A Ring of Endless Light

I'm reading - for the thousandth time - a book called A Ring of Endless Light, by Madeliene L'Engle, one of my most favourite writers. She is a writer, a scientist, a poet - all those things that I understand. She is also deeply religious - no, that isn't right - deeply spiritual, and that is a wonderful quality. She is very much a Christian but in a normal, unassuming way that is not phony, like so many "religious" people I know.

From me, high praise indeed.

I feel that way about Luis, too. He clearly believes but it is not that phony overbearing let's-do-everything-right-for-the-neighbours sort of way like his father or my deceased grandmother. It's very unassuming, a normal part of him like any other part of him. I am much more comforted by people like him in that way.

This book, which I have read so many times since I was a kid, is an easy read in the literal sense but not in the emotional or thinking sense. It is very deep, very emotional, very... I don't know. I love it. It makes me laugh, cry, feel, love, all of it. All of which is very important to me. I would not be happy not being this way. But it makes me think, and I'm the most me, the most complete, when I am thinking. For me, thinking is kind of like meditating... it isn't really, not in the true sense of the word, but it kind of is for me.

That probably doesn't make a lot of sense.

But it is an amazing book. The storyline is fairly basic. Told from the point of view of one girl, it is about her family spending the summer with her grandfather, who is dying. He has luekemia, an incurable kind. That doesn't sound like much, does it? But it is a lot. And told through her eyes it is even more than that. She has a big family - her parents, two brothers and a sister. That, to me, is a huge family, my being an only child. I was not unhappy that way and I'm still not, although if one could be guaranteed the kind of relationship they end up having, and overall, I might be more willing to put up with all the bullshit in between.

But I guess what makes this book so special for me is that I identify very much with the story teller, the writer, in this case Vicky Austin. I am very much like her, certainly at that age I was (in this book she is not quite sixteen). I needed to be alone a lot, I was much more inside my own head than partaking in the world around me. All cobwebby and artsy and not much for wanting to deal with the rest of humanity. Sometimes I still feel that way, although I suspect that this is normal for people who's job make them deal with the human race a lot.

In the book, at one point, her grandfather tells her that "poets are born knowing the language of angels". I like that - a lot. I'm not a poet, but I am an artist. One of the reasons I make a losy scientist, aside from a huge incapability with math, is that I'm too much the artist - the emotional, unreasoning creature who sees everything as it could be and not so much as it is. I'm pragmatic about certain things, but not the scientific things.

That probably doesn't make any sense, not easily, anyway, because I write all the time about science and my love of it. Yes, I do love science, terribly, but not that part of it that is the cold hard facts, but the colourful, dreamy side of it. I love volcanoes and can tell you a lot about them, but not the chemistry. I know the difference between andecitic and basaltic lava, the difference between lava and magma (the former is above the ground, the latter below), the difference between a pyroclatic flow and a lava flow, the difference between pahoehoe and aa lava, but I can't tell you the chemical make up of them, something a goelogist would mostly know. I love the visual and passionate sciences - plate techtonics, volcanology, meteorology, earthquakes, tornadoes, etc. Ask me about calculus - I'll laugh at you. I know nothing of math. Certainly not at that ridiculous level!

In high school I tried chemistry. I hated it - it was all math. It was boring, not at all what I'd thought. But I had taken all the earth sciences, biology and any other ology there was (except for philosophy - no, thanks!), and all that was left was chemistry for the sciences, so I tried it. It was a failed experiment, definitely. I asked to be tranferred three weeks into it.

I wish I could recall what I opted for instead but that was a million years ago, galaxies of time away. I know that by the time I reached my senior year, my classes were almost entirely art-based. Oils, airbrush, free form, creative writing, etc. - I had all artistic classes. I had gotten all the suff I knew I'd hate but had to take out of the way as much as the stuffy school curriculum would allow. I hated a lot of the classes - Math, Algebra (a complete waste), Spanish (they insisted on a language and did not offer Russian), Economics (gasp...), Social Studies (I liked the topics well enough, but the teacher really knew how to suck all the joy out of it), Home Ec (awful), Gym - good gods, who thought that up? Physical education was just a formalised area for the bullies to really show their prowess at abusing the rest of us. I hated that all my scholastic life, which would have absolutely been better served studying something I liked!

I had some great teachers who really made me suffer some subjects that I hated, like Mr. Lebrenz, my eighth grade math teacher. He was really great and he clearly loved what he was teaching. I had an algebra teacher who looked like he was going to nod off teaching the hideousness that is algebra. I had a teacher for Economics, Mr. Denequolo, who was very sarcastic and funny. We liked history but I did not have the good fortune to get him for that subject. He liked economics, but I hated it and it would always be that way - I've no more appreciation or liking for it now than I did then.

But I had plenty of teachers who were dead from the neck up. They stood there and spewed out tidbits by rote, made us take multiple choice quizzes and tests, and really wasted far more of my time than anyone should have.

I did get lucky in that I liked - at least I cannot recall any that I didn't - all of my science teachers. They loved their subject and really got into teaching it - and teaching high school age kids anything is no easy task. Shove this down any ten-year-olds throat and see how easily it goes down... but the average fifteen-year-old is lost in sexual angst and longings s/he doesn't really understand. That is an ugly age to have to deal with.

And while the character Vicky did not have my really awful high school life, she was still someone I could understand - most people are just... well... joe-people, moving through life but not really specialised or seeing the world that they are in. But I'm an artist. I still am, even if I don't draw. One reason why I won't ever try to write for a profession is that I tried that with drawing and now I don't draw. There is a very big piece of me that is missing and I have never been able to get that back. I miss it in a way that one misses a limb. And if you don't know that kind of loss, well, you can tell me I'm an idiot and I have my limbs (yes, I have both hands and feet and all that should be there with them), so what do I know? I know I lost something it seems I am never meant to have again.

The ability is still there and so is the interest and yet... when I sit down to draw, the lines come out but the emotion that made it so rich, and not just doodles, well... it is not there. My heart is not in it. And how can anyone create with that?

So unless you know that kind of loss, you don't get to look down at me for lamenting on it.

But artists are artists, no matter what their vocation, what kind of art and whether or not they still do it. I will always have the artist's temperament. I will never be the pragmatist that is the true scientist. I'll always be the person who can't look at things from the outside and be divorced from them. I am very empathic, which is good for what I do now - HR and EMS - but bad for science. And in some ways, bad for what I do, too. I find dealing with the patient extremely rewarding and satisfying. However, I find dealing with survivors of a deceased patient very, very difficult. That empathy tends to get in the way. I have a tendency to mirror what others feel and I have enough of my own internal turmoil to have to deal with everyone else's - if that makes sense.

I do the same thing Vicky does to balance out others' feelings with my own and letting go of holding onto negative things that people seem to shed all the time. I go out to my hammock, which is my magic space, my hideaway. I'm not all that hidden away - look out the bedroom or sunroom window or look from the road where the traffic comes out of the Foodtown and there I am, sitting or laying in my hammock with my laptop or a book and always, always with my music. Last summer it was my Rio Carbon (I do still miss it) and this summer it is my iPod (which I love dearly), playing my favourites... right now it is playing To Live And Die in L.A. by a group called Wang Chung (don't know them? They were a sort of two-hit wonder in the mid or late 80s. I have the first release, Points on a Curve but nothing after that - the song that was just on was from a movie. Now I hear Breathe Me by Sia. It's from Six Feet Under (oh, come on, you didn't think that show was something I'd immediately gravitate toward? Pleeeeaaassssse!

That's an easy one!

My laryngitis and tracheal whatever seems to proceeding apace. I don't feel sick like I did last week (thank the gods) but I sound awful. I laugh and everyone can hear all the phlegm and mucus moving and rumbling in there - it is amusing and horrifying at the same time. I was talking to my manager about something on Friday (I should not have been to work but I needed to get the Orientation out of the way and done and there was no managing it by moving it at the last second. He said something that made me laugh and there it was, written all over his face - total horror. I laughed, my usual happy infectious sound, but infectious the way I'm using was not what he was thinking! He was thinking infectious like I'm releasing a thousand bits of evil into his air. He couldn't get me out of his office fast enough. It was really amusing, although I'm sure he was not thinking that at the time.

I still sound all rumbly and sometimes my voice gets hoarse - not a whisper, but not normally the way it is, strong and clear. It's weird. Definitely not Barry-White-hey-baby sexy!

I love Madeliene L'Engle's use of language. In this world you hear people say the most appalling things - not in content but the way that they say it. Sentence structure, tenses, dangling participles - all those things we were told not to do in school - they just come flying out of people!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

I know I am not any great intellect or amazing learner. I have a problem with math and languages (other languages, dopey!), and linear thinking, but at least I can speak and write well. Very well, in fact. I never say "aks" instead of "ask", "don't" instead of "doesn't" - do people not hear themselves and want to cringe?!

I don't mean just that, though. She's not one to waste words or use unnecessary words. And then uses the full, rich, good words, not the simplest possible terms. Any book is worth it if you need to occasionally reaquaint yourself with your dictionary. That is never a bad thing. Your dictionary should absolutely be one of your nearest and dearest friends. What a terrible world this'd be if there weren't huge and witty words. I love words. Language is definitely a gift. Anyone can have verbal language but written language is what makes life so much richer.

I'm aways surprised and dismayed at how few readers I know and even less writers. I mean, sure, we all have to produce some written things at work (I do, but that is a major part of my position) but how many people do it for the sheer screaming naked joy of it? I do it because it feels good, excersizes the brain, keeps the dust and cobwebs out, and it also gets the millions of jumbled thoughts out of there. I need that. No one wants to hear all the stuff floating around in there but it needs to get out or I just munch on it more and more. Now I have this blog that no one reads (except for some staff - but they are just parsing it to make sure I don't put anything inappropriate in it!), but that's okay! It's out there, out of my poor, crazed mind that is always going, always thinking, always racing lightyears ahead of my mouth anyway!

I wonder if they are really reading this stuff, anyway. I know that they do. From time to time anyway. I like that, though. That's what it is there for, anyway. Not what they want to do, I'm sure - weed through my endless musings to figure out if I've posted something vile or heinous or just too private about work...!

So many ways I could play with this... GRIN...

And it would be so like me to do that, too. Just for the sheer fun of it. (Yes, the sheer naked screaming fun!) I can be a little on the mean side when I am taken by the mood. It's fun. They'd understand... they are kind of that way, too. I don't think all of them sit there and check out My Space and Blogger sites, but I know at least three of them do. Sometimes they've mentioned some of the things they've encountered... shiver...

I mean, scary - more than I ever want to know about my coworkers. Then again, I am sure that the same could be said of some of my postings - however, I am just cogitating, not looking for a hot date or (even worse) a spouse through the Internet.

I just like to think out loud...

Wow... it'sw almost 2000... Yikes. Time for bed!