Living Between 2 Worlds
I am in my office. It looks like something out of A Beautiful Mind. Hand written notes strewn everywhere even written on the window in dry eraser markers - Thoughts I don’t want to forget. Sunlight is streaming in the window and I am getting a sunburn on my right arm. Fortuny stands on the desk peering over my laptop as I work on my new website. We launch next week. Fiorella crowds behind me sitting on the chair.
Both the desk and the chair are Rococo. I live between two worlds as fully present in the past as in the future. In The Now time simply collides to give us structure. Time doesn’t need the hour. That’s for We. As earthly beings we need to be in this moment in order to transcend. Ironic. Right? If the soul is timeless?
The bell tower of Chiesa di Santa Maria del Giglio is ringing and simultaneously a neighbor somewhere up the road plays Kiss. Gene Simmons dances out their windows and down the road to greet Wagner exiting my door who waves his hat at Dali. Picasso stands in the gray nearby watching Banksy tag a wall. My seagull Harvey brays from the other side of my apartment sitting at my kitchen window. He taps. Where are you? Tap. Tap. Tap. I can’t see you! He raises his feather to shield the light as he peers in. Fortuny jumps off my desk and runs into the kitchen to greet him.
Harvey’s banging have been less frantic since I began to feed him. He’s smart. He’s figured out I feed him around 3pm. He waits patently until around then but if I don’t feed by 3 he’s pissed and the braying and knocking becomes more frantic. My coffee has gone cold, but I’m wired anyway. Besides, I like it that way. Cold coffee.
There’s been a buzz in my head for the last week. My head is clear. And that’s good news my brian is clear. Now is the time to think. My email delivered a 24 page document questionnaire on my finances from my divorce lawyer in Oklahoma this morning. Meanwhile my accountant in Berlin sends 4 more questions over night on our 2014 2015 2016 tax audit. My to do list sitting on my desk is a mile long- but I do what I always do.
I choose one thing.
That’s what I can do.
Now I chose you.
My choices are made in blinks. “Blink is a book about those first two seconds," Gladwell writes. “The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.” In business my intuition rarely leads me astray. I am less good at intuition in my personal life. My own desires get in the way of knowing. Desires, longing, the way I want things to be cloud my judgement and I can’t trust it. But I can see what powers lies before me if only I could learn to just be. Wish for it. Feel it. Let it Go. Don’t hold too tightly.
I am learning these last few years to call on the wisdom of the future and the past. Science meets Religion. Spirituality, Mysticism and the Ethereal. What would my future self do now? I can see so clearly who I will Be so what would She do now? What have I always known I know without knowing, knowledge passed through the womb of my mother’s mother’s mother. Ancient wisdom. Ancient knowing.
Now is the time to act. They say. My future and my past.
So I act.
I trust my intuition.
For people who trust in intuition minds don’t move linearly through space and time. Perhaps it’s why I moved to Italy. I’ve always had a special relationship with time. Time moves differently in Italy. Languid and fluid. Even more so in Venice. I think of Venice like a forgotten planet. There’s Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune — I’m still devastated about poor Pluto - and what’s this talk about Planet Nine? - and then there’s Venice. The unwanted bridge that Mussolini build - the Ponte della Libertà an attempt to thwart the the “tesseract” - The Wrinkle in Time.
Madeline L’Engle had it right. I think. Pity about the movie. She had divine knowing. Perhaps that’s what made it one of the most controversial - and awarded books of all time. Three cosmic beings, Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit, arrive at Megs doorstep, and explain the dire situation facing the universe. The Dark Thing, a force of great evil, covers parts of the universe — including the planet where Meg's father is trapped. Meg, her brother Charles Wallace, and her friend might as well have used a gondola - Like the phone box in Dr Who- to tesseract around the universe. I read this book as a child. Time and time again. It made sense to me. To be truly Christian means to see Christ everywhere, to know him as all in all,” L’Engle wrote in her book Walking on Water.
I imagine this virus as the darkness that envelopes the planet. Being fought by the light.
Mrs Whatsit, the comforter says. “All through the universe it’s being fought, all through the cosmos, and my, but it’s a grand and exciting battle. I know it’s hard for you to understand about size, how there’s very little difference in the dize of the tiniest microbe and the greatest galaxy. You think about that, and maybe it won’t seem strange to you that some of our very best fighters have come right from your own planet, and it’s a little planet, dears, out on the edge of a little galaxy. You can be proud that it’s done so well.”
— “Who have our fighters been?” Calvin asked.
— “Oh, you must know them, dear,” Mrs Whatsit said. Mrs Who’s spectacles shone out at them triumphantly.
— “And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”
— “Jesus!” Charles Wallace said. “Why, of course, Jesus!”
— “Of course!” Mrs Whatsit said. “Go on, Charles, love. There were others. All your great artists. They’ve been lights for us to see by.”
— “Leonardo da Vinci?” Calvin suggested tentatively. “And Michelangelo?”�“And Shakespeare,” Charles Wallace called out, “and Bach! And Pasteur and Madame Curie and Einstein!”
— Now Calvin’s voice rang with confidence. “And Schweitzer and Gandhi and Buddha and Beethoven and Rembrandt and St. Francis!”
— “Now you, Meg,” Mrs Whatsit ordered. And you. And you. And you. I keep thinking this virus is inviting us to find our genius. What have you been thinking? What’s that idea birthed out of your solitude? Just like an electron or a photon is an indivisible unit of information and energy, a thought is an indivisible unit of consciousness. Now is the time to create. There is a general consciousness. We are connected. Me and You. We.
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