The Melting World

How many entries will be about snow? Even I am beginning to wonder, but really it is the dominant aspect of my life these days. It determines when and where I can go and it determines whether I reach my destination. Thank god for four-wheel drive. I am enjoying the safari (well, the arctic safari?) rides like any proper thrillseeker should.

The snow is gentle this morning, however, like millions of minuscule ghosts floating down on white parachutes. If you watch it fall long enough the snow carries you off into another world, mesmerizing peace. That’s not a bad deal, is it?

Yesterday I turned one year closer to the 4-0 (no need for specifics at my age). Of course, I don’t really think about the number much, as I never have felt my age at any point in my life. I always feel both older and younger at the same time. I have always been an eighty-eight year old in a hot pink bikini.

Twenty years ago, my image of someone my age was of a preppy golf-playing polo-wearing yuppy lady with a bob, with two cars, 1.5 kids, a double car garage, and, oh yeah, a house with central air and heating, and maybe a healthy addiction to credit cards and valium.

I have none of that and so I am thankful for this life. The need to NOT be like everyone else has its price (you know, poverty, panic attacks, confusion, no community), but I am still glad my mother taught me to follow my own path–life feels more tangible, fragile, and richer because of it.

As my dear friend, Ines, said (where did she disappear to, like so many friends…?) (in French Belgian accent): “Rebecca, people like us feel more pain when the pain comes, but we feel more love when the love comes.” Then she would close her eyes, twist her mouth into a small pout and say “Pppuu!” with her lips, as if that was the conclusive irony of our lives.

Of course, I am always longing to be even more nutty and more artistic and to live a life of total mental and creative freedom, like Sun Ra (“I am the alternate destiny!”) or Taneda Santoka (“Which way should I go? The wind!”), but I also have that sinister practical bent, which keeps me thinking of paying bills on time and of finding a decent wage and of making sure my son is safe.

I wonder if I will someday have the courage to leap off the cliff of creative bliss? I hope to leap out of the plain sooner than later.