Sixteen Candles…and Counting

Another birthday has rolled in for me; another day to celebrate life and assess what I’m doing with it. (Some Lull readers may remember that my family surprised me this year with an earlier summer birthday, but today it’s authentic. Today I’m older.)

Just in time for my annual assessment, by way of Mary Oliver’s A Thousand Mornings, comes this wisdom—which we would all do well to take to heart:

“The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think.”
—C. G. Jung

[Photo by Robert Doisneau.]

When A Remake Won’t Do

This economy has driven many people into dire straits. Some have nearly folded under the weight of adversity; others have reinvented themselves.

If you’re somewhere in the middle—struggling with becoming that cloying, self-help symbol of transformation, the butterfly, and can’t achieve enough lift-off to finish the job of changing your life—then I have an easier visualization technique for you caterpillars in stasis.

I have a dream.

That is, I had a dream about a species of butterfly that doesn’t progress beyond the caterpillar stage. Just when this caterpillar can no longer sustain life as it is, instead of cocooning her/himself, s/he latches on to whatever might serve as wings—leaves, fabric, plastic bags—and flies.

In my dream, the butterfly that arrested my attention was as big as a dinner plate and having trouble flying. Its movement was arduous and erratic. This was largely due, I think, to the butterfly’s choice of wings: a sunny-side-up egg and a golden waffle from someone’s al fresco breakfast plate. Yes, the desperate butterfly I saw chose items of different weights and viscosity that kept him off-balance and made flight awkward. Yet he persevered, even with syrup dripping here and there. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

Upon waking, this segment of my dreams seemed initially like a complete non sequitur. Yet the more I thought about it, the more I appreciated its appropriate symbolism.

I came to believe that the “breakfast-food butterfly” represented every person who’s ever been hobbled by something—be it financial woes, chronic illness, or emotional turbulence. Sometimes when you struggle against the odds, transformation isn’t in the cards. The most practical option is to make do with what’s at hand in order to get by, get on, get ahead.

Latch on to whatever propels you and rise. It may not be beautiful. It may be nothing you ever aspired to or even wanted, but it’s far better to make do than not do.

[Butterfly photographer unknown; graphic art from Skirt! magazine.]

“Me Too! Me Too!”

Nothing says Determination like this little pup and his Can Do attitude.

May you, too, be able to face whatever comes your way this week with the same mindset.

[Art by Jamie Wyeth.]

Life’s Sticky Choices

Perseverance often comes down to this: Choosing between extremely bad circumstances and tolerably bad circumstances.

Take the bobcats pictured here, for instance. The one stationed high atop the saguaro cactus in Arizona was escaping the wrath of a mountain lion. The one straddling two cacti in New Mexico found the prickly perch preferable to the pack of wild dogs that had been chasing him. (Neither one probably anticipated or appreciated having to stay up there while humans stood below snapping photographs.) They did what they had to and worked with whatever limited resources were available.

The older we get, the more of these choices we have to make—about our health, our finances, our jobs, our homes. The economic trials of the last few years have forced many more people into similarly uncomfortable decisions.

But keep your chin up and remember: It’s always relative, never absolute.

“Bad is never good until worse happens.”
—Danish Proverb

[Arizona pics by Curt Fonger, courtesy of a Lull reader (thank you!); New Mexico pic by Paco Espinoza.]

Still Slogging Through Wonderland

A month ago, I needed something light to read and chose the adventures of Alice because:
1. We had a copy of it.
2. Our move to a new state had taken dreamish twists and turns not unlike Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole.
3. Embarrassing to confess, I’ve never read the original book.

However, our copy is a 1960 annotated edition, which makes it visually irritating (sometimes there are several pages of explanation in wee type without a word of actual story on them) and laborious to read.

Some references are helpful—for example, those that expound on unfamiliar (to me) customs and terms of Carroll’s England. But it’s not light reading. I don’t recommend it. Even the editor opens his introduction with this sentence:
“Let it be said at once that there is something preposterous about an annotated Alice.”

So why do I continue?

Maybe for the same reason a one-time marathoner finishes the race hours after his/her competitors: just to finish. To see a challenge through to the end. To persevere.

Also, I’m hoping to retain some of the factoids in case the subject of Carroll or Alice or 19th-century England ever surfaces at a cocktail party or in the Kroger checkout line. I like to be in-the-know, you know.

“Wipe your glosses with what you know.”
—from Finnegan’s Wake, by James Joyce

[Illustration by John Tenniel.]