Sylvia's Journal

Another morning that’s not normal, that’s for sure. In a period when the physical challenges have often been novel and the solutions required either cleverness or persistence or both, the types of challenges for the future I imagined would be the ones that had always been there. Challenges of how to be a better, more inventive designer, how to juggle time, how to stay focussed were what I saw as being ahead. And they were the kinds of challenges I had faced before the crash. But ‘normal’ even for the future seems to have changed.

It seems now that the challenges are veering away from the course that had been set – so I thought – years ago: a repeating loop that has filled my journal pages, fueled my counseling sessions and resisted the advances in psycho-pharmacy. I – and I think I can say we here – are emerging from a rather narrow and constrictive tunnel of recovery into a rather larger tunnel of life reconstruction. This newer tunnel is wider, lets in more light and leads me to know that there are changes in me that I know but cannot yet tell about. I get hints of those things now that pain is dropping off me like scales exposing the new skin underneath.

So what are the hints that there’s a new skin? And what’s apt to be underneath? And what hints are starting me on this exploration? For me some of the conceptual and sensory images that are coming up are about my attraction to doing something ‘significant’ with my life, a sort of early fixation with doing earth-moving things in order to fill a deeply excavated hole in me. Wanting to do something ‘significant’ isn’t in itself a good or bad thing, but the need, the compulsion to do the ‘significant’ has always screamed at me to be rooted out. The ‘significant’ was always something handed to me by someone else’s voice, by some other totem, some other netherworld figure, but not me. The crash has hinted to me in a profound way that there are other spirits, other emotions in me that can propel me in more interesting, and less corrosive ways than the quest to do the ‘significant’.

So what has the crash given me to begin making sense of my life? A sense of the power of how I think about and use time. I observed – in my broken condition – that comparing the past to the present can be a poisonous thing to the present. I felt that the present was good, particularly considering that there was a present to begin with. I understood that some visions of the future could also be destructive of the wonderful quality of the present. Both the past, and the future can blank out the wondrous colors of the trees in autumn color, the smell of drying pine needles, the sound of Sylvia’s breathing at night, the beauty of fog, the wonder of hugging Sita and Tessa, the early morning smell of salt air. Life is too short to let these things pass.

So these bits and pieces are working together, leading to what I’m not sure. But I do know I’m smelling the ocean, seeing the colors and feeling all of my body, crying as bidden. Sylvia too has had intimations of new understanding of herself and her role in the world. But I will leave her to reveal that.

And in other ways things are not normal either – whatever normal is. Our dear brother Joe and sister Rita have abandoned their home outside San Diego to the wiles of the fires consuming San Diego county are awaiting the verdict of wind and flame. They had been spared in the fire four years ago and were called as the wonderful people they are to serve the valley and the others not as fortunate as they, changing lives in a positive way when it appeared that all was destroyed. They have a calling and it will be carried out in many ways in this case as well as the last, however painful passing through the eye of the needle is going to be.

And my cousin Anne is being tested in another way – physically something is wrong and she and John and the rest of us who love her await news of its meaning. I wish I could be in Palm Desert to be with them, and in Alpine to be with Joe and Rita. But I am right now here. In the present, where I am thankful to be. I will hold all those others in the light, with all my heart, right now.