January 11, 2013

• Doo Doo Doo Doo

  The sun came out, briefly. Otherwise it is a cold, gray day (well, according to the  back fence, it's 50 degrees outside which in January hardly qualifies as 'cold'.) It feels cold. And damp. It rained last night and everything outside is wet. Very little snow has survived this. Which means the mud track through the Conservatory is going to get worse.

  I am new to steam cleaner ownership. It has posed some logistical problems that were not apparent when I 'ordered' the machine. For instance: it takes parts of our carpet hours to dry after a cleaner--like most of a day. This means that until the carpet dries, it's still damp (duh) which means that dogs tracking in mud just make the carpet dirtier than if I had left it alone in the first place.

  Clearly I am not looking for the Good Housekeeping Award, here: I just want all of my carpet to be the color it was when it was installed.

  As I write this I have an unhappy crate tenant. I am discovering (slowly) that contrary to my intuition, when Annie starts getting wired up and anxious, she's barking at everything on every side of the house, she's restless, goes after the cat, steals my stuff, starts fights with Riley...the best solution is a peanut butter Kong and a closed crate. She's like a toddler who needs a nap. Most of the time she settles right down, eats her peanut butter and then snoozes.

  Today is an exception, and while I can't see the eight foot purple and green slobbering monster coming through the back door, I know it's there--she certainly has warned me often enough.

  On a different plane, I am reading a book by Robert Monroe about...I can't remember what he calls it. OOBE: out of body experiences. Aka Astral Projection. If I have any psychic abilities I am unaware of them: on the other hand, I have spent the greatest share of my life blocking off intuitions and hunches because I find that whole realm of the unspoken confusing and I'm not good at it. For instance, of what use it is, really, to push my trash out to the street, observe my across-the-street neighbor sitting on his front steps, and intuit that he really does not like me? I've never met him. The urge to rush across the street and introduce myself is sufficiently quashed, but then, he's lived there for...three (?)...years and that urge is apparently easily quashed anyway. If the world really is full of little bits of free-floating, sourceless knowledge, what good is it? And as for the blocking issue: how do you know whether your next door neighbor, whom you have never met, actually dislikes your existence, or you are just projecting your own assumptions about twenty-something men who drive trucks and dirt bikes onto him?

  Interestingly enough, I did not buy the Monroe book and neither did Nancy. It just appeared in the guest bedroom as we were cleaning it out. (doo doo doo doo....) I assume it came from the GirlChild, who during her stay there dealt with some issues about death and dying, spectral visitations and the whole questions of where we go when we leave here. Initially it struck me as...quixotic...that I have read two books now about life beyond death and both describe more or less the same afterlife (and then it dawned on me: the GirlChild gave me the other one as well.)

  I have a friend who has been journeying out of body her entire life (I always seems to have at least one friend with some attachment to the psychic, in one form or another.) Her approach is highly spiritual and she might be appalled by Monroe's determined efforts to apply the scientific method to the ethereal. (Monroe was 38 the first time he saw a color television, which would make him at least twenty years my senior. I have just passed over the 64 mile marker.) During his time the scientific method was EVERYTHING. I should journey out of body to Wikipedia and learn more about him. Perhaps I'll just drag my body along. This time.

  Since I started reading this book--wherein he states he believes we all journey out of body, we just don't remember it--I have been dreaming about astral projections. Or it may not be a dream: there is (in my perception) a level of awareness between sleep and true awareness where my mind, at least, is apt to consider almost any stray and wandering thought as if it were gospel. I remember I 'woke up' once with this truly brilliant sentence running through my mind and I made up my  mind to remember it and write it down. And then I did wake up, and I did remember the sentence: it was gibberish. It sounded exactly like an English sentence, except none of the words meant anything. And then it was gone. Monroe says he frequently 'visits' friends, but they never remember the conversation; or if they do, it's fractured and non-sensical. So who knows where my brilliant sentence came from?

  Nancy says she wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that people from other worlds come to me and tell me their stories so I can write them down. This would explain (for her) the people who live in my head.  

  Monroe gives instructions on how to have an out of body experience. I read them quite seriously, and then all the questions reared their ugly heads again.... I joke about this, but the truth is I tend to avoid contact with the other side,convinced as I am that my mother is stalking up and down the fence line, preparing a few fine words for me, should I ever pop through. (Because, in the intervening almost 40 years, she has never found anything better to do than judge my life?) 

  I am in an odd little place right now. My friend's oldest sister died this week. I've met her, but did not know her well. My cat looks like a damp rag, his coat is worse than usual and he sits around in a hump all day. His movements seem steadily more tentative. I can feel myself pulling away from him emotionally, which I don't want to do, but seem to be doing anyway. (Nancy would point out here that when I met her--17 years ago--I assured her my cats never live all that long, so he would not be with me forever. He is two months and two days short of 20 today.) Nancy's mother is moving in with us at the end of the month, which is an adjustment. I just feel things...shifting.

  And I do this dance, which I have done all of my life, flirting with the spiritual and then dancing back to safety, reaching out, withdrawing my hand... part of me would love to astral project all over the known and unknown universe, and part of me mutters, "you're 64 years old: if you haven't done it by now, you're probably not going to."

  Maybe the Shadow knows.

  • 12:18 pm
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