All That We Don't Understand

 What’s nice about the writing life is you're never really alone in it. Yes, you may start out alone carrying your armful of fuel down the road in the form of the images you use and the stories you tell, but then suddenly here comes this nice other person who offers to help you carry the kindling all the way to the hearth, as fuel for your ‘fire.’ 

What I’m trying to say is that that person is your reader, and your reader meets you halfway on any road, coming with his own fresh take on things. He or she sees what you're trying to say, sometimes more clearly than you see it yourself. I think this is why telling what happened to me, telling what ideas burbled up in my mind can act as such an antidote to loneliness, leading me forth out of the stuffy closed room of my mind.I wrote the other day about how my young grandchild seemed to have somehow lodged himself inside the Play Place structure at McDonald's and was sobbing inside it.I had no clue what to do and that was the story I thought I was telling here Tuesday.It wasn’t until I got to the end of my telling that I suddenly saw the whole event as a metaphor for parenthood: Our kids go where we can’t follow and so on. And ll of that was me carrying my fuel alone on the road. But the everything changed when this one reader name ‘met’ me on the road and added his own interpretation. In the comments section here he wrote, "Perhaps [your little grandson] was not so alone in that tube but rather quietly listening to another guide, in addition to you of course, who pointed the way back to you.”'Another guide'! Another Capital ‘g’ Guide! See? A wholly fresh take on the same event. My little grandson's  predicament had suggested just two ideas to me. (1) I fall short as a caregiver and 2) We can't go before the children we love, taking joy in their joy and quelling their fears. The time comes when they will go where we can never follow.But now here was a whole look at the event, that acknowledged  what else might well be happening in this world every day, in fact, realms and realms beyond the understanding of  us bossy grownups, who are so smug in our belief  that we are the ones who move the world. Another Guide indeed! Thanks, fellow traveler. Thanks for helping me see that this child will never be alone, truly.

Strange Beauty

Last night when I stepped out of the sold-out I-Max theatre for a moment, I saw that I’d received a text from a young person in my life. “Hey, I’m at Avatar,” I answered. “It’s a truly phenenomal movie. See it twice,” he texted back and I think I just might do that because when was the last time I witnessed people clapping at a the end of a movie? When was the last time I saw folks talking so animatedly as they exited? One woman saw me looking at the crowd. “Were you as moved as I was?” she asked. “I cried!"A lot of people did as I could see since, with those 3-D glasses on, you can watch people without their knowing. I was completely swept away by what I saw. The great dragon-like creatures who fly against the human invaders with their death engines reminded me of the  Siamese Fighting Fish I used to  kept just to look upon the beauty of their  bright veil-like fins. The sight of the Na'vi  people  swaying like sea anemones in their religious ceremonies made me think how we could look like to God if we ever stopped fighting long enough to entwine our arms. And the main metaphor of Sully in his chair brought real tears to my eyes - not so much for what it says about so-called 'civilized' man with his shrunken and twisted legs, helpless as a fish on dry land without his ‘wheels,’  but for the pure force of that visual, repeated every time Jake enters the capsule that translates him to Pandora. It shows how, broken and weak, a human swoons down into Death; and then there’s that vortex of light; and then he wakes, a tall strong 'angel.' Ah that it might prove true!