Levitating

So many dreams, so little time to tell you all about them. Let's go with the most prominent one:

I have offered to help a friend with her young daughter, I am going to go across, and up the street and get her, but the day turns to black night, is filled with cars coming from both directions, with no headlights on, and I can't cross. The street turns to ocean, but the sky remains black. I levitate across the water to the other side, but it's so dark, I can't find the daughter, so I come back. When I am rejoined with my friend, the sky has turned back to day, and I try to convince her it had just been pitch-black a minute ago, I swear.

Immediate thoughts:

I was only going to be able to help for 25 minutes, anyway, so what's the big deal?

What's up with the sky dramatically, and unpredictably changing?

What's up with it only being me that saw the sudden shifts?

When did I learn to levitate, and why can't I do it all the time?

"Deep" thoughts:

Life can look dark, then suddenly, the sun comes out. And vice-versa.

We don't need other people to see what we see, experience what we experience, to make it true.

Things change.

Getting up and over the tricky parts of life (levitating) is the key.

Elevate

Had a Monday morning walk planned, that I'd been looking forward to. Needed the fresh air. Needed to move the body. Needed to get caught-up on ELD (every little detail) with my friend.

As I am wont to do, I tried to cram one more To Do in, before leaving for the walk. I had two outside planters with not-thriving plants in them, and was going to re-plant with thriving plants. Moving the planters from the front to back, where I'd have a hose, and a working surface, and the new plants, seemed hard. The planters were heavy. Tried moving the new plants and all the stuff to the front, but was making such a mess, decided to go back to Plan A. Got a little make-shift cart from the garage to help transport the planter. Tried pulling it. Didn't work. Tried pushing it, worked, until it didn't, and we hit a change in elevation on the driveway, and the cart, with increased velocity due to the incline, sent the planter straight into my shin.

Hurt like hell and my first thought was how irritating. Looked down, and there was huge swelling and bruising, instantly. Walking was painful. The sheer speed and size of the swelling scared me. The rest of the day's plans were scraped, and I spent as much time as possible, elevating and icing it.

Wil really "needed" to go to Bi-Mart and get the one thing from "our" list he had forgotten the day before, from "our" very important list. Talked my now-cancelled walking partner, into taking him to Bi-Mart, as I didn't think I could drive with my right leg in the condition it was in. Didn't know until she brought him home, that she was under-the-weather, too.

Some days our plans are just big cosmic jokes.

Some days our friends go the extra mile, and put your needs before their own.

Some days you just have to accept the situation for whatever it represents, for whatever it is, for whatever it isn't, and just elevate.

Tired

Had a very fitful sleep last night. I needed to pick someone up in the "middle" of the night (10:00 PM),  and when I got them where they were going and got myself settled in bed, I tossed and turned all night. Long about 4:00 AM the land line rang. Now, before you say it, the only reason we have a land line, is it would raise our bill to cut it. Turns out someone was trying to fax something to our non-fax phone, and they were quite persistent, and no sooner had I hung up, than they would try again.

Very annoying.

And so, when I did sleep, I dreamed weirder-than-usual dreams. Most memorable was helping a young teacher move into her newly redecorated classroom, and realizing there were no chairs for the students. Suddenly, a large group of older kids and adults were all filing out to go in search of chairs, and we ended up outside, far from the school, and walked (without the chairs) in the opposite direction. I ended up in a different school (high school?) with three other people, crouched in some back stairway, all using our smart phones to determine where we were, and where we were supposed to be, and the route in which to get there.

To no avail.

Nothing I/we tried worked, and ironically, the most map-challenged one of us (me) seemed to be leading the charge.

Moral of the story: Your smart phone ain't gonna tell you where you are in life, where you're supposed to be, and the route in which to get there.

Or something like that, I'm too tired to figure it out.

Masterpiece

I've been playing, and loving, the game Masterpiece, since 1976, when it came out. We owned a game, my cousins owned a game, and between the two families, there have been a million turns around the board, amassing each of us lots of play money and familiarity with the art featured in the game.

Ten years ago, three of my cousins and I were all together and in Chicago, and able to walk through the Chicago Art Institute, where many of the masterpieces used in the game, are actually hanging. We all had our favorites, we remember which ones were "worth" $1,000,000 one time when we "owned" them. We remember which ones, despite the odds, frequently were forgeries. We remember when I mis-pronounced "forgery" and said, "fogery," and we remember how we've never let that joke die.

We taught our own kids to love the game, and have fun playing it wherever we're together. Somewhere along the line, we picked up extra games at garage sales, and each of us "kids" have our own game. When my mom moved from her house in Sisters, I donated the game to the thrift store. My aunt went to that very thrift store, and bought that very game, not knowing it was her sister that had donated it. When we helped my aunt to clean out her house before moving, I ended up back with the exact game I'd donated, originally.

Yesterday, was Woohoo's 22nd birthday. Her college graduation was the day before. Lots to celebrate and appreciate - much gratitude to be given for her, her birth, her accomplishments, and all that lies before her. We ended the evening with a game of Masterpiece.

The round of Masterpiece was a metaphor for each of our personalities: STM broke all the rules, he went for broke, he was able to completely detach from what the paintings looked like, and focus only on what they were worth to him. He brokered deals. He made the game his own, and unsurprisingly, won the game by having over a million dollars more than the runner-up.

I came in last place. I played conservatively. I followed the rules to a T. I bought and sold paintings based on emotion and connection, or lack thereof, to the painting. I played the game the same way I've been playing it for 40 years.

The values of the paintings are in one pile, and the paintings in another. Each new game the piles get shuffled, and are paired "randomly." There is no question that STM and I have been in "the game" before. We've been reshuffled and in different pairings throughout many incarnations, I believe. I don't know all the pairings. I don't know all the past-lives. All I know, is that together, we are a masterpiece.