Paintings all over you...

Happy-town!

I'm long overdue for a blog update. So basically fastforward waaay ahead from the way things were last time. No more incessant loneliness or shaken-up identity. I guess I just got over it. I've adjusted, and I've begun to truly enjoy myself here. I'm not sure exactly how it happened. It wasn't like the time toward the end of college when I figured a bunch of very important things out and acted on them to make myself feel better, although it is a return to the state that resulted from that. This just kind of happened. One day it wasn't, next it was. Anyway, I'm not complaining! It's nice to be at peace. :)

Even the problems that were the greatest sources of anxiety for me before have kind of faded into the background. It's like when you're driving away from someone, and there was something else you wanted to say or do, but soon you're so far away that your voice can't carry that far anymore, and you need to look ahead at the road and so can't keep looking back, and soon you've forgotten all about whatever it was that was bothering you when you left...

It's also a little like Dante, when he ascends to a new level of Paradise. He's weightless, and moving upward so fast that before he even realizes that he's moving, it appears that everything else is growing away from him.

Those metaphors are the best I can do to describe this adjustment.

Other than that, there are the owls. They've been coming up everywhere! I rode down a wooded trail on this amazing bike path I've been exploring, and a huge brown owl immediately swooped in front of me, landed on a tree, stared at me for a moment, and flew off. A couple days later I was at the gallery crawl in NoDa and I bought a lavender-stuffed owl to help me sleep (sleeping is not a problem anymore, thankfully). I then walked into a gallery and noticed that I was looking at a large painting of an owl. I looked at another picture, and noticed that owls were also its subject, except more abstract and energy-like. As I looked around it dawned on me that the entire exhibit was nothing but paintings of owls. And at the end of the hall, there were two live owls perched calmly on branches; they'd been brought there by the raptor center. So this was all pretty mind-blowing. Then I saw an owl statue on a dock a few days later.

I did some research and discovered that owls as spirit guides represent clairvoyance and the ability to pierce through the deepest darkness. Which is crazy, because that's almost EXACTLY what my astrological crystal, rainbow obsidian, is supposed to help me do: "transcend darkness" to arrive at some greater clarity. I also read an Apache/Navajo myth about an owl boy who kills his parents because they don't accept him; the whole idea of accepting your inner darkness in order to transcend it resonates really deeply with me right now, in light of my thesis (Eliot had a lot to say about this) but also just with the way I'm trying to resolve my inner demons in general. I thought a lot about this as I was hiking up Mount Morrow. I'm still not sure exactly what the connection is between the stone and the owl, though, or why there need to be two symbols for something so similar...there's a piece of the puzzle I don't have yet.

"Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered."

-T. S. Eliot, "East Coker"

Hmm.

Another cool thing that happened: last night I had one of those layered dreams, the kind where you wake up a few times and are still dreaming. Now I know there's that movie Inception which apparently is about that, but I haven't seen it yet, so I'm not just getting carried away. Well maybe I am, but not for that reason. Anyway, here was the dream. At first I was in what I thought was uptown Charlotte, except it was dark (as if there was a blackout) and didn't look like Charlotte, but I knew it was in that dream-logic sense. I lost my car. And everything felt like it was a moving painting, Salvador Dali paintings, including shifting and teleporting people. I was on the second floor of some building. It was nightmarish, but I think it was too awesome for me to be afraid, because I wasn't. Then I "woke up" into the next layer and was talking to Kate, telling her about the painting-dreams. I kept alternating between falling back into the painting-dreams and talking to Kate, and when I was talking to her I felt anchored and safe. This felt very, very real, but strangely enough, the first layer (the Dali-Dreams) felt the most real. This continued until I found my car and it glowed electric pink before I woke up again, this time in a field. But I don't remember waking up in the field; I was just there. Two other friends came out of a van, and I was filling out a form in messy green, pink, yellow, and orange crayon on a newspaper. I had to give it to the Signal editor because it contained information about some prom that happened at least half a year ago. But the editor didn't have her crane anymore. I know it doesn't make sense, I'm just telling it how it was. Then I woke up. It's noteworthy that pink, orange, and yellow really stood out throughout the dream.

So here was my day, immediately following that dream: I went through the whole brightly colored green and purple Concord Mills Mall looking for jobs, and then went to NoDa, met some new friends, saw the Toubab Krewe, and jammed with the drum circle there until 3 AM. After we'd been playing for over half an hour, one of the drummers, a young hippie with awesome dreads, comes over to me.

"That's so great...I'm seeing paintings all over you, man...you're beautiful with that thing."

It felt really good to make this guy so happy with my playing. Then I realized what he'd said: "I'm seeing paintings all over you." And so my day ended the same way my dream began the night before: with paintings. I also happened to be wearing a shirt with a very abstract orange, red, and yellow pattern, which I hadn't connected to the dream until then.

"The pattern more complicated" indeed, Mr. Eliot. What a cool, self-contained day with its own themes and symbols. What is the universe trying to tell me, I wonder?