Connections

I blame James Burke.

Got to hear him speak, in person, once. An Impressive and genial and wonderfully lively intelligence. But this was later. First, I saw him on PBS.

He presented the world, a world likely to end soon, as a complex, interconnected, inscrutable, funny old place. As a construct in constant flux. When I first saw Connections, or maybe The Day The Universe Changed, my universe changed. I had been quivering on the tipping point. I honestly cannot say which came first. But something broke free, like the ice dams on the Scablands.

What is more, that change has never stopped, because I will never make assumptions about reality and expectations ever again.

I grew up with a concrete religion of absolute right and wrong, heaven hell limbo purgatory. Inescapable abusive, hard working, bring home the paycheck father, passive and judgmental, caring cooking mother. Assumptions like, 8 am is early in the morning, and sleep at night, and privacy is necessary, and I chose my own clothes, stay warm, have the sense to come in out of the rain, leave others some space, keep clean, don't shout.

I needed work. I needed to get back to school. I had unformed unease about the marriage I had chosen in ignorance. I joined the military, the part time one, National Guard. Raised my hand, and swallowed hard, allowed myself to be transported across the continent to a different dimension.

Where 0330 can be a time to start work. Where being woken for an hour in the middle of the night to be a fire guard is normal. Where I am told not only what clothes to wear, but precisely how to wear them, from moment to moment, what part of the floor not to walk on, when to take my boots off, when to instantly hurl myself face first onto the dirt, shower naked beside thirty others, ignore frozen toes, march through puddles, stand with my toes touching the heels of the boots of the woman in front of me, and scream my throat sore all day long.

If I let myself, I can feel all too well for those caught in the altered reality in this damned prolonged stupidity. I know, although only brushed by it, how profoundly changed they are and will be. I am in speechless despair that oozes into dark rage at those who refuse to understand the cost. Who refuse to give up their artificial assumptions about how they think it should be.


I began to breathe that first dark morning of Basic. Another time was the first time I kissed D, and he said "I love you." And when we decided to come to Boston. And when we admitted we wanted to go home, and that home was where our friends are. And when we saw Moby on the Animal Rescue League website, I knew he would be our cat. D knew when he met him. The first time I heard Sacred Harp. The first time I threw a cylinder in clay on a wheel. The first time I was lifted away from the earth in a plane. The first time I heard D play guitar. Thousands more as a nurse, first injection, first time cleaning up excrement, first incision. The phone call when D told me he thought he broke his arm, and later when Brenda told me it was a bad, bad break.

Each time, I opened my mind, and changed in response.

The universe transforms with every breath.