Are We There Yet??

Your Bloguero’s recent journey (very short version). Or why this blog has been so silent. Or how the present phase concluded. Or (subjectively) how the dog ate/didn’t eat the homework.

For most of the past month, since returning in early May from the wonderful International Shaman Gathering in Ireland, your Bloguero has been mostly “under the weather.” Coughing. Low fever. Running nose. Sleeping a lot. Aching. Not eating. Being weak. Being grouchy. Being unable to think. Napping. Walking at a snail’s pace. Wondering when his lungs would clear. Sitting. Hovering between awake and sleeping. Did he mention the persistent, wracking cough? Working (more or less successfully but sporadically). Isolation. Being alone in borderless dreamland. Long vistas sitting in bed under deep covers staring at the imaginary, metaphysical horizon and the beings emerging from it. Dreams that escape unbidden from new cracks between the worlds to sparkle under his eyelids. Or fly into imaginary flames. Bright sunshine. Visitations from beyond the worlds by all manner of beings.

Mercifully, this quite hallucinatory voyage appears at long last to be reaching a port. Your Bloguero is on the mend. And soon the coughing will be behind him. Very soon. And he will find himself no longer needing his sea legs. And the gaps between ordinary waking reality and everything else will partially seal.

Best events during the journey. Your Bloguero interrupted his meditations on his body’s pestilence and his mental travel exactly twice. First, to be in the audience for his daughter’s Independent Theater Project. Her final college work. Wow. Truly exceptional, wonderful, inventive, touching, the culmination of much training (your Bloguero hesitates to use this inadequate word). A great, absorbing, honest, moving show. Alas, parents, even cloaked in secret nom de plumes, do not dare to write reviews of their children’s work. Ever. And they worry as your Bloguero does now, about the adjectives. Your Bloguero wishes it were otherwise so he could give the show the review it really merits and expand on its profundity and subtlety and delight. Alas, this is not going to happen.

And second, to celebrate said daughter’s graduation from college. A huge celebration in Gotham to mark this milepost. Vast oceans of parental kvelling and astonishment and delight. Wonderful food, drink, comradery. A gathering to mark the launch of her post college life as an artist. And the end of a late parenting phase. Your Bloguero’s three children have now all completed college. They are all apparently adults. They have received whatever their parents could have provided to help them grow this far, and to bloom, and to make the world a better place. Now, their parents sit in the peanut gallery and act like their most devoted sports fans.

All of this, of course, commences your Bloguero’s initial navigation of a vast sea of speculation about what is next for him. What’s next? And what that might even mean. Another book, yes. A third novel. No, there is nothing yet (your Bloguero’s previous idea has been unceremoniously chucked), not even the smallest seed yet. Your Bloguero is sure, however, that something is coming. It’s just over the next hill. Still invisible, but your Bloguero can hear its breathing.

And other changes? Sure. All kinds. Who knows what. Or when. Or what that will look like. Your Bloguero’s arms and heart are open. He’s waiting to see what’s going to show up. He’s willing to embark. His anticipation is present.

Meanwhile, another day of sitting in the sun, hoping his chest will clear, hoping the coughing will subside even further. Waiting for the winged muse to perch on his shoulder and whisper ever so coyly in his ear.