The fiction of normal

From the email,  Notes from the Universe, 10/8/14:   Marylinn, you are the one who was sent to make a difference, to be a bridge, to light the way, by living the truths that have been revealed to you, so that others might do the same.

So now you know why you've always seen the world so differently than others.

To help,
    The Universe

“A ‘normal person’ is what is left after society has squeezed all unconventional opinions and aspirations out of a human being.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.”
― Hunter S. Thompson


I know I've used this video before, at some time in the past six years.  That this song, these musicians, could fuel a car if played loudly enough I do not doubt.

If each of us is unique, how can there be a standardization that labels some as normal and others as variants?  Ideal, perhaps, as in medical, psychiatric text books.  Preferred, the word chosen by some for the lack of problems caused.  We are either authentic or we are not, trying to pass as false selves or showing up with no mask, all inside-out seams and safety pins, held together by self-administered sutures, improvisation, unmatched in any known place, wishing that genuine involved a bit less pain.

The question is rhetorical, yet I have to ask myself how much of my life energy has been spent in an attempt to appear other than as I am?  I've watched too much sci-fi not to know the amount of power a device consumes while holding back the sea, conveying search parties through wormholes or trying to escape the relentlessness of a tractor beam.  Such a charade is depleting, it steals the life force.  No wonder the cities are haunted by approximations of the species.  The message and the models encourage fitting in, matching up, maintaining formation, shunning otherness, keeping the noise down and the waters calm.

I was praised for being a quiet child, a practice begun in fear yet turning out to be a natural response to the world.  In spite of that, trouble-making tendencies found their way to the surface.  I am reminded often of Mary Oliver's Wild Geese, "...you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."  Those are the words we need imprinted in childhood, that is the model that is still conspicuously missing from the mix, the examples, the billboards not of pop stars but eccentrics to assure us we were never meant to blend in, that that was not the plan.

The real plan, with a scant few directives to get the ball rolling is this:  Revere your unconventional mind, allow it to make synaptical leaps that cannot and should not be explained.  Love what and who you love as though your passion was the one thing that could save the planet, for it very likely is.