Down the Mountain

I haven't taken the time to walk lately. My days are full of activity. Escapist tendencies have begun to trouble me. I've been writing about escape and denial, because I've been busy cloaking myself in them. I've been on the mountain top, life transfigured by larger concepts and ideas. It's time to return to the valley. Real life awaits. I am not eager to make the descent. Enlightenment can be a fleeting thing. It's easy to fall back into old habits and bad patterns. Wisdom is a great gift. You can sound like Yoda at dinner parties. Living wisely, putting knowledge to it's best use, that remains a challenge.

Leaving the mountaintop is hard. Parenting is hard. Helping my family find a balance is hard. Sprinkle this with my husband's unemployment and the almost certain loss of the house, it's no wonder I'm eager to find another plain to live upon. Yesterday, I wrapped my battered stamina in a huge bowl of cookie dough.

There are days when cookie dough is a salve to my tired soul. I get sidetracked in games of denial and avoidance. I do not want to leave the mountain and return to my challenging life. I want to pitch a tent, sit around with the transfigured and solve the world's problems from a distance. I want all the benefits but none of the heartache. Real life doesn't play like that.

Last night, I enjoyed the movie, Eat, Pray, Love with friends. The movie was a good chick flick but I left with a slight shroud of disappointment draped around my shoulders. There seemed to be an altering of the facts in order to make a neat and marketable commodity. Many of the stores are riding on the movie's release, using it as a marketing ploy to advertise some exotic knickknack or piece of furniture. The publisher has re-released the book with Julia Roberts on the cover. I'm happy for Elizabeth Gilbert's success. I love her writing style, her ability to use the raw material of her life to make art, genuine art. World Market, or Pier 1 ad's I do not love. I can not love the movie. It made her life too large, too neat.

I know that most people would not be eager to see a movie or read a book, that has loose ends, threads of story that seem to lead no where. We don't tolerate prolonged uncertainty or unfinished business especially in a book or movie. We want life to be neat, packaged beautifully and sitting there with a huge bow waiting just for us to open it. We'll deny, ignore, lie to ourselves and others all in a vain attempt to keep our lives manageable and understandable. Some of us fill our lives with unnecessary drama, in order to feel important or alive, but even this drama is given a place and purpose. It's moving our story forward. Each of us wants desperately to remain the author of our lives. Everything we see, everything we experience is passed through this filter. When something unexpected or unpredictable happens, we struggle to come to terms with it, to frame it neatly. We are desperate to make sense out of life, to find and understand our story and them become the central character, the hero or heroine or sometimes the villain. It really doesn't matter as long as it's our story.

I may be more guilty of this than others. My days are alive with potential stories. I often write about them from a mountain top. I filter out the raw and less refined elements. I want things to be tidy, neat. Imposing my understanding over the hodgepodge happenstance of my life, I press down a grid so that I can connect the most distant points with an almost mathematical precision. Writers, artists, help us see purpose and meaning in life. They inspire, scold, caution, entertain. They manipulate the raw materials, trimming away the unnecessary, the pieces that just don't seem to fit.  Our real lives are almost always filled with these odd pieces. We struggle to accept them. I struggle to accept them. I can't live on the mountain top forever. Real life is calling.