Perspective

Today I saw a woman sitting on the beach with her face glued to a magazine. The pages had pictures of other women having fun at other beaches...

The Write on Wednesday Spark - The Nature of Place

This week's writing exercise from InkPaperPen:
Write about a particular natural geography, a natural place or space close to your heart. Tell us about the weather, the landform , the creatures who live there, what the place means to you and why. You can write prose fiction, poetry, non-fiction and/or a photographic narrative. You might mix the landscape with a personal story. Wherever the prompt take you...Let us peek into your place.

Nowhere's nowhere...

"Mum."

"Quiet, honey, it's the adults' turn to speak."

I spat the bush fly off my lips and swatted around my face. "Mum, I need to go to the toilet."

Mum looked at me, paused, and turned away. Whatever words she had, she forgot to say them. The intense afternoon sun glared at me from behind her profile, and I shifted to stay in her shadow.

Mum and Dad were speaking to an old friend. As the friend's canoe rocked in the shallows of the river behind them, my desperation grew worse.

 "When are we going back to camp, Mum?"

Camp was in the middle of nowhere on the banks of the stunning Macalister River. It might be in the middle of nowhere, but at least it had a three foot wide tent housing a portable toilet seat with a biodegradable bag hanging from it. Camp was also on a section of river where, carved into the rocks, natural water slides were coated in slimy green moss, protecting the bum of your bathers.

However, after a long drive from camp, we were in Nowhere's nowhere.

"You'll just have to go in the bushes."

My sharp huff didn't disturb the fly patrolling my chin. My eyes drifted across the rough-cut stones, up the greyish sandbanks, and to the small cliff that hedged the river. High along the ridge were the only bushes my mum could be referring to.

I set off up the cliff, climbing from grass clump to grass clump. With my hands busy clutching tufts for dear life, the best I could do to swat the flies was blink. Why couldn't we be like normal families? Why was it that our holidays involved deadly bush tics and heat stroke? Was it normal to have fork lightning blast a hole in your accomodation? I just want to go to a toilet! Why couldn't we go on an aeroplane to Noosa? It's the eighties, dammit!

I stood up and dusted the dirt from my palms and arms. 

And I forgot the flies, and I forgot my thoughts.

In front of me, long grass grew over a gentle mound in a perfect circular clearing. The trees practically hugged each other to keep a tight wall around it. In the beautiful space within, hundreds of orange Monarch butterflies flitted in the air.

I walked into the cloud of butterflies, palms up and fingers reaching. I lowered each foot carefully; I blinked to prevent them landing in my eyes. My heart filled with the level of wonder at this world that makes you feel ageless, even as a ten year old.

I remained in the giant fluttering sphere until I couldn't stand it any longer.

I really had to pee.

Laughing with joy, I crouched down on that very spot, looking up at the blue sky spotted with such brilliant, orange, brief little lives. As I pulled one of my white socks off, I decided it was the grandest toilet in the world.
~

Which way is up?

Do you meditate? I do. Well, on and off for a while now. Usually in bursts, interjected with the opposite - substantial periods of a mentally distracted lifestyle. In fact, you could call it a stuffstyle - too much analyzing stuff, pondering stuff, stressing about stuff, and wondering what will be the stuff I do with my life.

I generally experience my consciousness as an acceptable bracket within the much wider sliding scale of the human experience. A scale, which I imagine, is between a paper bag of sausage and a zen master teleporting their way out of their final stint in this physical reality.

At the end closer to the butcher shop is the disconnection from true self and the myriad of trickle-down effects that this devastatingly underrated spiritual faux-pas inflicts on the human race. When I disconnect from my true self, I lose sight of my goals and end up wasting time invested in activities that I think I should be doing. I become susceptible to underlying stress that affects me physically and mentally, even though I'm still overall a happy person. 'Important mental stuff' becomes the focus of every minute, such as work, research, everyday stresses, and the artistic project I'm aiming to finish by Friday, when realistically it needs 6 months and a team of five to help me.
As I shift further toward life as an uninterrupted procession of thoughts, I become what feels like a floating mind that hovers around 5 feet four inches off the ground, with little sense of my soul or the neglected body that drags beneath it. The mind floats up from the bed in the morning, floats into the home office, boots up the computer [yes, somehow] and glares more intensely than the monitor. It leaves the computer only a few times throughout the day for hygiene purposes - ie. it dunks itself in caffeine. In the final stage of the process, the floating mind gravitates closer and closer to the monitor and attempts to mind-meld Vulcan-style with the computer. To the floating mind, this final upload of self seems a logical merger, as all the mind's life, work, communications, and busy montage of over-activities have transferred entirely to the digital realm. Life couldn't be more perfect... but wait - what's that stench of rotting corpse?

Ever so thankfully, at this point, there is always an intervention of some kind. There's a defiant protest and shocked denial as each spongy lump of suctioned brain is plied off the monitor by the mind's dedicated sponsor [my loving partner]. I return to my body and use it to kick, scream, and blaspheme. I bow out of the mental race. I sit still, away from the computer. I even go outside and exercise. I eat wonderful home-cooked meals instead of astronaut food. I go to the toilet instead of using the astronaut - oh... never mind. I meditate and allow myself to truly drift off into space. I remove all thoughts. Most of them just come from other thoughts, anyway. I reconnect with myself again, and thank my loving sponsor dearly.
 I return to the preferable end of my relatively liveable bracket in the scale of human consciousness. Here I find mindfulness, physical calm, mental exuberance, energy, positivity, heightened awareness, balanced activity and inner peace. The sum of these cultivate a genuine space for creativity, wisdom and personal growth to cascade. Ideas and personal revelations explode like fireworks, one popping into the next, a continual illumination of everything that is truly important for me to see. Some call this being connected.
Only through recognition of true self, can I develop recognition of true purpose. An adopted purpose is really someone else's life. To live someone else's life is a form of death. With meditation and the art of simply being, I have come to experience an amazing side to the inner world, which is the force that drives my outer world and keeps me in check.
There is even what some call synchronicity, where many things just collectively go right. We have often heard of the adage - when a person follows their true goals, the right people and opportunities appear in their life at the right time. Some people would consider this surrealism. There are many people who think 'things going wrong' is the norm for reality. If this were the case, the universe would have started with a big bang, followed by a self-manifested slew of everything going wrong, and then - with an unfathomably infinite drop-jaw expression - imploded shortly after. 'Everything going wrong' cannot be the order of the universe, and therefore nor the individual – only 'everything going' can. The right or wrong is up to us. :)
~