Waiting Game

Tragedy struck in Chile last night- an earthquake of terrible force- and now we all sit and wait with a strange anticipation to see what havoc it will echo in Hawaii.  Knowing that a tsunami is headed towards the island paradise with tremendous speed stirs my fascination with mother nature’s power.

I love apocalyptic movies, Armageddon, The Day After, 2012… if the world is coming to an end on celluloid, I’m buying a ticket.  But here we are watching real-life versions of Nature’s strength and I still can’t peel my eyes away from the screen, or my mind away from the possibilities…

What about boats out in the Pacific?  Are they facing gigantic dips and subsequent waves of water? Visions of A Perfect Storm well up from my memory’s backlog.  What about the ocean inhabitants?  What happens to the fish and the mammels?  Do they know something is coming?  Or are they going to be caught unawares?

My mind is racing, my curiosity piqued, and I can’t help but think about our technological advantage over our ancestors – Imagine leaving home to travel (and travel took much, much longer centuries ago) only to return home to… nothing-  A city completely destroyed by earthquake or tsunami- buildings constructed of lessor skill or knowledge might not stand a chance… and the heartbreaking unknowables!  What if no one remained to explain what happened there?  What if all you were able to uncover were rumors in nearby cities?  What wonder and terror you would feel finding nothing where before had been an entire community!  Imagine an otherwise sunny day, turned to ruin via unexpected waters, and no one else in the world able to send help because there is no way to tell them what has happened?  I’m seeing it, I’m imagining the horror, and I’m amazed that we can bear witness to these natural disasters happening around the world, we can pray, donate money, contact loved ones… We can sit on the couch with our proverbial popcorn, and watch it as it happens.

The ripples of an event occuring on the other side of the world reaching out to us all…  There are so many implications of this inter-connectivity that it makes the mind spin.

Anthropologist of Wonder

Is it any wonder artists are so prone to madness?  We hear, see, taste, feel everything!  Our minds, bodies, and souls are tuned in to those hard-to-hear frequencies… frequencies that the average citizen remains blissfully unaware of… and with a predisposition to listen to so many channels, it’s no wonder we get labeled eccentric, quirky, or just plain crazy (warranted or not.)

Today, at my odd job surveying teens, I was sitting in a gymnasium (woof, I don’t miss P.E.!) with oodles and oodles of school kids, minding my own business when there came a tap, tap, tapping.  Now, the obvious source was one of the 8th graders seated on the floor nearby, but for some reason I looked to the trash located to my right as though some little garbage monkey had begun playing the drums… and allowed that idea to sit for a moment before even thinking to ask where the sound was “really” coming from.

Because (cue the circus music)it didn’t seem that impossible.

And as I sat there, completely open to the possibility of garbage monkeys in Topanga and what they might be doing hanging around with the middle schoolers, (kids do manufacture a lot of trash) it occurred to me that the patterns of thought exercising my brain on a steady basis might be a little bit… unusual.  I mean, people don’t probably go from “Hmm, I wonder what that sound it” cue eyes… see garbage can, VOILA “Garbage Monkeys!”

Then, the observational “Me” who was noting this unusual thinking got to remembering yesterday’s date confusion.  See, I got to the “date” section on a form I was filling in and wrote 10/18/08… then I stared at it, at that infinite 8, in utter confusion.  What year is it? My brain asked as it ran around and around itself in perfectly mimicked loops searching for the answer… (none came)… and then it asked Does it really matter?  I mean, what is our human obsession with time and counting anyway?  The earth doesn’t care about our calendars, seconds, decades… It’s just a symbol!  An assignment.  It’s wholly and completely meaningless! (15 seconds… still staring at the form and that “8”) But what year have we decided upon right now?  Am I really here, facing this conundrum or am I having some sort of existential crisis in the memory of this Post Office line? (25 seconds) Why does this seem to unimportant?  Is time, and therefore the year, and therefore more things by association, decided by my action, or am I a slave to this assignment?  What happens if I call it 2008?  Or 1008?  Anything?  Is this a shift in consciousness or am I consciously loosing it? (40 damn seconds Tiffany!) …   …   …   2008, it feels… weird…

And then  I remember, not because I feel some kind of lunar “Click” but because I can “see” my pen on paper the week before writing 10/9/09 over and over again at a another survey school.

So I scratch out the infinite 8 and draw in the less frightening 9… my mind still racing because I don’t believe in it.  Somehow, some remainder of the confusion has remained long enough for my mind to echo Time is just something we invented to give the illusion of control… control over the seasons, over the sun, over our own imprefect and short existence on this planet… as if Nature or the Earth gave a damn how old we think they are.

And there I stood, form filled out, completely irreverant and not at all unsettled by my ponderings… And I felt (for a moment) outside it all.  I felt completely untethered to these human rules we fight for… and I felt fine.

See -Is it a step, an inch, a breath away from madness?  Or do I simply have one foot in Neverland, one foot still here writing down all I can see?