Human Being As Time Capsule

(dual posted at http://datinggod.typepad.com) I have always been, in various ways, an artist. When I was small, around four, I sang while my father played guitar. When I was five, I became a voracious reader, and by seven I was writing stories. By ten I was singing in the chorus at school. By eleven I was drawing pictures. At thirteen I began doing musical theater. By fifteen I was performing as a modern/jazz dancer. At sixteen I was performing as a singer. At eighteen I began attending a professional acting conservatory. By nineteen I had moved to New York to attend another conservatory. By twenty I was living in NYC, auditioning for commercials and plays and films, and even landing a few tiny bits of work. By twenty-six I had written my first novel. By thirty-one I had written my second. And now, at forty, I have written close to five hundred posts over the past three years, and am regularly writing research papers and the like, learning to speak and write in the language of science. This learning of science has been difficult, challenging, and deeply humbling. As a card-carrying member of the Granola Nation, I saw science as the stunted, myopic, shut-down third cousin twice removed from Reality. Why I felt so compelled to drag my brain back to school, to overcome all that I had to just to get my ass in that first lecture hall on that first day, lordy be, I shall probably never know. It was a compulsion of sorts, and I am eternally grateful to it. Because what I have learned is that science, at its purest, is inquiry, a way to examine and study and experiment and watch the world. It asks every single question it can come up with. It lifts every stone. It attempts to weigh things independently. It seeks only To Know. It desires to present only the facts, leaving out what the "I" may want or hope for or fear. Of course, from an holistic point of view the last few sentences are really bullsh*t, as nothing is separate from any other part, and that everything is weighted and connected and emotional and all tangled up. But there is something elegant and pure in science's desires, even as it is simply a piece of the puzzle. I have been careening through my semesters the past two years, barreling through course after course, squirreled away in my apartment, reading, writing, studying, racking up the good grades. Attempting to parlay some of the learning into real knowledge that sticks to solid places inside of my brain, I've encouraged The New to form symbiotic relationships with the energetic models of reality already residing in there. But mostly I've just tossed the new stuff in with the old, and trusted that everyone would just find a way to get along. I didn't choose this mad pace, it is what has been required if I am to qualify for financial aid. Full aid means full time class loads, and so that is what I've done, in addition to working, and the occasional attempts to have a social life, a romantic love life. But now I am faced with a choice. Starting in the fall, I can slow down and take three classes a semester and graduate in the fall of 07, or I can continue on, hell bent and headstrong, finishing up next spring. The choice may seem to be an obvious one, but for me, it really isn't. This world of academia, this Land of The Mind, is not my world, and in many ways I long to be done, to be finished, to be released. More often than not it feels torturous in one way or another. I am reminded every day, usually several times a day, that I am Different, and in a way that others aren't sure what to do with. If I had a nickel for every time I spoke up in a class or lecture hall, only to have hundreds of pairs of eyes turn to me, silent, blank, as if I had just said something like: I enjoy wearing butterscotch panties because they make the world seem like so much more fun!, oh yeah, I would be so very, very rich. A wiser person would have learned to stay quiet, keep their head down, and not make waves. And for many semesters I begged, I pleaded with my mind: please, please, shut up, please don't talk today, please, stop embarrassing me. But then someone would say something, like female clitoridectomies are horrific but male circumcision is routine, and my mouth would be off and running, headed down the backstretch, going for the gold. I've found more of a home in graduate school, because even as we come from different walks of life, we all have an abiding passion for health on a grand scale, having given up the pursuit of cash and fame and perks of other possible careers to wade into the muddy backwaters of public health. My standard joke in classes has been to end my topical comments with, "but, hey, I'm a granolahead", much like a comic does the ba-da-bump symbols sound to cover up the silent vacuum following the mystifyingly bad joke. I've given folks a label to attach to my odd comments, even as I get that I'm educating them in some strange way. With the excruciatingly intense first semester of grad school behind me, I am finally getting downtime, drifting through the days in a most delicious way. The tension is slowly unwinding from my joints, muscles, my brain, visceral tissue. I have another week before my internship starts, and other than ten hours left to fill for my graduate assistantship, and a bit of holistic work, I am free to do as I feel. Yesterday, I had a glass of wine at 3 in the afternoon, took a hot lavender and eucalyptus bath followed by a nap, then cooked stroganoff for dinner, and read in bed until 10. This morning, I woke up a little before 8, watched The Hoon breathe and release small kitty snores, until he finally woke up to stretch, yawn, and reach out to place a paw on my face, to gently stroke my arm with his tail. I made a broccoli and leek frittata with dill and cheddar, spelt toast with grape jam, and a huge mug of decaf french roast coffee. And I asked myself: what are you doing in grad school? what do you plan on doing with it all? And the answer I got was: Watch. As in I do what I have always done: I Watch. Up until this morning I think that I believed that I would enter the public health workforce, find my niche, settle in. Now I see that this is just another piece in the jigsaw puzzle of experiences that has been my life. This leg of the journey may last a year, or five, or twenty. I feel to do it now, I feel to stay connected, finish my master's degree, and do this internship. And at some point things will shift, and the next adventure will begin, taking along the best of the adventures that have gone by, the pieces of them that remain inside of me. And along the path I will continue to have my artist's way with it all, using it as creative fodder, turning experience into Life juice, powering up the ever expanding circuits inside of me, having the privilege of watching the arc of energy move to another, as the arc from fellow travelers have transported me along. In spite of the stress and the heartache and the strain and the intensity and the feelings of Other, I am turned on every single day by what surrounds me, what I've immersed myself in. To live your life surrendered to your passion, whatever that translates as for you, is to spend a lot of time deep in the heart of discomfort. But it also delivers you up on the half shell as an hors d'oeuvre for Life, and what better way to live a life than to be lusciously devoured by the Almighty Yes? For whatever reason it is that brings you here to read these stories I feel compelled to write, I hope that in one way or another, you get some Life juice from it all, are inspired to dive more deeply into your living, to fling yourself into what impassions you, despite The Thinky Thoughts that brings up the hundred reasons that makes your mind chant I Can't and that have labels like money and children and health and I-just-don't-freakin-know-what-to-do. Inside of you lies great passion, passion for pie, for jokes, for napping, for climbing, for reading, for American Idol, for shoes, for God/Life/Spirit, for trees, for floating, for cookies, for freedom, for service, no passion too small or seemingly insignificant. Passions aren't endpoints, but stepping-stones, how the Almighty Yes makes him/herself known in the ongoing pod of organic synapses that is You. If you follow your heart, you will be taken on great adventures. If you follow your passions, you will come full circle in this world, look into the mirror, and see the one you've been searching for: . . . across a dimension, a sea, a space, to look into your own sweet face . . . And along the way you will laugh and laugh and laugh. We are all travelling heros, as we are all tiny specks of nothingness floating about inside of The Great Nothing. We mean everything and nothing. We might as well have a dang good time. May this find your passions bubbling inside of you, oh so deliciously unbearable, spilling over with Yes . . . offering yourself up to that Beloved whose beauty you just can't resist . . .