugh about that!) Everything else runs through the third and fourth cervical vertebrae via the spinal cord.”

Now was the time to spring my logic on him, but not before I got his expert take on the subject. “So, where does it start?”

“In the brain.”

So much for logic. “Oh!” I exclaimed. “I thought it started at the base of the spine and spread upward, like a tulip bulb!”

He thought this was hilarious. “No, no. The nervous system starts at the brain and continues from the base of the spine into your legs and feet. I’m surprised at you, Ruth. I thought you were smarter than that.”

“Yeah, well, I guess it shows how much I value my brain!”

I’m really more of a heart person.

Fast forward to the ancient Egypt exhibit at the Royal BC Museum.  It’s a fabulous meander through life on the Nile in the time of the pharaohs, spanning everything from geography to society to the afterlife. I’ve read a bit about the ancient culture and the rituals around mummification, but the exhibit taught me a few things I hadn’t previously known about the process of prepping the body. I knew the internal organs were removed and given their own individual jars—lungs, liver, stomach and intestines—but I didn’t know (or remember) the heart was replaced in the chest cavity and (get this) the brain was discarded. Turns out you don’t need it in the afterlife!

It’s not that important in this life, either, no matter how hard it tries to convince you otherwise. It doesn’t house your soul. It’s the mortal version of Windows: it keeps the compostable container alive, but it doesn’t know a darned thing about life.

Well, maybe it knows enough to fear dying. It runs the machine and houses the self-preservation software. It’s also got an impressive array of tricks to keep us believing it’s smarter than it really is. As the comic Emo Phillips once said, “I thought the brain was the most important organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me that.”

Sure, when faced with imminent danger, the fight/flight response kicks in, but the brain is part of the standard mortality package that includes motor skills and bladder control. I suppose the intellect resides in the brain as well, as intellect lacks compassion for anything and anyone save itself. Intellect ridicules compassion and empathy. It sneers at getting by on what you need rather than raking in the lion’s share. It’s all about survival of the fittest—but not necessarily the smartest. It believes what it’s told (sort of) and makes up what it doesn’t hear the first time. To its credit, the brain is a good storyteller—the writer in me likes that point—but it does tend to focus on horror rather than hope, keeping itself relevant in the guise of keeping us safe.

I could go on, but I’m not a neuroscientist. I don’t even play one on TV. I do know, however, that my heart is far smarter than my brain will ever be. I suspect this is because my heart houses the innate wisdom of spirit, that which connects me to each of you and to the greater source of All There Is. What resides in my heart is truly eternal, limitless, immortal and divine. What resides in my brain is temporary, transient, subjective and useful only until I reach my carbon-based expiry date. It is utterly fallible, and utterly human. It provides the contrast our spirits need to help us experience this phase of existence. It’s not as smart as it is shifty, but if I’m going to be a true creature of spirit, I will be glad of my brain for as long as I am here. It serves a significant purpose, after all, but let’s get real.

I won’t need it in the afterlife.

Over and Under

We might as well face it: we’re doomed. This mortality gig is designed to try our strength of spirit, and when I really think about it, I get suspicious that being human has set me up to fail. I can’t always hear my little voice, and when I do hear something, I question whether it’s my connection to spirit or my own duplicitous intellect pretending to be spirit. I am distracted by noise, overcome by sensation, drawn into drama, goaded by fear, and occasionally wonder if no one is listening when I speak to my imaginary friends.

In short, I think too much. This despite my best efforts not to employ what the Japanese warriors in The Last Samurai refer to as “too much mind”. I try not to overthink my life, but when I want something to materialize and it ain’t happening on my timetable, it’s easy to forget my Jedi training and start wondering if I have been duped by my New Age gurus.

I watched a podcast of Professor Ekkles some months ago, in which he warned against the perils of overthinking. He suggested that one’s aim should be to underthink, which will result in greater trust of life’s process and the universe’s grand plan for each of us. More importantly, the stilling of one’s mind, the silencing of the chatter, is the way to inner peace. Inner peace opens the channel to the higher vibrational energies beyond this realm. It brings us closer to the collective force of creation and thus more in tune with our true (spirit) selves.

But how to accomplish this, when everything about our compostable container is confounding? As recently as yesterday morning, I thought, How can I possibly succeed when I’m foiled by being a carbon-based unit? Never mind that pretty much everything in my life is miraculous. I might be grateful, but I still have these annoyingly human moments.

Time for a metaphor.

Consider the mortal coil as a suit of armour. Its purpose is to house and protect you during your deployment to this alien country. At first, it’s a novelty—it has all these cool features like sensory perception and a logic processor—but the longer you wear it, the heavier it becomes. If you don’t maintain it, the showroom shine tarnishes and the joints rust out. The surface gets pockmarked and parts need replacing. It gets bogged down by the things you added to make it more impressive: plumage for the helmet, nipples on the breastplate, gold-encrusted greaves and talons on the gauntlets. For better protection, a newer, bigger shield. A longer sword. A snazzy dagger with a jewelled hilt. A newer, even bigger, shield. Yup, it looks good, but man, it weighs a ton and is harder than ever to humph around. And there’s no earpiece in the helmet, so you’re pretty much deaf to anything that isn’t right in your face—which is also all you can see because of the nifty-but-impractical visor you put on in your twenties. How did this happen? How did this thing get so cumbersome?

It’s not too late to simplify. You need the armour, but you don’t need the accoutrements. They were only acquired to impress all the other knights anyway, and the other knights were too busy trying to impress you. Lighten the burden by shedding what you don’t need—including the mental baggage that fooled you into believing the additions were what mattered. (They weren’t.) Sand off the rust and polish up your helmet; if you keep it clean and shiny, you’ll hear better when your little voice says something. And get rid of that stupid visor. Broaden your perspective. Open yourself to the true miracle of this existence. Don’t worry so much about how long it’s taking to get where you’re going; just enjoy this moment on the journey. You’ll get there when the time is right. Besides, being present helps to quiet the frantic chatter in your head. Mind is good, but too much of it—like too little—can be harmful to your sanity.

I quit overthinking as soon as I realized I was doing it. It won’t stop me from doing it again, but that’s the joy—and perhaps the point—of being human.

I’m off to polish my tinfoil suit now.

With love,

Against Our Nature

When did Man decide that he is separate from Nature? Was it when he ceased to exist as a hunter/gatherer and began to farm the land rather than accept what was offered? At some point, it obviously occurred to his burgeoning ego that if he could choose what to grow, then he must be in control of and thus separate from—perhaps even superior to—Nature.

He mistook the earth’s willingness to work with him as something less than cooperation and more like mindless servitude. He lost his respect for the natural world and began to exert his formidable will over it, flooding arable valleys and redirecting rivers, overplanting the soil, overfishing the oceans, and sucking out the oil buried beneath the planet’s skin. He perceived flaws in the fields and orchards and began to tinker in the name of perfection, and now we have genetically modified Frankenveggies designed to… what? Last longer on the supermarket shelves? It can’t be for our nutritional benefit, else fish genes would have been evident in prehistoric tomatoes.

And don’t get me started on the biological misconceptions; that because we can think analytically we must be smarter, thus better, than the other animals. Have you ever watched a crow crack into a discarded Starbucks cup? That takes some ingenuity.

You know what makes us different? Our ego. Our arrogance. Our intellect. In fact, the most unpleasant facets of humanity are pretty well responsible for the present discord between Man and Nature. Of course the planet exists to serve, but so do we, and in believing ourselves separate from it, we have failed to nurture the resources meant to nurture us.

Abuse can only be endured for so long before the tables turn on the abuser. A planet once eager to embrace us is now fighting to save itself, and if we’re caught in the upheaval … oh, well.

We are not separate from Nature. We never have been. We are born of the same stuff as the rocks and trees and birds and rain and stars. We are a vital part of a greater whole comprised of other vital parts, each subject to the same law as the others. We are all alive. Living, breathing, adapting, we are all beings responding to the energy of intention. To cut ourselves off from this wondrous collaboration of particles is truly the means to our end.

The tide is turning, slowly. More and more people—the unlucky inheritors of a world we’ll leave to them—are reawakening to the relationship we have with the rest of creation. Many of us are trying to mend the broken ties and reconnect to the wonders of the world around us. Nature may lack the intellect, but forgiveness and compassion are universal traits. It might be too late … but it’s never too late.

With love,

Inside Voices

I have two inner voices. One is the part that came with me, the part that I’ll take with me, the part that is me. The other one is part of the software that came with my compostable container. It’s more of a tape recorder in that it plays back the memes that shaped me growing up, and it seems utterly bent on keeping me in my place.

“You’re an idiot,” it tells me.

“That won’t work.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Who are you kidding?”

“Shut up. No one cares what you think.”

It’s bossy and derisive and judgmental and relentlessly unforgiving.

It tries to deceive me into believing that it’s actually my other inside voice, the one that’s true and wise and eternal. I also think it’s getting worried. I’m learning to tell the difference, you see. In fact, I’ve recently tried a trick of my own, and while I’m hiccupping a bit, I am determined to persevere until a new, healthier habit forms.

The other day I stapled two invoices together. On discovering my error, I immediately berated myself. Moron, I thought, ripping out the staple.

Wait a second, someone else said. It was an accident and no one died. ‘Moron’ is unduly harsh.

The internal debate ensued. Well, yeah, said the first voice, but she should have known better.

Keep beating her up and she’ll keep making the same mistakes, the second pointed out.

That’s the point, really. The first voice needs me to stay stupid so it can feel needed. It doesn’t offer any brighter alternative, but it gets to keep its job. In other words, it stays relevant.

We all need that voice. It’s the voice that ensures survival at all cost, that motivates and assesses and preserves us as mortals. Unfortunately for it, the job is only temporary, so it tries to make itself more important by holding us back, by reminding us that we’re failures without it, or that we can only be successful if we heed its sage advice; advice, incidentally, which is strategically worded to keep us from trying.

I digress.

The inner dialogue is ongoing, like the ticking of a clock. Sometimes you hear it, sometimes you don’t. When I hear mine, it’s usually the aforementioned first voice and it’s almost always deriding me for something and calling me stupid into the bargain. Whoa, buddy. Catch me on a gaffe, by all means, but instead of snarling, “Idiot,” try something gentler, like, “Oh, sweetie.”

Basically, I’m watching to catch myself on the lip of an insult with the intention of changing said insult to a term of endearment. I’ve done it a couple of times—it’s actually appalling, how frequent the opportunities are—and it might just be working. In fact, the opportunities seem to be dwindling.

Ironic, isn’t it? The voice that takes such pleasure in correcting me harshly would rather be silent than be corrected itself.

Who’s the real idiot?

With love,

Novel Gazing

Progress on the rewrite is moving along nicely. It’s slowed a little, given my post-vacation status, but it was bound to get stickier anyway. The first eight chapters were pretty well fine as written; they only required minor tweaking and a couple of new scenes to help re-establish the focus. Now that I’ve crossed the line into where I went astray, it’s taking more time and even more thought and still even more “effort to resist what’s already been written”.

What was written before was all good material. I had simply lost my direction. Many of the scenes will feature in the rewrite, but I’ve encountered an unforeseen curiosity: I view those scenes as written in stone. My mind is trying to place them “as is” in a new location, and gets frustrated when the pieces don’t click into their imagined place.

Two scenes are about to become one. I’ve laid the mental groundwork, envisioning the setting and committing the dialogue to memory so I can blast it out when I’m done with this post. I was still struggling yesterday morning, labouring under the misconception that they had to appear in the same chapter yet remain independent of each other because, let’s face it, each one is effing brilliant, when a little voice quietly suggested, “Why not merge them?”

Uh … DUH!

From that one small instance, I realized that my logic processor is trying to control my creative process. It wants me to believe that what’s written cannot be altered to accommodate a new format, a better format, may I add, which further supports my argument that the ego, the mind, the intellect, is so freaked out over losing control that it will sabotage its own success.

Well, get thee behind me, micro-manager, I’m onto your neurotic game. As soon as I realized that two good scenes could become one better scene, you could almost hear the whoosh! as my imagination took flight. Suddenly, I saw how one location could support a longer conversation and add a new element at the same time. That element will lead into yet another (new) scene to keep the plot on course and voila! Another chapter finis!

“The Day of Undying Loyalty”

My father could have been Jon Bon Jovi.

Well, not really.

For one thing, JBJ is a year younger than I am, and no matter how quirky are quantum physics, even a Master of the Universe would have trouble engineering that one.

I mean that Dad and JBJ were born on the same day—albeit thirty-one years apart. According to Gary Goldschneider and Joost Elffers in The Secret Language of Birthdays, anyone born on March 2 will share a bunch of specific traits with millions of others, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Dr. Seuss, Desi Arnaz, John Irving, and the latter half of Simon & Schuster.

So how is it that not everyone born on this date is a rock star, politician, artist, journalist, or business magnate? Personality plays such a strong part in who we are, and an equally strong part in what we become, but every soul is a snowflake. Give each child in a kindergarten class a box of Crayolas and watch how their drawings differ.

It’s half what you get and half what you do with it. What you get is, I believe, predetermined. What you do with it is up to you. We are as much a product of our environment in this life as we are ourselves, and our personalities dictate how we develop, how we adapt, how we endure, and, perhaps, whether or not we survive. I am unsure how much of what we are is influenced by planetary alignment at the time of birth, but I do wonder if the range of available traits depends on the astronomical tableau. I’ve heard that personality is connected to the ego/intellect, and that tells me it’s disposable, as in, we neither bring those traits with us when we come nor take them with us when we go. We might take the knowledge of how to use them, maybe to wield them more confidently in the next go-round, or to leave them in the box and try something else instead … and start by choosing another birthdate.

For the record, my father may not be a rock star, politician, artist, journalist or business magnate to the rest of the world, but in a very real way, he is each of these things to me.

Happy birthday, Dad.

With love,

My Human

Ter coined a dandy the other day. She passed an unkind judgment on someone—hardly a criminal offense, but definitely out of sync with the higher level vibe we’re striving to maintain—and promptly smacked her own hand. “I’m sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. “My human.”

Bwahahahahahaha!

To be human is to be influenced by the five sense reality, the egocentric identity, the left brain, the intellect, the bane of pure source energy. The human experience is why we’re here, but it’s terribly restrictive when learning lessons of love, acceptance and forgiveness within that experience. It also provides a physical contrast to things of the spirit. We need it, but we also need to be aware of it. Only then can we move past it.

It’s okay to be human. It’s okay to be small, occasionally, especially in defense of someone we love (thank you, Ter). It is oddly gratifying to think savage thoughts toward someone who has caused us or our own some form of angst, but we must not let those thoughts consume us. Have the thought, get your jollies from it, then forgive everyone involved and let it go.

Easier said than done? Yup. Being human makes it so. Forgiveness, however, does not mean to say that an injury/insult is justified or acceptable. It simply means that we as individuals can control our response to the slight. Yes, the comment was unfair. Yes, the insult may have been unintended, but it also reveals something about the person who made it, and that is not ours to own unless we choose to own it. (And, really, do you have room in your life to wear someone else’s issues?)

Ultimately, you can only live your life. You can only control your feelings and your actions. You put out the intention based on where you are in your journey. How I perceive it is determined by where I am in mine. Sometimes we’ll meet in the middle and sometimes we won’t. That is when opportunities for forgiveness occur.

If, however, an intention is initially misread, then … “Oops. My human.”

Monkey Do

Watching A History of Scotland has Ter shaking her head. “We haven’t evolved,” she laments, referring to the ongoing struggle of one man, any man, for power over the masses. Be it a king, a clan or a whole country out to subjugate another, the contrast is ancient and eternal. Treachery and deceit are required qualifications to build an empire, and if strengthening oneself means cutting down everyone else, then we are indeed a failed experiment.

I did some lamenting myself, during one of my morning tea chats with a friend at work. The topic du jour was online bullying or hate crimes or something (there are so many to choose from that it’s easy to forget), and I remarked to my buddy that humans are the only animals in the kingdom who treat each other so cruelly, so wantonly, and with such perverse delight in the destruction of others.

“Oh, no,” she countered, “there’s a breed of monkey in (insert jungle here) that does the same thing. They hold kangaroo courts and beat the defendant to death.”

I guess that makes it all right, then. After all, why should we be better than the monkeys? We’re only supposedly more intelligent—oh, wait. That may be the problem. Intelligence is no indication of kindness, compassion, sympathy, empathy or any sort of emotional evolution. You can teach a monkey to communicate by pushing buttons—the simian form of texting—so maybe we aren’t any smarter and shouldn’t tout ourselves to be superior.

*sigh*

Fear Less

Life is about contrast: light/dark; yes/no; happy/sad; naughty/nice. We have no choice in that, it’s a physical law. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Nothing is constant but change. This too shall pass. Bad/good things happen to good/bad people.

Yaddayaddayadda.

The empowering thing about contrast is that we can choose which way we’re facing. When it’s all good, we can enjoy the moment, or waste it by dreading its inevitable end. When it goes pear-shaped, we can wallow in piteous despair, or seek the contrast and overcome.

We choose how we respond.

I’m saying this out loud because a) it’s true and b) I need the reminder. I have a lot of fear—or I could, if I chose. Fear is like a water leak; it starts small, so small that you may not know it’s happening until the ceiling crashes into your living room. Then, as is completely natural, you’re immobilized.

Fear is housed in the biological unit’s disk operating system. It’s not the same as the little voice that warns against getting on that particular bus; the little voice is your wiser self, and often dismissed by an intellect so insecure that it will endanger itself by refusing to accept the help. Fear is part of the survival package that comes with this mortality gig. Fear is a good thing—until the filtering mechanism malfunctions. That’s when all manner of mental anguish results. We start spooking at shadows and suspecting infamy at every turn. We begin to believe when we are told we should be afraid, and of what. We then actively seek things to frighten us. The law of attraction gets very weighty in such cases—the more you fear, the more you have to fear.

Nicole sent me the pendant in the picture at Christmas last year. I wear it when I need the boost. Courage is not defined as being unafraid. The bravest souls are still afraid; they simply refuse to be ruled by it. “Courage” has pinged on my radar of late, showing me that I am working through some of my issues. It’s also confirmation that I’m on the right track, because I’d already identified the problem but wasn’t sure how to resolve it. How does one conquer fear, especially an irrational one?

With courage, that’s how. Look the monster in the eye and say, “You’re not the boss of me!”

It’s a start, and there might even be a fight, but persevere. Fear is a bully and bullies are cowards at the core. Be brave. Stand your ground. Trust that all will be well … and it will be.

With love,

Know Your Mind

“If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth.” – Eckhart Tolle

Further to the tiny poem I posted on Saturday …

What do you want to write today, Ru?

Oh, boy! An urban fantasy!

You haven’t finished the novel yet.

The novel’s too big. I want to have fun.

“Black in Back” is half-done. You should finish it.

I will, but I’m stuck right now.

You’ll stay stuck if you don’t try to get un-stuck.

Did you not hear me? I said I want to have fun!

You’ll have fun once you get it rolling again.

I’m not having fun now, that’s for sure. I’m going to do something else …

What about the blog? You’re behind on your posts …

… something not writing!

*contemplative pause as Ru stomps off in a frustrated snit*

Well, no wonder you’ll never be successful.

During the course of this inner dialogue, my enthusiasm for my art was badgered from the joy of widespread potential to a poisonous knot of despair jammed under my ribs. By the time I was done, I was done. I didn’t even want to consider what I truly wanted to write because I felt like I’d be a failure if I didn’t finish something else. It wasn’t enough for my mind that I write for play. It wanted me to work. And even my bliss can be a turnoff when it becomes work.

I observed this odd conversation with the awareness that my compostable container houses two distinct entities: my mind and my spirit. And the two are the most contentious partners since George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Boy, is my mind bossy. It’s such a control freak that, even when it’s so tired that it’s banging into the boards like a hockey player in third period OT, it still strives to beat down my spirit. And my spirit, the little wimp, lets it.

That’s what intellect thinks of spirit.

Actually, spirit is smarter than that. It doesn’t give up; it just concedes the moment. Eventually it comes back. It’s as relentless as intellect, if not as prone to pumping up the volume. I kind of wish it was, but I’ve also learned that spirit burns at a higher intensity and will not lower itself to the level favoured by the mind. Let’s face it: the mind is pushy, aggressive, derogatory, critical, judgemental, self-righteous, argumentative – all the things we look for in the perfect mate.

Spirit, on the other hand, can afford to wait. Spirit doesn’t adhere to the concept of time as interpreted by the mind, so if I storm off in a fit of pique and refuse to write on Sunday, it neither judges nor ridicules. It simply lets me be. My mind is the thing that will hunt me down and kill my will. Why it fears my writing so much is a mystery. You’d think it would appreciate a break, especially when it’s as tired as it was when I started my vacation, but no, if it lets up for a second, it will be overcome. Worse, it may be cast completely aside, forgotten, reviled, ignored. Oh, that’s the worst fate it can imagine, that it might be ignored. 

It thinks it’s the less favoured child when in fact there is no competition. I appreciate my intellect. When I need it, it’s there. I just wish it would shut up when I don’t. No, not shut up. Relax. Yeah, relax, old mind o’ mine. Take five and let spirit drive for a while. You’ll kill us all if you don’t loosen up, and if that’s not counter-productive to your purpose of keeping us alive, then who’s the big picture failure?

The third party in this dilemma – and this brings me back to Professor Ekkles’ point – is the compostable container. Emotion is reflected in our physical condition. When I’m angry, my stomach knots. When I’m sad, I cry. When I’m hurt, my chest aches. When I’m happy, I smile. When I’m in love, I am weightless. When I ask myself a question, as I did at the start of this diatribe, my immediate answer is the truth. Any hesitation and my will mind slip in there with its niggly naggy nonsense, effectively confusing me with coulda/shoulda/woulda. If I doubt my response, however quickly it comes, all I need do is note how my body feels. How I feel is always true. What I think, not so much. When the two collide, what feels better is the way to go.

So go there.

Little Dickens

On Christmas Eve, after the socializing is done, after the prezzies are wrapped and under the tree, after the pre-show viewing of “Merry Christmas Mr, Bean”, we pop “Scrooge” into the player and settle down to await our favourite moments. When you’ve seen a film that many times, there’s nothing new to be discovered … right?

Maybe. Maybe not. This year, I came away with a finer understanding of a story I’ve know my whole life. I enjoyed the movie as always (my favourite segment is Christmas Present), but my recent chanting of “let the past go” tripped me up a bit during the telling. If the past can’t be changed, I thought, why bother to revisit it?

Duh. It can’t be changed, but you can still learn from it. We are each a product of our past. History shows how we came to be – Ebenezer Scrooge was quite plainly fashioned in his youth to become the miserable old coot so brilliantly played by Alastair Sim. Ironically, he learned to fear loneliness and poverty so well that he became lonely and lived like a pauper despite the wealth he obtained in pursuit of … not happiness, exactly, but security and comfort. Christmas Past demonstrated that quite clearly, especially when Alice said to him, “You fear the world too much.” She had it right, though he argued intellectually that living defensively is the best protection against insecurity and discomfort.

I guess you could say that fear of the future changed his mind and thus changed his ways; again, maybe so, and maybe not. I saw his heart softening through the course of his night, he just thought himself too old for any change to make a difference. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I learned to articulate three things from “Scrooge” this year:

We are shaped by our past but not bound by it.

No one is ever too old to affect his future.

All we have is now.

So …

Release the past.

Embrace the present.

Change the future.

And God bless us, every one.

U R Loved

There’s been little time for spirit of late. That’s life. The daily grind, the battle for survival, the drudgery of the workweek, and not enough weekend. Laundry, garbage detail, what to make for dinner. Road rage on the commute, a coughing neighbour on the community limo. The little old lady with 12 items in the 10 item express lane and the debit machine is down. Gum surgery. Yeah, life sucks. Or can do. If I let it. Sometimes it overcomes me and I find myself wondering what the heck it’s all about, forgetting that innately, I know what it’s about and this angst is but a phase. A lesson. A reminder. An opportunity.

For what, you ask?

Good question.

I suppose one day I’ll figure it out and when that day comes, I’ll be done. Until then, the struggle continues. The search for joy in the dreariest moment. Panning for bits of glitter in the gravel. Enjoying the journey rather than envisioning the destination.

A couple of years ago, when Ter and I had moved to a little place in the ’burbs and I was a novice transit rider, I’d get into town just as world was waking. More buses than cars in the streets. Public works trucks on their beautification rounds. Civil servants in search of morning coffee and the homeless folks beginning to stir in their sheltered doorways. Walking a few blocks from my stop to the office, I made a point of paying attention, usually for the # 61 zooming by with my wee sister on board. If the timing was right, we could hook up and walk to work like we’d walked to school in the old days. Happy moments even if we had little to say. But I digress.

That year, things at home had gone severely pear-shaped and life was unhappy pretty much everywhere. Every morning I’d ride into town with the rest of the zombies, stunned and despairing that the office had become preferable to conditions in my own home. Paradoxically, Ter and I were learning more about spirit versus intellect, which was actually pretty exciting. It helped us to manage our dilemma and ourselves within that dilemma—but there were days when I just couldn’t get it up, days when I wanted to disappear into fiction and never come out. Days when I felt lost. Abandoned. Mystified. Angry. Yeah, angry was a frequent flyer through that winter.

Then one morning, walking from the stop to the office, my eye caught a line of graffiti spray-painted on a wall at the corner. It was simple, unadorned, and completely out of place in the gritty grey dawn.

U R LOVED

I wish I’d had the camera; I’d have taken a photo of it. Who had put it there? And why? Then I thought, why not? It’s true. I am loved, as we all are loved, and no matter how bad things get, how formidable the obstacles or difficult the people, how interminable the conditions, love is there. Always. Always. Deep in my core, under the layers of programming and intellect and media influence, beneath the doubt and the fear and the insecurity, right in the nucleus of my being, is a little spark that knows U R LOVED. It didn’t start with my parents or my siblings. It predates this phase by millennia and will continue beyond all the phases to come. It’s the one true constant, the easiest thing to forget and the last thing to be remembered.

Until someone spray paints it on a concrete block in big pink letters. Whoever the artist was, they made an indelible impression on me. Now, whenever I feel beleaguered or despondent, when my spirit is sapped and I start to question the point, I remember that morning’s message. It’s on my screen saver at work. I write it on the fridge at home. It doesn’t solve my problems. It doesn’t make everything all right again … but it makes me feel better, and where’s the harm in that?