Try this at home when alone, and fully alert.
Sit in a chair, or stand purposefully. At the same time – clap your hands loudly together and sternly and sharply speak the words wake up out loud.
I hope it works for me.
Archive for the ‘Reflections on the everyday’ Category
Nightmares
Posted in Psycho-Bubbles, Reflections on the everyday, tagged consciousness on September 24, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Equinox
Posted in Reflections on the everyday, tagged autumn, time on September 23, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Mr. Saturday Night
Posted in Reflections on the everyday, Uncategorized, tagged monarch butterflies, monarch caterpillars, transformation on September 21, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Mr. Saturday Night is no longer — I miss him already.
Mr. Saturday Night was an adventurous monarch caterpillar given to escapist feats. Placed in a jar for his own protection against winged predators, he had a penchant for wriggling out air holes and heading on down the highway, or at least the end of the shelf.
Big, striped, and saucy, that boy had a way about him. Nobody could put down a milkweed leaf like he could.
And he is gone.
Yesterday, after hanging upside down for about a day, he sloughed his skin and disappeared into a jade-green chrysalis about one-third the size of his formerly formidable caterpillar form.
The root meaning of metaphor is to transfer, carry over or across. Metamorphosis is to change, or transform. Metamorphosis has always been a florid metaphor for human transformation.
We all know the story of the caterpillar and the chrysalis – monarch butterflies are beloved for their beauty, their shape-shifting, and their migratory bent. To me, they represent a life-long interest. When young myself, I witnessed the same journey I now see again in Mr. Saturday Night and five of his closest friends.
Everyone sees what they will. After years of troubling divorce and continuing instability, the permanence of the change in Mr. Saturday Night – his reduction to goo, his sturdy reliance on unshakeable instinct to lead him forward – leave a deep impression on me.
Prior form is utterly gone – we have the shed skin to prove it. Yet he survives, interior, contained, and changing. His instinct, our faith, he needs only to endure and follow his path to the sky.
At their age, my children are saddened by the disappearance of these beautiful caterpillars, they wonder at the change – and wait to see if nature holds good on the promise. I do too.
Along the way
Posted in Reflections on the everyday, Uncategorized on September 14, 2011| 1 Comment »
Crisp day, a turn toward autumnal.
Quiet day in the neighborhood gave way to rushing, oncoming traffic. Trucks rumble by close enough to feel their wake. To the car repair shop via sidewalk, a piece down a busy road. Attention pivots away from vehicular onslaught.
Mountain Ash…a scrubby tree with top full of orange berries reaching for light, resides on the north side of a house that has seen better days. Cedar Waxwings covet those berries when days cool further, beautiful birds.
A stand of common milkweed beyond cracked pavement catches my eye. Monarch caterpillars that grow to magnificent butterflies feed upon these plants, absorbing the toxicity of the plant into their skin – making them unpalatable to predators. You are what you eat. No leaf damage here, not a caterpillar in sight.
“Excuse me,” an upcoming runner dodged around me and took a near, and pleasant looking side street.
Two tractor trailers, engine brakes engaged, roll past too fast – what am I doing here?
Looking up for escape – an eyeful of Simpson’s clouds. Cumulus clouds bearing precise resemblance to the opening scene of the popular, but irreverent, animated television show of the same name. Meteorology, please forgive me.
Only a few weeks ago my boys and I were above those clouds looking down – cannot help but smile for the memory of family and friends seen again along the way.
Struggling young ornamental pear, half a dozen trees, planted a couple of years ago when this thoroughfare was widened, working at survival in the foreground of an empty lot.
A large old maple here, guards a pumpkin patch set back off the road. Powdery mildew is making fast work of those vines, exposing pumpkins ripened early by unusual summer heat.
Black metal bench and trash can front another vacant lot. Hidden here is the geocache my children and I found last December. Still here.
Almost there, sumac bobs in full sun, tight ruddy fruit clusters like those in my parents backyard years ago. Those seed pods always were a little too tense for me.
Rounding the corner, I spy Buckbeak, finished, parked and waiting, my time travel ended for now. When avoiding the unpleasant, a lot to be seen – and said – for things noticed along the way.
A Moment
Posted in Reflections on the everyday, tagged September 11 on September 11, 2011| Leave a Comment »
After just posting a bog, I see it is dated “September 11,” although where I am in the world, it is still only September 10.
September 11 is breath-taking. I wish it were over, but it never shall be.
As I did ten years ago, my thoughts and prayers go out to all who lost, who lived, and who inherit the cause and effect of that day.
Onward.
Underfoot
Posted in Reflections on the everyday on August 30, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Scrubbing floors on hands and knees. While there is likely a more chemically efficient means of floor cleansing these days, I am good with elbow grease.
Years of waxy build-up is the target. A dull shell of plastic coated floor I did not notice until today. One linoleum square gave way to the next, and the next…well, you know how it goes.
Clean, restored, almost like new. Good thing to take care of the ground you walk on.
Airports
Posted in Reflections on the everyday on August 28, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Lightning over the airfield delayed the flight. A line of thunderstorms moving east.
Airports are interesting places. Architecture that supports carriage of transient, generic humanity. Generations daily enter, depart, and arrive – processed.
Delays are common, expected, and generally accepted among the strangers who temporarily populate airports.
One woman left Korea early that day, a young man returning to Amsterdam, a woman with moving vans arriving next day – all unique. The tattooed man, the weary newlyweds returning from Italy – each story, with its quirks, a coincidence with whom it is shared.
Strangers who boarded, waited, deplaned, and re-boarded now have an incremental understanding of a few of the stories that passed their way. More willing to hoist luggage, step aside, spare a smile. A common phenomena of human sociability.
Cheers went up at the gate as re-boarding was announced – camaraderie built only through the pressure of process and delay. Something to that.
In the Pines
Posted in Reflections on the everyday on August 27, 2011| Leave a Comment »
On adventure bent of late.
Look over there – a mountain to catch the sinking sun. Spare trees, wind. The younger generation throwing rocks. Pine needles cross my palm.
Devastating. But only for the good. Hapless fragmentation under the onslaught of memory held in bone, wind, and tree. I have been here before. I did not realize it was a beginning. I am here again, and this time, I am aware.
New energy, new ideas, young people who are not me.
An airplane overhead and for once – for once – I am happy to be grounded.
Under cover
Posted in Reflections on the everyday on August 17, 2011| Leave a Comment »
There are blinds on the windows this evening. Light, darkness and the seasons have washed unimpeded through my uncovered living room windows for two years.
I never intended to leave windows uncovered that long. Divorce is all about dissolution, and mine drained away energy for big things and small things, like tending to windows.
Windows provide a view – both in and out, access to both bounded, and unbounded space. As arbiters of view, windows admit or deny both the highly personal, and the naturally impersonal beyond our four walls.
Dreams of houses with doors unshut, windows uncovered, are common. Lack of containment. No discernment, only unrelenting exposure – unmediated nature.
The nature of things. The blinds are closed this evening.
Shouldn't...but Do 