Karma

A fresh cup of coffee over a fresh piece of mint gum gives, for a brief moment, the impression of that ‘holiday feeling’, born of the association slowly made over the years between winter mornings and peppermint lattes. Some day, I like to think, my house will smell like coffee, peppermint and pine all winter long.

It’s my fourth grade classroom, at a West Olympia elementary school in the mid nineties (replete with mauve, teal and salmon detailing). We have the fourth and fifth grades together, actually - part of this ‘Alternative Education Program’ idea that’s going around. On this particular afternoon, we have all pulled our chairs away from the tables and over to the blackboard into a sort of class huddle, some of us standing or on the floor. We’ve begun to take a look at our solar system, and my amazing teacher has just explained to us the mind-blowing phenomenon of gravity and our orbit around the sun. It is amazing. Amazing enough that even as I try to listen - and I am focusing quite hard indeed - my brain runs off with it all and has its way. But then, to make sure we have the concept, he asks us to raise our hands if we can explain why it is the world itself is turning.

Of course, I raise my hand. Immediately. And I explain to them, matter-of-factly, from somewhere off in the clouds: it feels to me sometimes that as we walk, we turn the earth.

This, as I recall, was followed by an awkward silence, then some quiet juvenile laughter. My teacher (as wonderful as he was) let me know that wasn’t quite the answer he was looking for, and went on to survey the rest of the waving hands.

I remember that moment from time to time, especially when I’m having difficulty working around an idea about the world that seems established. It helps quite a bit to remind myself that the closer you look at something, the more explaining there is to do - but when you swing out wide and let that focus fuzz up a little, so simple a story can suffice to satisfy the Why of things. Heck, we used to be satisfied that the earth was flat, until we traveled far enough to notice things disappearing over the horizon. Chances are that before that point, the world at large was just as comfortable with its existing notions about the universe as we are with what we believe to be the truth now (however comfortable that is).

Of course I’ll never stop digging for Why, or looking at things as closely as I possibly can. I simply shall not ever forget how nice it is to have a little answer, and just let it imply that something more tantalizing hides underneath.

It’s really something to be ‘bottoming out.’

There has been a loss of control. But it’s been more like a blip in the power steering than, say, spiraling into addiction or becoming trapped in a bad relationship. I guess this means something different to everyone. Either way, it’s quite the experience.

The thing of it is not to panic. 

It reminds me of my first forays into The Evergreen State College’s twelve-foot deep diving pool, when I was just old enough to pass what at the time seemed like a rigorous swimming test (two laps in the regular pool). To plunge in headfirst from that height, slicing through eight feet of water when you are barely four feet high, is exciting and at once starkly foreign to what you know as swimming. But there are familiarities. I could find ‘up’ with a momentary pause to drift, and steer myself in the same way I swam along the bottom of the five-foot pool. The pressure in my ears, though intense, was recognizable and not frightening. Recognizing these elements as universal to being a person under water allowed me the time for curiosity, to wonder at just how far away the surface was and how close this new stretch of pool floor had gotten.

Once I felt the bottom, oriented it to myself and mapped it into my world, to resurface took  little more than a push. But, I did find it easiest to push once both feet had touched down.

I remember one of the first things that struck me about the film Donnie Darko. It was during the assembly, as the ‘inspirational’ speech was being given, and things began to speed up around him. "I’m moving through time," he said. It was profound, and yet when you think about it, incredibly obvious. Of course he was moving through time. We all are. If we weren’t, we would be separate from the stream of reality that holds us in conjunction with those around us. This "time-space continuum" is, by definition, a streamlined progression.

I think about it every time someone says that the day is going by fast or dragging on, especially when I feel the opposite effect to what they are describing. It’s strange to think that while a day is racing along to you, for someone else, it seems to take eons to make it through the last hour. That’s only for those of us who believe in time, I suppose. But even then, I don’t know anyone who has never experienced a ‘long day’.

We were thinking about how we forgot what we were just thinking about,
But that it doesn’t matter, because now that we’ve thought about it, it’s out there. 

– The final night in my first apartment 

I have three major personal philosophies.
Two of them I am aware of.
The first has to do with the general tendency to analyze and judge categorically, this being inversely relative to the expanding human consciousness. I’ll go into that later.

The second, and probably the most pertinent on a daily basis, deals with process.
If there is one thing I’ve noticed in moving through time, it is that nothing begins and ends at the same moment. We never remember the exact beginning or the exact ending of an event - it is what leads to these beginnings and ends (which for the purpose of my thought are one and the same) that makes a point in life memorable. Try and think of a single moment in your life that you remember clearly. Immediately, one tends to wonder why one remembers it.
It is part of our inquisitive nature as humans; I like to think of that curiosity as a subset of this philosphy, because that is what drives these automatic reactions. I remember reading Sophie’s World (an excellent book if you ever get the chance to pick it up); there was a part in which an object is rolled through the room towards a cat, who immediately locks onto the object and watches where it goes next. A different form of curiosity; humans see an object roll into the room and, as the book notes, look to the object’s origin and not its destination. This is why history is necessary to us, why science looks to debunk the whole thing, and why so many look to faith: we need an explanation of the process. Simple answers like “We are alive, and that is all” are not enough.
Life is about process.
The most important part of this, though, is far more personal. We measure our life in terms of experiences, not necessarily in knowledge gained. It is a strange phenomenon in adults, however, that when we reach a certain age, we feel the need to pass on what we have accumulated so far to the generation below us in the hopes that perhaps they will not have to go through things in the same manner we did. What we forget is the importance of process in that child’s life. The answer will not be enough for such a young and inquisitive mind, and we are hard pressed to explain the sequence that led to these conclusions, especially when it may seem different in retrospect than it did at the time. Memorable events are going to have a larger impact on a child than simply delivered answers that were perhaps not what they meant to ask for.
Children are simply an example, really, of a more over-reaching idea. In modern Western society, we are very individualistic and goal-oriented. Often we lose sight of what we go through in between until much, much later. So my philosophy of process is, I suppose, to gain as much from the process as you might from the end result; or perhaps, to be careful about taking the process for granted.

The third philosophy is a mystery to me, at least so far. I like to think that in a roundabout way, this alludes to my belief that not everything must be explained or understood; and I can accept this, which further indicates that it’s alright, and perhaps it isn’t necessary anyway.

I always feel the need to defend my philosophies against nihilism for some reason. I suppose it’s because as I write and attempt to debunk any questions that one might have about what I am writing, the first objection to leap to mind is “Well bugger all then, we can just leave things be and not bother doing anything, is that it?” This is not necessarily so. I suppose it could be in the harshest of interpretations, but one would be missing the point.
One misses out on a lot by simply disengaging and assuming the world has nothing to do with them. Above all else, without ourselves, how would we appreciate anything?

Before you ask, this isn’t some hippie attack on the material culture.
I couldn’t bother myself to go that far with it, or to get that negative about it. Just couldn’t be bothered.
It’s just that lately, as I’ve been about to move out for the first time ever, I’ve been going through a bunch of stuff that I’ve had for years. Some of it was in such a state that it had to be thrown a way. A large amount of it could probably go to goodwill, but some of it I just had to keep, because it still meant something to me. I know eventually I’ll be able to just toss it all out the window and keep the memories, but not yet. Now, hold that thought.
On a completely unrelated mindtrack, I was thinking about Christmas as I walked from the parking garage to work today. I’m not sure why. But I was thinking to myself how a lot of really intelligent people condemn Christmas because it has become a purely secular holiday, revolving around people buying each other crap they don’t need in order to try and alleviate some weird media-imposed guilt. Which is true - for a large part. But that doesn’t mean it means nothing to people. And I think that’s where those people drop their argument. Beyond their condemnation of mass marketing, any counter-argument comes across as nothing but cheesy emotional excuses for its existence as such. I feel personally insulted when people assume that I participate in christmas because I am obligated by the media to do so.
I know that for a lot of people, that’s how it is. And you can kind of tell by the things that they go out and buy for people how well they know the person and just how important it really is. Would I be disappointed if I didn’t get presents? Hell yeah, I put a lot of thought into what I ask for. I get stuff I use. But if there were no more presents ever, would I think that Christmas was gone? No. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the “spirit of christmas” or even any religious elements. The attachments I have to the christmas, easter, valentines day, all that crap - they have nothing to do with all the corporate lauding. I would still decorate a tree, because that’s one of the most fun things to do all year. Same with eggs, because I’m an artist and my mother and I go all out… and it’s always fun trying to find them in the morning because she forgets where she hid them. Valentine’s day? I like chocolate. Yep, that’s all. No cheesy romantic stuff, my boyfriend isn’t obligated to buy me anything, I have never required myself to have one by that particular day, and my mom buys me all the sugar.
I could boycott the holidays, teach the media a lesson like some people do. But I already refrain from buying the pointless crap. And you know what? It doesn’t go away. It never will until everyone stops buying it, and with the large number of underinformed, brainwashed citizens in the country that believe they are making good purchasing decisions, that is not going to happen in my lifetime. And sure, I could work at organizing people and telling them not to buy it either, but not if they really thought it was what they wanted. Not everyone can give up their material ties so easily. Hell, I couldn’t get rid of half of that sentimental stuff that I found. Now my friend is Taoist. The last thing that this friend of mine wants is more junk, and after the last move, a lot of that same kind of memorabilia was done away with. My point is, we are all on different levels. It so happens that most of the country is at the level where they feel the need to purchase and hold on to things like that for no good reason until they come to the realization years later that they never needed it to begin with. Furthermore, there is the problem of what can even be categorized as “useless shit,” and until everyone agrees on that point, we cannot compeltely stop buying it. That’s how our commercial nation works. And it isn’t just going to break down overnight. It may be slowly decaying, but the keyword is slowly.
So people can go ahead and keep ranting about it in their “blogs”, just like this. They can either dribble on in some broken, misspelled variant of internet english about all the stuff they didn’t get, or curse antagonistically the fact that they never had a happy holiday because of domestic issues and use that to argue that no one needs it, period. It will be done intelligently. Many will agree with them. But listening to anything like that religiously is just as ridiculous as buying meaningless plastic on sight from an infomercial.
That can’t be stopped either. I can’t even tell anyone to give up the argument.
By no means am I being nihilistic here. One shouldn’t do or not do a thing simply because “it doesn’t matter anyway.” I celebrate christmas not because it doesn’t matter in the long run, but because it has personal value for me. Maybe that’s cheesy. But like I said before, it’s all internalized, and there’s no real way to turn everyone at once from complete externalization of self-worth.
Just a thought. Do with it whatever you like.

I don’t know why I take so much notice of these church billboard signs. I don’t go to church. I’m not Christian, and I don’t percieve God in the same manner they do. I am, in fact, of a Bhuddist-Hindu philosophy. But I’m very contemplative, despite context, and am always on a subconscious lookout for concepts to mull over. Things like “Big bang theory? Yeah right! –God” catch my eye now and again.
So this morning on the way to work, after dropping off some of my mum’s heavenly vegetable soup for my best friend (it’s her favourite), I drove by a sign that jumped out at me.
It said, more or less, that prayer was not to give commands to God, but to report for duty.
This challenged my personal perspective.
I have prayed to “God” before, once. I guess I just wanted to see what it was like. It was a warm fuzzy feeling, though uncertain, and of course tinged with that silly feeling that one is talking to oneself about things one already knows. It was the latter that stuck with me, not because I felt stupid for having done it, but because it was true - I was talking to myself. Churches have the strange dichotomy of all at once telling you that God is in everyone, but that “He” is also the master. He is a separate entity. When you speak to him in prayer, you are broadcasting your prayer in a heavenly direction. But what I found, that one night, is that it is simply a further internalization. We pray before we sleep, with what is most important to us weighing on our mind. The comfort of the idea of a God then sends you to sleep with reassurance that someone is giving thought to your problems, your dilemmas. And sometimes it happens, miraculously, that you wake up in the morning and you come to some kind of conclusion, though you can’t explain why. You dreamt something? Or maybe you don’t even remember your dream.
I talk to myself all the time. Driving in my car, falling asleep at night, both silently and out loud. The same thing has happened to me, some strange resolution, realization, or epiphany has come to me, though I have no heavenly agent to which I can attribute its coming. It is of the same nature.
“Prayer” is not for giving commands to God, no. But it is not for recieving them, either. It is for putting those thoughts of yours out in the open. Telling yourself and whatever is floating in the air around you what you are worried about, what you are thankful for, or what you hope will happen, works the same way as it does when you sometimes write something down to remember it and the act of writing it causes you to memorize it. It is now manifest as one assumes God to be. And there it remains, in your subconscious, which processes these thoughts in the background more than you may realize at the time. Is this “God?”
All I had intended to say, initially, was that no one can tell you how to “pray”. But the more I bounced it off of myself in the car on the way here, the more I thought of. All this in a ten-minute drive to work? I’ve got a lifetime ahead of me! This ought to be fun.

My favourite colour is purple, and my next favourite colour is orange. But favourite colours are complicated. I like a dark purple to wear, but a lavender when colouring or writing - and I like a very slightly darkened, yet vivacious orange that will jump out at you when used against the purple. I don’t much like pink except on rare occasions (like fluffy dresses, which I hardly if ever wear…). I like to think that green is one of my favourite colours, but every time I think of green, I think of a colour that’s brighter than a grass green but not light enough to be a spring green - a colour like generic green plastic, and I don’t like it. Then I end up thinking that green is good on grass, and that I look good in a dark, foresty green, and then I remember that chartreuse can look really nice… I have to qualify liking green for some reason. So I think I like sky blue better. A really light sky blue. A little darker than ‘almost white’. Especially when on black. I used a lot of gel markers the last couple of days - the new kind that look like markers, but dry as gel. I like watching the bright colours slowly materialize on the dark paper. I remember when gel pens were a huge fad. I always wanted some because they were cool, not because I wanted to be popular; there was no helping my social status. Thank goodness. I would be horribly different if I had worried about that back then. Now I can get all the gel pens I want and I don’t have to think about it… I got a purple one the other day. It’s metallic. When you write with it, it dries so that if you look close, the words themselves are in silver but ringed in a line of purple, like the ink somehow separated on the paper as you wrote into shiny bubble letters. I wish it didn’t show through on the back of the paper so much, but then again, the shiny ones are to be used only for special things anyway - and one usually doesn’t go front-to-back on special things. Which might even be on cardstock, because it holds up better and looks nicer. Just a thought.

Between a state of sleep and waking, your worst nightmare materializes, inches away from you. It is vivid, and sickening. The things you trust the most conspire against you, believing you blind, knocking your feet out from under you and raping that trust. Even when you rise against it, you end up in the same place you were, comforting that which you feared moments ago… only to wake the next morning and remember it as nothing more than a dream, a figment, a nightmare.
It is nothing so trite as a lesson; perhaps a sign. Whatever it is, this figment of the night is haunting, leaving no direct recourse and no memory of where you stood before it all hit you.
Somehow, though disoriented, you feel at peace. Perhaps now the worst is over.
But those words always echo in the eye of the storm…
In your mind, the shadows dance. They stretch and flail, like spindly flames, then shrink, to creep along the edges and slip through the cracks. What it might be. What it looked like. What they said it was, and how it shouldn’t have been. It tears at you.
So why does the calm remain?
It cannot be the resolution of knowing what comes next, for there is no way to know what must be done. It cannot be the comfort of justification, for the trust still lays broken at your feet. The only question which can be answered remains as such: who is left with the upper hand?