I Sit Awake When June Stops

June just ended, and now it's July.  I am awake. It's dark outside, very quiet. Inside, the house is making its contented sounds:  A ticking clock, whirring refrigerator, a fly randomly crashing into the window pane with a quiet "tock." Fingertips on the keyboard are soft pats and clicks, contact of skin on plastic. My foot brushes the floor as I shift my weight on my chair. July is hushed so far, sidling in, awaiting its cue.

It seems the stage is set now that I'm aware of all these little things, but what's going to happen? My mind begins to wander...

Wouldn't it be strange if everything just collapsed like a soap bubble and disappeared? Only a little splash left behind? Or if a superhero flew through the window, smashing the glass, rolling onto the floor and then springing to his feet ready to save my life? The glass would turn to water drops and then diamonds everywhere. Conveniently. Glass shards are too much. Some other meander could accommodate them, not this one.

I wander further...

It might be possible that everything becomes edible: the walls caramel and the curtains crispy. Or that the lamps have voices and tell great stories while the chairs chuckle at the punchlines. The sofa sighs and stretches, reaching for its glass of brandy. I like the squeak of leather, so I'd add that in. It's clubby and rich with detail. Then, the doorknob turns and all is quiet again. Anticipation of something, but what? Let's see...

This is where stories start, you know. In the middle of the night when the town is quiet as one month stops and another starts. Between the lines of ordinary life.

Pique Your Imagination

The world between what is seen and known and the unseen and barely known, explored by the imagination and prompted by a curious spirit, pricks the conscious mind and tugs at the heart. There it is, and is not, a timeless space of dimensionless being. It exists, more than anywhere else in song, story, poem and prayer.

Throngs stream into stadiums and arenas to see contests between teams or solo competitors, or into theaters to listen to singers, hoping that there may be a glimpse  into the mystery of life and beyond, giving voice literally to that which might elevate the mind and transform ordinariness, spark  something with possibility.  We listen for the lilt in the voice or the moistness of the eyes that tells us that emotion is rising, that the heart of the singer is affected, that something is afoot.  We hope to become different, to have our senses expanded, the impossible reeled in and made near.  We have words for the experience of accessing the unknown:  Transcendent, uplifting, divine, and surreal.

We may view a piece of art, a painting, a photograph, or we may sense in some way that something special, unusual or undefinable is upon us. It may be fleeting and transient, but we know those moments as breathtaking and memorable.

On the other hand, when life is only drudgery and slop, hope and possibility drift away to the cold reaches of the night.  We sag, we worry, we cannot sing.  We cannot even breathe very well.

It is certain that living things, humans certainly, need those transitory moments when the dimensions of ordinary life change, when time stands still and when creativity and imagination are in full bloom.  We need to have time to let our minds wander, to drift undisciplined and unruly into the state of dimensionless being.

Ask any artist what I mean, and they will tell you:  Time stands still or means nothing, and it is as if they become a tool for the creative force of life itself.

Sometimes, I imagine I can step into pictures and exist in them.  I exchange my mundane existence for a walk in new worlds known to no one else.  I let my mind wander far into the realm of imagination.  It is as if I can push the edges of the painting's frame or photograph's edges aside and climb into a different state of mind.

Nothing is possible.  That is, nothingness is possible, even probable, when we do not live in between worlds at least part of the day.  The cues that beckon us to the dance of creativity are for our eyes and ears to catch and relay to our hearts, which beat more strongly when we do.  A backlit field of wheat at dawn, a fleeting smile, the ringing note of a trumpet in the woods are talismans for the torch of imagination that must be sparked if we are to be alive fully.

What piques your interest, stirs your heart, speaks to your eternal spirit?  Are you dancing lively, you tender creator of your own possibility?

A Fourth Dimension: Imagination

As if arising from the echoing darkness of metal gutter pipes, a sudden din of raucous crows resounds along streets and off of fences. A cat creeps, hoping to go unseen.  The birds have spotted her and sound the alarm.  Gulls join the bedlam and shriek in exaltation.  Then all is silence; the panic subsides.

I step into an exhilarating quiet blanketing my still-sleeping town, outside where I feel the breath of cool dawn air.  It is damp out here, but arid of bustle and distraction.  It is a world into which my dreams stretch, transfiguring time and space.

The crows croak to their cohorts to make way for me.  They are tricksters with eyes in both worlds, dark feathers rustling like silk.  My mind lingers in the fourth dimension of altered mind where color and shape become emotion and spirit.  I am a marionette, a spirit doll, jerky and then smooth.  I walk and notice my walking.  It pleases me to stride like this.

I think:  Don't think; feel.  

I am unsullied by weariness or disappointment.  I am an instinctive creature, a prowling cat myself, a tree, a gust of air, not yet mere human.  I am moving quietly, I am loose, light, still softened by sleep.  My eyes see, my spirit feels, my body follows its own rhythms, walking.  I am in a sleeping town that will awaken and then change the way I can move and see, ensnare me in humanness.  I have time in which to breathe and move.   I still inhabit the in-between spaces where dreams prevail and the sternly vigorous demands of the working day are as yet unprovoked.

With sleep so recently upon me, where I walk and how I feel is unguided but seems intentional.  It's as if I can juxtapose awareness on a dream or see things from the inside out, feel them and know them in an altered way that gives me access to their substance, as if I am living sensually in absolute terms.  Nothing but my senses - no recall of nagging requirements or limitations - propels me.  I am free to wander aimlessly, compelled to move by feelings of curiosity alone, and it seems akin to sanctuary.  I play here, in this way, free of talk and interpretive words.

I want to learn anew what I have always looked at and perhaps not seen.  The day wants, I imagine, its many parts to be peeled away and reassembled.  The sky is clear, the sun is naked, and there are intense shadows.  Backlit petals are tiny flames.  Colors have odors, textures have sound, and sounds have flavors.  They blend and blur into an illogical melange.  A flower blushes, a leaf seduces, a tree groans and its roots coil deeper into the darkness of deep earth.

Simplicity of intention allows me to enter and live in that loosely held, time-unbound existence of creative mind/automatic body.  There, I imagine; I create; I think and love and feel and live.  I am alive.  I am more myself in this state of unawareness and altered mind than any other.  I feel renewed, transformed in some undefinable way.  This is what I seek at dawn.  

This in-between condition feels as essential to me as breathing water is for a fish.  Deliberate introversion in the quiet stillness of sensual existence is my air; it is my creative medium.  I cannot be alive without it.

A Decision About Crunch And Squish

I needed some crunch in my life.  You just do every so often.  Too much is mush, too many sounds are very close to squish, and not enough has the defined snap of this being different from that.

Decisiveness can be very refreshing.  You know what you're dealing with when a decision has been made.

So, thinking of carrots and decisions, I decided to go ahead and make a good salad for dinner.  At the end of the day you can relate decisiveness and salads and come out okay.  Except for the olives I bounced into the bowls, the ingredients were all from farms close by.  I sliced open a large Russian radish.  It looked like a little slice of watermelon.  I thought of summertime heat and spitting watermelon seeds with my friends when we were kids.  The lettuce was crisp and tender, which seems like an impossibility as I write it now, but it was.  I had thought that crispness was more a close cousin to efficiency, but it seems more likely now the sister of delicacy and tenderness.  How unexpected.  Celery had the merest saltiness.  I thought of girls eating "ants on a log" - peanut butter and raisins on celery - and telling lies to each other to see who would believe them.  No one believed anyone else, but everyone wanted to.  No one was disappointed, but instead planned bigger lies for next time.  It's like that when you're seven.  Your friends' audacity and willingness to travel down the rabbit hole into a dimension of ridiculously funny falsehoods always won your admiration.  It proved you were not anything close to adult.  And you could luxuriate in the further untruth that you were not planning to grow up.  Ever.  

Olive oil slicked the lettuce leaves in my bowl, coating them and readying them for herbs and sea salt.  The nectar of olives has no equal for me when we're talking about food.  Garlic and olive oil with nearly anything elevates it, and somehow mysteriously gives you access to dreams and subtleties you might have overlooked before.  Handsome men and crisp linens laid upon aged wooden tables set at twilight.  The snap and hiss of a wooden match struck into flame and the pungent odor of sulphur and smoke.  The gleam on a pearl at the throat of an olive-skinned woman with dark eyes and rich tumbling hair, who sips some Chianti from a small coarse glass.  The pale green olive oil on my salad, its very light fragrance and delicate flavor brought me back to earth, and I stood in the kitchen thinking I should make risotto, too.  I wonder...

First, A Vision

What struck me about the day today?

That artists and writers spend a lot of time retrieving the tangible from a fuzzy nothingness, a place that's not visible to anyone but themselves.  That they see what's there so vividly the act of creating is more one of pushing away the material from around the envisioned piece in order to reveal it than it is an act of producing it one stroke or one letter at a time.  

Michelangelo saw his statues that way, already standing there, perfectly formed.  He knew his work was to remove unneeded marble encasing the figure.  Creation of the statue at hand had occurred in full long before the first hammer clanged against the chisel.  

That visualizing a scene, a pot, an image or a house vividly enough to know that it believably exists is the gift.  The work is to take the necessary time to pull it into the three-dimensional world where everyone else can see it, too.  

That what I see in my mind's eye will stay there unless I decide to do the work to bring it out into the open.  

Each thing that is done is visualized first; everything is a re-enactment of a creative thought.  Imagine a place, a story, a world, a table or a cake because that's where it has to exist first.  Then, be the technician who uses tools and time to help it emerge.  Right before our very eyes.  

Who Cares?

Who cares?

That's what I'm asking myself as I work on a short story these days.

It's a question that you have to ask, but I've noticed if you ask it too soon or to harshly, you kill your own magic.  Imagination is everything, but the freedom to let it fly as far as it needs to before you start hauling it down for repairs is even more key, I believe.  Self-censorship too early on makes for a crash landing.  

There are a lot of aspects of storytelling that you should never really notice if you're reading or listening.  If you're lucky, you are pulled into a story as if by some magnet.  You cling to the scenery desperately as the story winds to a close and never want to leave that new landscape behind.  You really care about what happens, you understand deeply,  and your own imagination carries the story far beyond its original pages.  It all really matters.

When I was in seventh grade, our English teacher read us a story for about 15 minutes at the end of each class.  The bell would ring, she'd have finished her reading and we would exit the room.  Once, there was a suspenseful story in which the main character was facing certain death, and all of us were on the edge of our seats, spellbound.  The bell rang.  She looked up, and we all urged her, "Keep going!  Don't stop!"  We were all late for our next class, but nothing was more important than hearing what happened next.  It was the coolest thing.  No Star Trek transporter ever did a more effective job moving 30 kids to another world.

As I write my story, I feel really glad I am not God.  No disrespect intended, but it's crazy enough keeping track of one ordinary character.  Imagine seven billion of them swarming everywhere.  What a headache.  Sometimes, my character just sits there no matter what I do, and other times he is going to town, moving like mad, and I can barely keep up with him.  Who knows why.  I'm letting him roam for now.  Later, I'll net him, examine him and see what needs trimming.  I'll find out who cares, and hopefully it will be me.

So, there was this man, a successful man with a broken heart ...

Key as Icon

Keys are icons of possibility and mystery.  The keys I have are mostly orphans and duplicates, functional at one time, utilitarian and ordinary from the time they were made, less so now that they just sit purposeless in my bowl on the countertop.

There is one key in particular that is very old; it was my grandmother's key - to what door I am not sure.  It is a key from another age, a simpler time.  It's brass, long, classic in design, but it seems to be something special; it's a whisper, a hint.  A key like that seems to have developed a mystique simply by having outlived my grandmother and the lock it was intended for.  It stirs the imagination even as it lies quietly in my hand.

It's the kind of key that Mary found that opened the secret garden, the kind of key that rattles nervously in the keyhole when a terrified and solitary woman is seeking refuge on a dark and stormy night and violins screech shrilly in the background.  While it is not really grand enough to be a key to a kingdom, it is does have an allure about it.  If nothing else, it unlocks my imagination, setting it free to run, perhaps through the halls of a walnut-paneled mansion set high on a hilltop, with love and intrigue hiding in the shadows.

The simple act of picking up the key and fingering it renews its ability to unlock a door, but now the door could be anywhere, in any time or country and by any one of a thousand vivid characters.  An ordinary but now-old key has transcended its original pedestrian use, beckoning forth stories, creating images and songs with a simple blink of the mind's eye.  

Wisp of Imagination

Overnight rain had come down from somewhere up there - where exactly? - and soaked the planks of douglas fir that form the fence, darkening it as the fibers of the wood absorbed moisture.  Wood, very heavy and wet, stood in place without sagging, even though it might have wanted to, stolid and determined, static. 

When the sun met the fence, it became a dark stage for an ethereal and magical performance, played by the most basic elements we know:  Air and water.  Up wisped the strands of new clouds, twisting and turning slowly to their own song.  They looked young and fresh, breezy in their movements, swirling slowly, prettily.  The backlit moving vapor was enchanting; it danced, visible very briefly and then invisible, elusive, almost nothing at all. 

They were wisps that embodied the invisible, the unseen world of thought and memory.  As lightly and softly as they played above the fence, our imaginations turn and shift, barely noticed sometimes, formless but constantly moving and shifting, ungovernable but desired and prized.  We can no more live without our imagination than we can live without water.  Lost to water, parched thirst and death overcome us.  Absent imagination, we are lost as human beings. 

That the fence as stage, and vapor as unbound dancer, were not seen by anyone save one sleepy person peering from a bedroom window did not diminish their place in the whole fabric of the day, nor their right to simply exist and play.  An imagination that plays without observation or qualification still influences the rest of the universe, as it has been born of those influences and joins them as the wisps joined the passing clouds above.