Girl in Yoga Pants: “Ok”

Guy With Dreads: “I don’t think it’s very attractive”

Girl in Yoga Pants: “Oh, I think it’s very attractive”

Guy With Dreads: “Yeah, that’s what I wanted to talk about…”

I felt proud today. Proud in our check in that I could share this image of the moonlight flooding my room at night, floating on the ocean, sparking to out-shine everything and realizing then that I was going to die. That this was it. This was actually my life. And this was actually what I was doing with it right now. And that sometime, possibly very soon, I would die.

That then I wanted to really live  - if this was it, if it was happening right now. I knelt on the floor to pray and nothing came extra for God that wasn’t there already. And I heard a voice and it said

“Its gonna hurt, that’s a guarantee. Its gonna fucken hurt”.

Felt my heart wide open, wide as the sea, for the inevitable pains.

And today I filled the room for a second with this moonlight glistening sea and felt everyone listening and felt proud and felt ashamed of feeling proud and then defiant.  So what if I was maybe good sometimes at something.

“You are the worst girl in Standard Three”.

She pointed her finger and stared through her thick glasses, a string hanging off them so she could dangle them from her wrinkly old neck.

Pink face growing more and more flushed

Lipstick a little off the sides of her actual lips

And permed hair.

I’m guessing it was a perm.  I was 8 and not yet fully trained to spot them.

Mrs Hewitt they called her.

I flooded fast with shame and humiliation and horror. Ran away. Out. Into the playground.

Concrete squares with paint on them.

Four Square.

Hopscotch.

A long, wind-ey snake.

Old, chipped benches painted primary school yellow and green.

I ran across the squares and the snake to a place behind some trees where I could blubber.

When the sobs and snot finally subsided I opened my hand to study the thing that was a key part in the cause of such an insult.

An old tarnished metal case

Very small

With a little hinge

And a window made of magnifying glass

Stretching and enlarging the words

“WORLD’S SMALLEST DICTIONARY”

I opened it up.

It was magnificent.

It’s tiny pages trimmed with gold

and miniature definitions of “sarcophagus” and “fart”.

That’s the one we looked up first always - “Fart”.

And the definition I still remember - “a small explosion between the legs”.

We had been asked to present a book review and this was the most interesting book I had seen in ages.

anyhow, she writes “… nervous, empty, continually willing action is sterile and the faster you run and accomplish a lot of useless things, the more you are dead.”

Was reading Jung’s travels in Africa from “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” and found this.

“From Nairobi we used a small Ford to visit the Athi Plains, a great game preserve. From a low hill in this broad savanna a magnificent prospect opened out to us. To the very brink of the horizon we saw gigantic herds of animals: gazelle, antelope, gnu, zebra, warthog, and so on. Grazing, heads nodding, the herds moved forward like slow rivers. There was scarcely any sound save the melancholy cry of a bird of prey. This was the stillness of the eternal beginning, the world as it had always been, in the state of non-being; for until then no one had been present to know that it was this world. I walked away from my companions until I had put them out of sight, and savored the feeling of being entirely alone. There I was now, the first human being to recognize that this was the world,  but who did not know that in this moment he had first really created it.

There the cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear to me. “What nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects,” say the alchemists. Man, I, in an invisible act  of creation put the stamp of perfection on the work by giving it objective existence.  This act we usually ascribe to the Creator alone, without considering that in so doing we view life as a machine calculated down to the last detail, which, along with the human psyche, runs on senselessly, obeying foreknown and predetermined rules. In such a cheerless clockwork fantasy there is no drama of man, world, and God: there is no “new day” leading to “new shores,” but only the dreariness of calculated processes.  My old Pueblo friend came to my mind.  He thought that the raison d’etre of his pueblo had been to help their father, the sun, to cross the sky each day. I had envied him for the fullness of meaning in that belief, and had been looking about without hope for a myth of our own.  Now I knew what it was, and knew even more: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence – without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found is indispensable place in the great process of being.”

Socrates

C G Jung . Modern Man In Search Of A Soul.

http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/friday-boy-2009