Once More Into the Breach

People sometimes say they are a “product” of their times. What does that really make us? Who produced us? What’s the role of a producer? Telling an actor how to act. Wait a minute, this is getting complicated & I was trying to make it simpler.

For years I have used the tools I was given to engineer my life. However, I’m not a “tools” kind of gal. I joke all the time about my “Hello Kitty” plastic tool kit being all I’ll ever need… I’ve listed it before on the blog, in a kind of wonder – how did I survive on my own with only this to repair it? The toolkit was always an admonition of guilt: I can’t do this; time to ask for help. At the risk of assuring the “in” in “inept,” I never got the hang of driving in a nail, or hanging a picture straight. So that meant hanging it twice, which was really four times the trouble when I gathered my head around it. I’ve enlisted the help of tall people all the time – in stores, where I will approach a total stranger (who’s tall) to ask him to get me a jar of something on the top shelf. I wrote the lists: my ex used to ask strangers to read them for him; then they would speculate on what the little lady really wanted. Going to the store, for him, with one of my scribbled lists, must have been like Frodo walking out of the hobbit-house with the Ring in his inside pocket.

We never know the ripples downstream from where we stir the water.

Tools bring up an immediate physical reaction in me: I put my hands behind my back. I don’t even touch them.

I’ve done this with my life a few times too. I’ve always opted to sail past the self-help section into sci-fi/fantasy, usually opted for the heroine I childishly & wonderfully pictured myself to be. The posturing & the great cloud of unknowing I resided in were a double-whammy to learning life by logic. Overall, I’m not quite sure there is a logic to life. Mine, for example, has been random at times to the point of writing the word ‘hopscotch’ to describe it. My resumes were chock-full of growing responsibilities in the work arena: would I have applied that energy to personal growth, I’d be running my own whatever. I left out the work of the tool-bearer completely.

But while I imagined living in a vacuum, it was never the case. I affected (afflicted?) any number of people over a lifetime of monetary focus: I chose currency as the currency to live by. At this point, there’s no use assigning a good or bad to it. Acknowledgements alone work as witness to the event. It was a choice I do not regret: I was funneled into it & it is still working in its own way.

When the writing pushes up between the cracks in my brain, when the truth of my ineffectuality is known on all levels but this: & I cannot know if it is even worthwhile except to me… ?

In fact, just like another fabulous & long-lasting analogy: if the tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, does it make a noise? If everyone ignores all my writings meant to entertain, identify, belong with, enjoy manifestation with on this level … if no one reads me, do I exist?

I rely on the ripples.

Love,

Carol