Angels in the Architecture

 Lately I have been thinking about dead people. Not just people I once knew in real-life but dead people in general. Their spirits, mostly. What happens to our spirit, our "soul" if that sounds better to you, after we die?  No one knows, of course, no one even knows if we have a spirit or a soul or if we are just matter. Our spirit wouldn't be matter, of course, but maybe it is our consciousness because no one can really put their finger on what physically constitutes consciousness. 

There's no specific reason this has been on my mind now; it is on my mind most of the time. Like some people I know, I talk to dead people quite often. Something happens, like I see a group of does and fawns and I say "Oh, Mom check that out!  I know you always liked deer, so look at those!"  I say this out loud, of course.  Once you begin to equate actions and situations with a now-dead person, it is amazing how often the connections are there. Something will remind me of my Dad, my Mom, my friend Martha, and once I comment on it to them, more and more things occur that remind me of them.  Or I think about John Prine for a second and in another second there's a John Prine song playing on the radio or on Pandora, just randomly.

I don't know if others out there experience this, but it gives me faith and belief that some spirits stick around us and are listening to us.  Sometimes they help us out (Thank you, St. Anthony) and sometimes they come to us for comfort or to assuage loneliness or to make us open our eyes to a bit of wonder or beauty. The flower stream I presented this past year on Instagram, posting a single flower each day for 9 months, gave me a temporary reprieve from some of the ugliness of the world. And I felt like my personal spirits were helping.....beautiful flowers presented themselves to me in odd, unexpected ways and I got to share those with anyone who was looking. 

I currently work in a small hotel that has been in existence for close to 100 years. There are stately redwoods on the property, old-growth hydrangeas and camellias and dahlias that are six feet tall.  And there are spirits on that property, benign spirits that exude peace and tranquility. You can feel it when you walk around the property, a feeling of calm and peaceful resignation and hope. I've never worked at a place that felt so safe and accommodating and I am 100% sure it's due to those old, dead souls who still hang around because it was their special place when they were alive.  

Nothing profound here, just my mind rambling on.

Sometimes the magic works.....

 ... and sometimes it doesn't.

That's a quote from the movie "Little Big Man" from 1970, with Dustin Hoffman.  This is not a movie review but those eight words stick with me because they are like life: sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not.  Sometimes the cards fall  your way, sometimes you bottom out, deuces and threes instead of tens and queens.

I am not a fan of the word "magic" or "magical" used in an every day context. To me magic is studied trickery, slight of hand, conjuring, fooling the eye, fooling the mind. Life isn't that. Yes, we all experience moments that feel 'magical' but I still don't like using that word for anything less than transcendence and that experience is too rare to even discuss here. So, leaving "magic" and all its incarnations aside, let's talk about luck.

(And now I am floundering because, honestly, I don't even know what I started writing about and here I am, still typing away.  I could/should start over but no, not taking that road. Whatever made me begin on this path will either carry me on or lead me astray and I will be fine with that.)

Luck: who has it? Who gets it? Why does it touch one person and not the other? Is there even such a thing as luck, just as is there even such a thing as magic? Do you feel lucky, are you lucky, has your life been blessed (!) with luck?  What the fuck is luck?

Don't know. Don't care. Yes, it's lucky, perhaps, if you find a $100 bill on the sidewalk. Yes, it's lucky, perhaps, if you put that $100 on a red square on a roulette wheel. And yes, it's lucky, perhaps, if that spin of that roulette wheel comes up red and you win a bunch of money.  And then what? Does your life change? Perhaps yes if you win $100,000.  But perhaps not.

So, luck. So, magic. Joan Didion wrote a remarkable book about the death of her husband and her daughter titled "The Year of Magical Thinking" which has nothing to do with luck or magic but explains, to me, that theory of what magic means to many. In our small and uncertain lives here on this uncertain planet, sometimes we want to believe something so viscerally that we think about it so much until it becomes real to us. We internalize it, we live it, we want it to be real and 'magically' it happens. It becomes real to us. It is, indeed, magical thinking. But at the same time, that thinking doesn't change the reality. It just smooths it over for a while. It mitigates the pain.

Whew. There is no resolution here. Just the recognition that it is time to go to bed. Thank you for following along.  More to come.

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