Drunk on Possibilities

It’s Spring, and I’m drunk with the possibility of plants surviving the winter and popping up in my garden. I swoon at the possibility of seeds I plant growing up into lush leaves and succulent roots and fruits. I dream of my garden as I nurture it with manure and pull the weeds to prepare for the season.

It’s Spring, and I’m drunk with the possibility of getting my novel published.  I send it to publishers and agents I haven’t sent it to before,  envisioning the book’s acknowledgement page, and hoping beyond my experience of rejections. The thought of being published makes me tipsy.

It’s Spring, and I’m drunk with the possibility of finding my muse again, the inebriation of ludus, the joy of enjoying the energy of growth. My drunkenness makes me giggle, which makes people look at me sometimes.

In the words of Baudelaire, one should always be drunk.

Day 17 Reflection: Possibility

I am positively drunk with possibility. To be drunk on possibility is to see an opportunity and combine it with hope, and recognize the potential of good things.

A blank computer screen, a seed, a fresh journal, a job application — all of these whisper possibilities in us, possibilities of creation, growth, sustenance. All we have to do is act. And wait.

A possibility is not a probability. Not even hard work brings us a guarantee. We have to act to bring the possibility to fruition, and then we have to wait. And sometimes we’re disappointed, but then we hear the whisper of possibility again, and our essential optimism risks disappointment again for the sake of pursuing opportunity.

Chronic disappointment leads to a dulling of that sense of possibility. People get drunk on substances out of a sense of hopelessness. Those who have not been provided opportunity lose trust in possibility, wanting to believe only in sure things. The unscrupulous prey on these disenchanted people. Con artists guarantee riches to unsuspecting victims, taking advantage of their dreams, their drunkenness on possibilities. The sign of a con, in fact, is this promise to make the possibility a lucrative reality. Real life seldom promises fulfillment of our possibilities. 

It’s too easy to chide people for being unrealistic, but believing in possibilities requires from all of us a certain recklessness, a certain desire to believe that a computer screen and keyboard will yield a novel and that a resume will get an interview. We all need to believe in possibilities, and we need to make more possibilities possible for those who face an impoverishment of opportunities. 

Because being drunk on possibilities is the best inebriation.

Day 16 Reflection: Wonder

The way the light spills into the hallway, I realize that I have never truly seen light before. White light, moonlight from the window, turns the stairwell into shadows. I look out the window, and high in the sky floats a huge moon, ancient and luminescent. It is my moment, mine and the moon’s.

Day 15 Reflection: Curiosity

I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with my curiosity. 

This probably has to do with the fact that, at the age of seven, I got caught going through the drawers of a buffet at my friend’s house. I wanted to know if all buffets were catchalls for stuff like the one at my house, and what kind of clutter my friends’s parents collected. I seriously didn’t know I did anything wrong. (That was a lot of my childhood, getting yelled at for things I had never been told were wrong.)

As a adult, I’m still very curious. Most of the time I save my curiosity for the most appropriate things, like research: “How much debt do college students have? How do they feel about it?” Or writing: “What would Luke Dunstan do in this situation?”

But then there’s the rubbernecking at accidents. The burning desire to ask personal questions. The gleaning of details on the Internet about teens dying of suicide and celebrity nervous breakdowns and the manifesto of the New Zealand shooter. I am not proud of myself for these, because with each click on such articles, I vote for privacy to be invaded and websites to post hate.

I suspect that curiosity is hardwired in the brain as a mechanism to protect one from harm — if I know what caused the accident, I will avoid the same fate. If I know the motivation of the mass murderer, I will spot the next one before he attacks. The truth of the matter, though, is that fate is capricious enough that no amount of information can guarantee safety. So I keep the personal questions at a minimum and only to the people closest to me, and I drive on when I see the accident.

Curiosity, they say, killed the cat — but satisfaction brought it back. Sometimes we never get satisfaction, and that’s okay as long as we don’t try to get it at any cost.

Querying progress: Not a lot to report

I haven’t reported my writing/query progress for a while, so here it is:

My Prodigies query got rejected by Tor/Forge and a lot of agents over the past few months.

My query is now out to three publishers — one big, the others small and independent.

One of the small presses asked for my whole manuscript, which is progress. We shall see.

The other two presses — it’s early days yet.

Please keep me in your thoughts and even prayers if you think this unabashedly liberal and universalist Quaker deserves them.

Day 14 Reflection: Hunger

Hunger, the gnawing in our stomach and uncanny fear in our bones, disconcerts us. Wired in our most primitive brain, hunger presses us to seek sustenance so we don’t die.

We have borrowed the word ‘hunger’ to describe other forms of sustenance, usually in a spiritual sense. We hunger for love, for truth, for justice, for a right relationship with the earth or with our conception of God.  The word is fitting, as our desire for these needs can grow uncomfortable and urgent in our souls.

 Hunger drives us, no matter what its source. Hunger doesn’t take us on a gentle walk through the orchard after dinner, but sends us in pursuit of what would make us satiated and whole. We walk with hunger on a rocky path, but we barely note the stones because we are in pursuit of our sustenance. 

Hunger reminds us that we are akin to the other creatures of the world, who need, who toil, who search. We may hunger for more than basic sustenance, but we do hunger.

Day 13 Reflection: Search

Humanity searches.

The poorest search for sustenance and shelter. The disenfranchised search for justice. The lonely search for love and belongingness. 

We all search for meaning in a harsh, capricious world.

It’s hard to live in such a random world, where one’s life can be turned upside down by a natural disaster or a crash of the economy. It’s harder to live in a world where the wicked game the system and come out on top, where structures that disadvantage people by race and social class keep people down.

We all search for something beyond ourselves, for comfort, for meaning. Some find it in a Supreme Being, others find it in nature or music, still others find it in service to higher ideals. Sometimes our attempts to order our world yield injustice, as when we decide that those who are advantaged deserve their status by order of a deity. Sometimes, when we realize that what we thought was natural order are actually the structures of injustice, we make meaning of the need to right wrongs. 

We define ourselves as the seekers of the Mystery — followers of the Book, calling ourselves Christian, Jew, or Moslem; Hindu or Buddhist or Zoroastrian; seekers of Truth. No matter how far we travel on our path, the Mystery of life will always be just beyond us, hiding in a random world.

Day 12 Reflection: Heal

I have been in a state of healing for most of my life. 

I grew up with childhood trauma — sexual abuse and rape, bullying, an unstable parent. I will talk about resiliency later in this series, because today I want to talk about healing.

This is hard to write, because society tends to tell survivors to ‘get over it already’. The heart and mind don’t work that way. Childhood trauma changes one’s whole trajectory — how one sees oneself, what one believes is possible, how abnormal one feels compared to the children around them who haven’t faced the trauma and who blithely live their lives without picking around the traumatic experience.

I didn’t start healing until I left my hometown for college. Before that, I was still immersed in the toxic culture of the town and could not see my life as anything but pain. In my new life, however, I met people who loved me for myself, wreckage and all.

It was only then that I began to heal. I think love is an integral part of healing, because it shows us that we are more than the sum of our damage. It’s hard to let love in as an abuse survivor, but I had friends who persisted in loving me, and I became the person I had been denied.

 I’m still healing, many many years later. It’s much better; the nightmares come rarely, and the memories have faded to neutral-toned snapshots, devoid of the pain. Sometimes I wonder how I would have turned out if I hadn’t had the childhood I had. But my life has turned out so much better than I had dreamed as a child, which I credit to healing.

I will likely heal for the rest of my life, as do many (if not all) of us. But healing is possible.


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Day 10 Reflection: Partnerships

I like to work alone. I feel working with people complicates things and takes up extra time. It’s not as efficient as working on my own. I have to work around other people’s schedules, and … 

I imagine many of you reading this are nodding your heads in agreement. It’s just easier to get things done on our own. Unless, of course, they’re things too big for us to accomplish. Or we don’t have the know-how to do them. 

So we seek partnerships. And we find partnerships difficult, because we have to deal with the messy tension of working with other people. We struggle with communication at times. We see the problem differently, and the solution differently as well. We have different priorities, different perspectives. Even in the best of partnerships, we struggle at moments, because we’re not psychic twins with our partner.

But partnerships have a power that working on one’s own lacks. The power that comes from those different perspectives. The advantage of having a complement of skills to address a situation, to find a solution. The ability to tackle big problems. 

The power of a partnership is worth giving up a little independence, stepping back to negotiate rather than charging in and doing something, and having sole control of the vision.