Wordsmiths

Hopscotch Snoozebutton Dreaming

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In five minute increments I’m experiencing a cavalcade of newsbite dreams that would employ doctor Freud for a month. They say you need 26+ minutes sleep at a time to achieve effective rest, but what if there were a way to go beyond power napping into the speed-reading equivalent of dreaming?

Harlan Ellison wrote a story sometime after I was born called “The Function of Dream Sleep.” Spoiler alert: a premise of the story is that our dreams are not artful expressions of inner meaning, but rather our mind’s nightly trip to the crapper to excrete useless thoughts.

As I lay there tumbling into a surprisingly deep and disorienting dreamland for each four and a half minute session, it’s possible my mind was having a frantically productive spring cleaning session. No long involved mystical dreamland tales that beg interpretation and analysis, but rather mental exhalations that were as swift and satisfying as a series of sneezes.

I think of the fear-breathing exercise at Kristen Ulmer’s Ski to Live clinic. From my journal:

Last exercise for the night: breathe in your fears. All of them. Let each breath in carry with it one of our fears. We would have plenty, she assured us.

And with each breath out— it’s not succinct to explain— expel the belief that you will ever let go of that fear. In other words, accept that you may always have that fear … but the double-negative is actually closer to the effect Kristen was trying to cultivate: you’re not gathering up yet another “thing,” an acceptance of something unsavory, another worry for your analytical mind to obsess on, but rather you are expelling, exhaling a myth, a deceit, a lie.  It’s important (and not readily accessible to me, anyway) that this not be confused: it’s not about debunking fears, it’s about breaking down the ways we hide and ignore our fears. Lots of negative language and dark concepts there— all mingling together.  It’s tempting to work a mathematical magic and turn double-negatives into positives, but this is not a problem solved by unicorns and daisies.  Trust me: I’ve tried several times in this paragraph alone.

I stood there breathing deep.  On each successive inhale I never ran out of fears— or “worries” as I preferred to call them. These were very real worries that plague me daily.  Here’s where the structure of the exercise struck me as revelatory: without the exhale, I would burst.

The cycle— the rhythmic give-and-take of our own respiratory system— limits each side’s contribution to the dialogue: One side says “What about money? What if I can’t pay the bills?” The exhale replies: “You may never know if you’re going to be able to pay the bills.”  It’s only implied: “So now what?” because it’s time for another fear to be inhaled.

Perhaps like a village tribunal, little cases come before a judge, swift decisions are rendered, and the next case comes up without fanfare. Villagers trudge away wondering if it was worth it to gripe in the first place; judges go home at night doubting they made a difference in their community; and only a bigger mind sees that the process is the inhale and exhale of Justice.

You know Kristen and I are both Virgos? I’m a Year of the Rat guy, as well, making me exceptionally precise, organized, analytical, and someone who hoards things in wall cavities. I think her breathing exercise worked for me because it negated analysis and perfectionism: there is not enough time in the space of a breath to get it absolutely perfect. So you simply move on to the next breath. Or turn blue.

So what if snoozebutton dreaming could do the same for my subconscious, hopping from square to square to stomp out these nebulous half-formed thoughts? I’ll sleep on it and get back to you in 4.5 minutes.

Thanks for reading. Cheers,
Greg

Photo by Yours Truly

Authentic Experience, Faves

Immortal Bedouins of the Hydrologic Cycle

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I just thought to a drifting snowflake, “You’re a long way from home, little evaporated drop of seawater,” and in my mind I traced its path ahead. It would come to rest in a puff of fresh powder before blowing into the hardpack crust of a snowdrift sometime early tomorrow morning. Warm weekend weather would begin the melting process, but because of the drift’s density and the many layers of the drop’s compatriots above and below, our little drop wouldn’t thaw for two full weeks.

Finally finding its way to soil, our drop would continue downward to the water table even as its fellows are gathered up by plant roots to undergo the process of photosynthesis, respiration, and evaporation. Right here, just shy of the Continental Divide, those fellow drops would travel no further than the day winds carry their vapor, waking as morning dew to begin another day right in this very vicinity.

Our drop, however, feels the pull of gravity and the call of Mother Ocean, joining an underground railroad of similarly zombied drops, marching in steady percolation till they meet in flows and work their way ever downward through springs then streams then rivers and eventually the Golfo de California to Madre Pacifica. And there, of course, they will swim a while in the world’s largest gathering of their types. Then, one day, while lazing about the surface on a hot day, they will be whisked up into sea air and blown back inland toward these mountains which will gather them back up again as snow.

Of course water has no home. Each drop is one of the immortal Bedouins of the hydrologic cycle. Roaming the shifting sands of climate and ecology, they course their way through plants, geology, space, and time: blind hikers with no destination.

When alone in their travels, they are mostly silent, except for occasional soliloquies when they drop into a larger body of water or drip to hard earth from a ledge above. When joined by fellows, they find voice now and then, from the collective sigh of a mountain brook to the thrill of river currents crashing down the bank. And it is in the rare waterfall that our waterdrop feels a rush of gravity and community it has not felt since riding the waves back on Mother Ocean. Out there it was all moon-pull, wind spray, and current, amid a teeming highway of fellow drops; here in the seconds of the waterfall’s rush it’s a skydive of adrenaline, a rollercoaster of droplets who don’t scream till the bottom.

Ancient evidence of skiing in China?
Ancient evidence of skiing in China?

I’m reminded, somehow, of a petroglyph caught by the Warren Miller cameras somewhere deep in China for this year’s ski epic. The film suggests the region they visited in the Altai Mountains may be the new “cradle of skiing” (details in the second half of this 22-min. TV show, scripted by yours truly). To me, that petroglyph is evidence that humans, like snowflakes, have been making their way earthward in graceful arcs ever since we were nomads.

I’ll leave the archaeology to, ahem, archaeologists, but as I watch these thousands— no, millions— of crystalline adventurers out my window, I’m feeling the itch of my own ancestral petroglyphs.

Follow one flake and you see the industrious path of a worker bee, a route— even if it wanders— from one place to another. Soften your focus and you see flocks, shifting like sparrows, influenced by wind and gravity and physics and whim. It becomes less about getting from one place to another and it is then that I feel the way of the Bedouin pecked into my own DNA.

In other words, we are all flakes. Thanks for reading. Cheers,
Greg

Photos: by SteamboatDigs and courtesy of Warren Miller Entertainment

Levity

New Theory on Human Digestive System

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Medical theories are traditionally based on dissection of cadavers and other such arcane arts. In my experience, though, I haven’t found cadavers to be models of digestion— except from the point of view of maggots and other underground creepy-crawlies. Since I was hoping to focus on other unsavory topics, let’s try another tactic.

I believe it was in a commercial (and not one for a new anti-bacterial yogurt) where I recently heard again the oft-touted factoid that we are comprised of more bacteria cells than human cells. Inspired by this surprising revelation, I have pieced together the following theory of the human digestive process, based on my own personal experience and just short of one visit to an actual sausage factory:

Sausage Grinders
“Eat somethin’ that’ll stick to your ribs,” Grandpa said.
The body, to him, was a bag of skin filled with air
and a popsicle-stick skeleton.
Sticky food, I guess, adhered to the bones,
a meat and potato popsicle
that moths and bees lick for sustenance.
Moth and bee farts kept the skin-balloon filled.

It’s a mechanized world now
we are sausage grinders
the butcher crams it in
our blades chew it up
we make little loaves
and squish them out.

Some sticks to the blades
the night rats scavenge
lick the blades clean
make their own little wieners;
some stay too long
become sausage themselves
when the morning shift starts.

We are clean green grinding machines
fueled on rat gas and moth farts
we are composting bins
in a landfill world
we stink and we’re slow
but we get the job done
if the world can wait
and hold its nose.

Thanks to Luc Besson for the little exchange that set this grinder in motion:

Police officer outside door: “Are you classified as human?”
Korben Dallas: “Negative. I am a meat popsicle.” —The Fifth Element (1997)

Thanks for reading. Cheers,
Greg

Photo by silverfox09