All in Good Time

 

This happens to me a lot.

The alarm wakes me up at crap o’clock. I lie half-asleep, thinking dark thoughts until muscle memory animates my body and I find myself sitting upright in bed. From there I shuffle into the bathroom and bumble through my morning ablutions, then stare at my closet until some sort of business casual ensemble jumps out at me. It’s a struggle getting into my pants one leg at a time, but I make it. Bling is then coordinated—earrings and pendant, maybe a nifty scarf to complement the fake gems in my studs. Pulled together and starting to wake up, I go to the bedroom door, open it—

—and the alarm wakes me up. It’s crap o’clock and I’m still lying in bed. I’ve dreamed the whole thing, and the first word to mind is a naughty one.

Sound familiar?

Years ago during coffee at the Wall, Boy Sister announced that he’d had a idea but couldn’t remember it. Then he wondered where ideas go when you forget them. My wee sister suggested that, in a parallel Universe, a light bulb had just gone on above his alternate self’s head so it wasn’t really gone, it had just skipped dimensions. Pretty heavy talk for my wee sister, by the way, but maybe she was on to something. Quantum mechanics, you know.

A thought is made up of energy. When a thought is acted upon, the energy of the thought becomes matter and therefore subject to the rules of time and space in this dimension. In my imagination, I’m already up and dressed. In reality, I have to haul myself out of bed and go through the motions, which takes time and (monumental) effort. Still, it’s the price of admission to this estate. Nothing happens instantly in the third dimension. Thoughts do, of course. Thoughts are easy. They pop into being without, well, a second thought. Wishes, dreams, intentions—they’re all energy. Each may be made manifest given physical time and space.

Or not. What we envision isn’t always what’s best for us, and the Universe only coughs up what we need to gain experience. It doesn’t always look like what we intended, though in retrospect it can often be seen to fit the original idea. It may take years before you realize that something happening now is actually something you thought of way back when. And then there are times when something you think becomes real within days, maybe hours, of you thinking it.

The point of all this, you ask? Patience, Grasshopper. All in good time ...

Heavenward

Why do we look up at Heaven?

When we address the Almighty, we are taught to bow our heads in a show of submission to a higher authority, but I no longer consider myself subordinate to God. I am born of Divinity; not exactly on equal terms, but most definitely worthy of eye contact with the Creator.

Assuming the Creator has eyes. I am unsure of the form one takes outside this physical dimension. It seems likelier that man has made God in his image rather than the other way around, and though I can’t say for sure what God looks like, I recognize without question that he exists in some form or other.

I also digress.

Despite my preference for face to face conversation, one day I found myself looking at the ceiling while speaking to (insert iconic nomenclature here), and the question occurred: Why?

Well, I thought, the heavens are above, aren’t they?

Are they?

“Parallel dimension” means side by side, not above or below, so doesn’t it make sense that our otherworldly ancestors, angels, spirit guides, deities, etc. occupy the same space with us albeit in a different realm? Why else do I look at the empty chair by the fireplace when tossing off a comment aimed at the other side? I must sense my guardian angel seated there, otherwise my gaze would go elsewhere.

Like “up”.

If you believe Heaven lies on the far side of the sky, by all means, look up when you seek it … but what about the folks in the southern hemisphere? Our Up is their Down, so where the heck is Heaven?

I think it might be here.

It’s in the taste of chocolate. It’s reflected in a stranger’s smile. It rings in a child’s laughter. It warms the hug of a friend. It smells of sun on hot pavement. It chimes in birdsong. It lingers in silence.

Why do we seek Heaven above when it’s present with us? Look around instead of up—and you just might catch an angel’s eye.

With love,

Me and My Shadow

You again. My old friend. Stealthy and silent, biding your time, waiting patiently for your moment. You’re so good at being unobtrusive that I forget you’re always two steps behind, lurking at my shoulder, skulking by my side. I lose my focus and suddenly you’re right in front of me. If you had a face, you’d be smiling because once in front, you refuse to step aside and let me pass.

Everyone has a dark side. It’s part of the package we bought when we signed the papers on this existence. Call it what you will: shadow self, alter ego, super ego, it’s the human part of our mortal makeup.

And it loves to be miserable. It revels in reminders of how hard life is, and how precarious our position is within this big scary world. Fear is its driving force, and boy does it know how to play the head games required to immobilize you.

I normally choose happiness and love over fear and anxiety, but when life demands to be lived on its own terms, i.e., when the poo hits the propeller, Shadow Ru pounces.

I didn’t even realize she had done so until the day I finally looked up from my feet. There she was, and had been for weeks, fixed solidly in my path.

By then I was so immured in the funk of loss that pulling myself out of it was like pushing the proverbial elephant up the stairs. I’d been crying nonstop since June. Taking tea and tissues into the Ocean Room had become a nightly ritual. From one loss, a list of others had sprung in a dismal domino effect that made the rest of my life look pretty grim. What’s the point, anyway? Can we start again, please? I knew I had to flip my focus to abundance instead of loss, and as soon as I saw Shadow Ru, I understood it was time to put her back in her place. But how to do it?

According to the law of physics, you get back the energy you put out. If you’re operating from the fear-based position of loss, you’ll find yourself losing more, thanks to the generous nature of our obliging Universe. Conversely, if you look for the miracle, you’ll see it—and you honestly don’t have to try that hard.

But Shadow Ru was relentless. “You think that was bad?” she asked. “What about this? And this? Or what if this happens? Wouldn’t it be terrible?”

“Well, yes,” I replied, “but it hasn’t happened.”

“But what if it does? Best be prepared for the worst.”

“Oh, move along!” I burst out, fed up with the negativity.

She refused. Worse, she persisted with her pernicious fearmongering until I thought I’d lose my mind. She wouldn’t let me see past her. She deliberately blocked my view of the good things in my life, of the little miracles and everyday blessings that sustained me through this summer. I was frazzed beyond endurance, trying to elbow past her, when my smarter self—Spirit Ru—calmly made a brilliant suggestion:

If your shadow is in front of you, then the sun is at your back. Just turn around.

Huh. I shoulda had a V-8.

Shadow Ru is still with me, of course, but now she’s back where she belongs: behind me.

With love,

Parallel Lives

I know what you’re thinking. How could she have lived in Vietnam at the time of the war, when the war began after she was born in 1961?

Good question. If time runs in a straight line, it’s natural to assume that multiple lives occur in a similar format, i.e., one after the other. But what if they don’t? Time is cyclical, not linear, therefore it’s entirely plausible for multiple lives to follow the same principle. I mentioned this in an earlier post: if you picture Time as a big wheel, then you can stand in the twenty-first century on one side and look straight across the circle at a life in the tenth century. Or the thirtieth century, since who knows the wheel’s circumference?

You might say, that doesn’t explain overlapping lives. And you could be right. My “previous life in Vietnam” scenario may well have been a simple imagining inspired by a piece of music. It could also be a hint of a life in an alternate Vietnam, situated in another world in another dimension that mirrors this one. I’m just playing with possibilities here; I am not a physicist. I don’t even play one on TV! I do, however, believe there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

Like the one about parallel dimensions. If we live in the third dimension, what do the first two look like, and how many more are there? (Personally, I think the first two must be flat and boring, as indicated by the terms “one-dimensional thinking” and “two-dimensional character”.) Some theories suggest a whole whack of dimensions, co-existing at the same time on various planes, occurring in no particular order and housing who knows what sort of sapient energies.

Then there’s the “big Ru, little Ru” theory; the one that suggests the Ru in this life is a single facet of a multi-faceted Ru situated elsewhere, and that other facets of the greater Ru presently exist in a handful of other dimensions, living different lives in different conditions, all at the same time.

Blows your mind a little bit, eh? It sure blew mine. It took a while to get my head around it, and I’m still unsure exactly how I feel about being one of a bunch of Rus all connected to a mother Ru. It seems Type A-ish for a single entity to be so eager for experience that it divides itself into splinters and sends them out to grab all the gusto at once. First, if Time is infinite, then what’s the rush? Second, despite its glossy brochure, the multi-function device at the office can’t perform more than one task at a time (and neither can the human brain, by the way), so I question the ability of a greater Ru to live multiple lives at once through a squad of smaller Rus ... except it could explain how I lived in both Vietnam and Canada in the same span of years!

Starlight

A light year is the length of time it takes for light to travel from its source to Earth. A star that shines a hundred light years away can die, but the light will continue to shine for a century before we’ll see it go out.

A lot of stars have gone out this year. David Bowie. Glenn Frey. Leonard Cohen. Prince. George Michael. (That one hurt more than the others put together because I have more of his albums than I do of all the others put together.) Then, in tragically quick succession, Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds. It seems to me that a mass exodus is happening, but I may only be so aware of it because these famous names are a part of my generation; after all, thousands of people die every day and most of us don’t even blink. At least the famous ones leave behind a legacy of work that keeps them alive in the hearts of their fans.

Truth is, the world is always a little bit darker when someone dies.

I like to watch Jeopardy! to test my memory banks and see how far out of the loop I’ve fallen with regard to pop culture. Once in a while, I’ll take an inexplicable shine to a contestant and root for that person through victory after victory. Halfway through December, a quiet young woman named Cindy Stowell won her first game and took her place as the defending champion. Her run took her through six wins and over $100,000, before she was inevitably defeated. She gave Ter and me more than one heart attack over the course of her appearance—she wasn’t always quick with the buzzer, but she consistently came back from the red to win the game with a clever bet on the Daily Double or knowing the answer to an obscure Final Jeopardy question. And she never lost her cool. She was a little mouse with big eyes and dark hair, a shy smile and sweet demeanour. Something about her was delightful and fragile and made you want to cheer for her.

On her seventh appearance, at the start of the game, Alex Trebek mentioned that her goal had been to win $100,000 and she had accomplished this with her previous win. My radar pinged with an uh oh, and sure enough, regrettably, she lost her seventh game. At the end of that show, however, a clip of Mr Trebek came up after the credits, in which he explained that, during the filming of Cindy’s shows a few weeks earlier, she had been fighting stage four cancer. She lost her battle with it on December 5, almost two weeks before her shows aired. In short, she had already departed when her championship run was broadcast.

Like a little star whose light took a few weeks to wink out of our sky.

Smell the Roses

It’s the first day of vacation and I can’t slow down. My mind chatters like a runaway train: what to do first? Dust? Bake? Walk? I can almost hear it panting in my ear, a juiced-up puppy eager to bust loose.

Why is it that I feel pressed to do everything—even play—all at once? Granted, a jet moving at speed on an extended flight needs time to slow down once its wheels touch the tarmac. A sudden stop would flip it end over end, and I’d rather avoid a face-plant on my first day off.

Breathe, Ru.

PBS began a rerun of Wolf Hall, last week. Two episodes, back to back. I read the book by Hilary Mantel and wanted to see what Masterpiece made of it.

For most of the first episode, I was dying, the pace was so ponderous. It helped that I know the characters—told from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, it’s the oft-told tale of his rise in the court of Henry VIII at the time of the King’s Great Matter. A darned good story worth retelling, else I may have packed it in at thirty minutes. I’m glad that I stayed with it, though, because after thirty-five minutes, it got interesting. By the end of the second episode, Ter and I were sold and looking forward to the next installment.

She guessed why: we had to slow down, ourselves. Once we did that, we could pay proper attention and the story came alive.

A friend once told us that he could teach anyone to juggle. “All you need is to stick with it for more than three minutes,” he said. Three minutes being the critical period required to catch and keep someone’s attention.

Are you kidding me? Three minutes? That’s all?

Apparently, it is. I am guilty of impatience if F***book takes too long to load, if more than two people are ahead of me in the checkout line, if I land at an intersection as the light turns red and I have to wait through the whole sequence.

I have two weeks to live life at my own speed. Right now, I’m on “world speed”. If I take three minutes to be still and silent, it’s almost guaranteed that my natural rhythm will kick in and suddenly I’ll believe what is true:

I have all the time I need.

I must use some of it to stop and smell the roses.

“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,

Ra

One morning last week, I went across the street and sat at the beach while the sun came up. I wanted to witness the first warming spark as it breached the horizon. Not through my window or my camera, with no company; just Ru and Ra. The sky was brushed with pink cotton clouds, the ocean cloaked in a pale gold mist. The sky was robin’s egg blue near the water, then changed higher up to something brighter and brassier yet richer and deeper at the same time. Amazing. I placed myself directly in line with the spot where I figured the initial ray would appear, a step down on the breakwater, regrettably not far enough to avoid the “pound pound pound, huff huff huff”, but far enough that it wouldn’t matter once the show started. Then, I waited. Watched. Listened. Marvelled.

A gang of crows were hanging out on the rocks below me. As the eastern halo intensified, one of the crows erupted into “caw caw caw” and the whole flock took wing, buzzing so close to my head that I heard the wind whuffing through their feathers. They landed on the rail that runs along Dallas Road; the ringleader cawed again, and they all turned toward the sun. I was so fascinated by their behaviour that I almost forgot to turn myself. The gulls were doing something similar down in the water, gathering to greet the new day.

The light changed again, the golden halo shrinking and glowing harder, fiercer. The water was still, the birds quiet. No joggers, go figure. Then the first tiny gleam, bright minted gold, peered over the silhouetted houses on the far side of the bay. One single spark—then two, as the shape of a house split the atom; then three as the earth tipped a little further and the topmost arc of the corona rose above the shadow peak. The ocean caught fire, my retinas began to sizzle, and I glanced down to watch the fire line stretch across the water. The clouds turned white. The mist disappeared. The sky assumed a pure polished blue as the sunlight itself gradually eased from intense orange gold to sparkling silver and, finally, to blazing white.

Now, I know that the sun is actually a gargantuan rock roiling with combustible gas and belching fire. I also know that the sun doesn’t move. We do. Sunrise, sunset, and the path in between are optical illusions driven by the earth’s tilt, rotation, and orbit. Daybreak and twilight are a blend of physics and perception. Sometimes I feel as if I am made from the same blend. Someone once told me that I am the calmest person she knows. I was gobsmacked—and oddly touched that she would perceive my energy the way we perceive the sun’s: as a warm and nourishing presence.

I suppose I could laugh it off (I actually think I did), but deep down, her observation stayed with me. So when I watched the sun rise serenely over the ocean that day last week, I remembered what she said … and that it’s a good idea not to get too close.

There’s nothing serene about a billion degree burn.

Smarter Than the Average Bear

He may not be smarter, but he’s far cuter. Moon Pie decided to hold Ter’s reading glasses hostage the other day; we were running around getting ready for work—always a bit of a circus—and he pounced on her purse when our backs were turned.

His enthusiasm reminded me of being a kid and believing that work was better than school because you got paid for being there. Every kid plays at being a grown up. Conversely, too few grown ups play at being a kid. Moonie gets to stay home and play all day, but I guess that gets old after a while. I wish I could remember those days. I disliked school for the most part. Almost every report card from grade five to twelve features a teacher’s comment along the lines of “Ruth would do so much better if she would apply herself.” I was obviously rich with potential (aren’t we all?) and highly unmotivated—except in English, of course. I reckon I’d have done better if I’d been healthy and thus less preoccupied, but I could be wrong. I simply did less well in subjects that failed to appeal.

I regret some of that, now. Math will always inspire an Ugh!, but I must harbour a closet engineering gene because physics has become more fascinating as I’ve grown up. I can grasp concepts of space/time/energy etc. that have Ter gaping at me in astonishment, yet the most significant thing I recall from physics class is shooting light through a prism … and I’d likely have forgotten that little item if Pink Floyd had chosen different cover art for Dark Side of the Moon. Still, with naught but that tiny experiment to my credit, I understood the concept of trans-warp beaming as defined in the Star Trek movie from 2009. I couldn’t possibly write out the formula (which doesn't exist, by the way ... yet), but I totally saw how it could work. You aim for a set of coordinates at a point in space X number of parsecs or light years or whatever from where you are now, compensating for the speed at both departure and arrival points. The tricky bit is figuring out where the arrival site will be, given that it too is moving at warp and could change speed/direction en route. Firing a bullet at a moving target at breakneck speed while blindfolded was a good analogy as expressed by Montgomery Scott, but the entire thing made complete sense to me.

Easy.

I think.

Even math, when I get past the ugh, has become a test of skill. I’ve relied on my calculator for so many years that I’ve begun losing my ability to add three digit figures in my head. Panic ensued on that discovery, and now I’m adding my invoices by hand … then confirming with the calculator. After all, I work with taxpayer dollars so accuracy is key. It’s hardly the same as beaming Captain Kirk from the Romulan Narada to the Enterprise during a high speed space chase, but the fundamentals are pretty much the same.

I think.