Word of the Week - 48

Trying to get a glimpse of some place other than where we are.

Word of the Week:  RECONNAISSANCE

There are some things that cannot be reconnoitered.  Such as the future, our futures, what comes next.   Even with the most imaginative homemade device we will not be able to see around that particular corner.

In another lifetime I consulted psychics, astrologers.  I thought they could, for varying fees, apply their periscopes to my unseen destiny and assure me that all I hoped for would come to pass.  Eventually I realized it was just so much piffle.  They couldn't tell me and I no longer wanted to know.

It is not difficult to envision that most of us are familiar with expanses, jagged and bleak, from which we'd rather escape.  What better destination than a promised tomorrow where all is bliss.  I know addiction, dissociation, torpor, depression and despair.  The great miracle is that they are no longer chronic states.  Their shadowy overhang once kept sunlight from the garden, that is different now. 

Time and love, that of self and others, carry us beyond our grimmest days.  It is work and it is worth it.  As much as I craved the assurance of peace to come, I would never have believed anyone who described this path to me.  Or maybe they did and because it seemed so unlikely I simply forgot.  As it feels the most accurate name for them, I swear there are angels, fierce angels, who take up our cause, especially when it feels lost.  Once we recognize all life as an act of faith, we become our own seers.

Waiting for what's next

Yesterday we had the winds.  Today we have the postcard views.  Any who watch BIG BANG THEORY or PARKS AND RECREATION know the sight of Pasadena's City Hall, shown here with palm trees.  On our street, it was turf-war time among the palms this morning, the crows playing the Sharks, the parrots as the Jets.  The crows are bigger, louder and a lot more scary.  This round went to them.

Photo by Gina McDaniel

During Sunday's game between the Boston Celtics and Miami Heat, an exterior shot of the Boston stadium showed a patch of jonquils. I have it on good authority there were snow flurries not two days earlier.  I take heart from the jonquils and how each growing thing, us included, pushes tenaciously toward the sun, toward dreams and sources of nourishment in all its forms, some of which may seem nearly unreachable.  I also took heart from the Celtics, called a team of old men (which they also call the Lakers), with too many players on the disabled list, winning handsomely.  Of course, being  an age that would allow me to be the mother - by a wide margin - of the team's oldest player, probably Kevin Garnett at 35, approximately, casts the notion of old in a different light.

Somewhere in my Monday morning internet rambles, I saw the reminder to never stop dreaming.  As my mind shrieks about a split infinitive, I ignore it and continue.  My philosophy could best be described as "We never know."  The will, the determination, not only to survive but to flourish inspires me, in flora, in fauna. We don't ever know what comes next, which may be the single best and most difficult thing about this existence.  Every moment becomes an act of faith, or perhaps you would call it optimism.  Life is a cliff-hanger, one of the old Saturday morning serials at the 10-cent Early Bird movie.  I intend to keep showing up.  I want to see what happens next.