Some People Live in the Matrix. I Live in a Hadron Collider.

Posted in Astronomy, Communication, emotions, experiments, Humor, Physics, Science, Spring, Survival by Shelley Sackier

It has been a crummy month.

I have had more balls thrown at my head, more rugs pulled from beneath me, and more Charlie Brown and Lucy football moments in this short space of time than an Amazon warehouse has isles.

One wretched thing after another has befallen where I find myself looking up into the ether and wondering if it would be easier to find the nearest cliff to leap off, or if I should just become a comedian and work out all my trauma on stage like everybody else.

Also, my beautiful, newly installed woodstove has become a deathtrap for bluebirds. Countless feathered friends have been falling down the great length of pipe, fluttering for hours in the dark with no place to get a footing until, exhausted, and like Augustus Gloop, who fell into Willy Wonka’s chocolate pond and got sucked through a body-hugging pipe, the birds find a way to squeeze themselves through tiny crevices and make their way into the glass encased box of the wood stove itself. And there they sit. Panicked. Anxious. In wholly unfamiliar territory. And they have no idea how to escape.

I have called my woodstove company—these feeling, and oh-so-brilliant installers I have written about in the past—who have simply laughed at the number of phone calls they’ve gotten in just one week over this very same issue.

Why is there not some form of wiring around the cap of the chimney? I ask.

Well, cuz that’d be bad for the health of the chimney, they state.

And what of the health of the bluebirds? I add.

I can hear them tsk. Yer just gonna have to find a way to communicate to them that what they’re doing is stupid.

I sigh.

I count fifteen avian rescues I have made this week alone and reflect on how one of the main contributing factors to my terrible-horrible-very bad-no good month has been the inability to communicate some of the most basic, necessary, and essential needs I required.

If I couldn’t do it for myself, how would I presume to do it for others?

I marvel at the irony that my life’s work sits firmly beneath the umbrella of communications and yet my transmissions are received as garbled, twaddling claptrap. I am a writer, an educator, and an editor. I work with language all day long, and yet I have fallen flat on my face and repeatedly taste the same snoutful of dirt, always lifting my head, blinking around bewilderingly, wondering how the hell I’ve landed here again.

I reach carefully into the woodstove and put my hands around a tiny, terrified bundle of fluff. I feel it whiffling about between my enclosed fingers. I release it through an open window and say after it, Don’t make the same mistake twice. And then, moments later, there is another bird—surely not the same bird—flapping and frantic, coming down the pipe.

I go outside to look at the chimney.

Ye see, the indifferent installer lectures me on the phone, the idiot birds are damn straight positive they should be making a nest in that there tiny space up top. They think it’s the right thing to do.

All month long I had been positive I was doing the right thing too, but just like the bluebirds, I kept falling down the pipe.

What was it that made both the birds and me fail to see the futility of our actions and the physical and mental harm we were putting ourselves through?

Was it trusting our instinct? Allowing a bypass of brains to follow a simple responsive reflex? Was it relentless and unquestioning doggedness?

Maybe we were all testing Einstein’s famous quote describing insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” But lots of smart people do that. And they do that for their jobs. Because this is how the world actually works. Physicists smash the very same particles together repeatedly—trillions of times over—in a precisely repeated fashion, and guess what? The results are not the same. They are vastly different. Physicists are not insane.

I am not insane.

My bluebirds are not insane.

Perhaps, we all live in a giant collider, where in the world of quantum physics—the land where the bluebirds, the physicists, the particles, and I apparently live—we are playing under the rules that chaotic randomness and wild variability are the norm.

Maybe in this landscape, there is a chance that I will express a string of words that will deliver the exact meaning they are intended to present. Maybe in this realm, the bluebirds will discover that nestbuilding in a springtime chimney is a brilliant decision under certain realities.

In some scientific circles, the argument is not one defending the accusation of insanity, rather the complaint of not having full access to reality.

Suddenly, I am wrenched back to a very shrill state of consciousness where I see my cat, who I SWEAR I’d locked in another room, come dashing across my feet, a squeaking tweetstorm of flapping feathers in her mouth. A chase ensues up the stairs, under the bed, and into a corner, where I finally snatch the poor songbird from the literal jaws of death.

I soothe the tiny creature and take it outside where, waiting for it to catch its breath, I whisper, I’m sorry. For both of us. But this certainly sheds light on one bit of controversial science. Obviously, we did not prove Schrödinger’s alive or dead cat question, but I do feel we’ve cracked the back of existing parallel universes, as I swear that animal is still locked away in my office. So, there’s hope for us yet.

Which is when the bird turns to look me in the eye and say, They call ME crazy, but you’re the one holding out for a Netflix comedy special.

~Shelley

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Don’t forget to check out what’s cookin’ in the Scullery and what we all gossiped about down in the pub. Or check out last month’s post and catch up.

29Dec2018

How to Come to Your Senses and Leave Some Behind

Posted in authors, Calendar, Humor, Resolutions by Shelley Sackier

If I had to choose one sense to give up, what would it be?

December.

Yeah, I know, none of that holds any meaning. Which is par for the course these days because I’m pretty sure I have never been this insanely busy and still comprehensible.

I start out each day finishing yesterday’s work—this again, is rather average and ordinary for many of us. But should it be?

Maybe—and only from the perspective that I’ve never been this incredibly productive—but I’m noticing a pile up of all my minor bucket list activities ignored, dismissed, and pitched off the itinerary entirely because really, who has time to teach quantum physics to their dog?

Except I wanted to.

I also wanted time to balance last month’s checkbook, take a glance at last week’s four thousand emails, and clear out last year’s leftovers from the fridge.

None of these activities are nearly as important as the whole science experiment believing that with enough patience I could turn the genus Canis into a genius Canis, but I feel the surplus of neglect in other areas is starting to rear its ugly head demanding attention.

I know, I know, I can hear the responses to my gripe pouring in right through my computer monitor:

Editor/publicist/agent—We told you this business is a tough one, and maybe not for a pansy such as yourself, but you went ahead with it anyway. Stop your whining and deliver us work.

Parents—None of this would be happening if you’d just finished your degree in opera performance with a minor in third-world country folk music. You could be onstage at the Met right now dressed as a villager from Tajikistan.

Pets—Like we give a damn. Feed us.

Pity party over. I find no solace from any quarter.

Except … from Father Time.

Because everything ends. And December, in particular, is a time for endings. The end of the fiscal cycle, the end of the endless holiday season, the end of twelve months on every calendar. It is the finish line of the long six month journey into darkness. And at the end of darkness comes light. Dawn follows the night, summer springs forth from winter, illumination shortly succeeds most every election.

It is a pattern we’re used to, but maybe not wholly aware of. It’s so far in the background it’s now just white noise.

Eckhart Tolle sends me (and millions of others) an occasional “present moment” reminder. It’s a pithy little sentence that in a gentle non-blaming, non-shaming kind of a way announces you’ve strayed from the path and lost the plot.

And it doesn’t matter what tender, sympathetic words the great philosopher uses as an alert, I always read, then slowly hunch over in my chair, and end up face down on my keyboard, forehead somehow locating the letters U, G, and H, tapping them out repeatedly as my head rolls across the characters.

The work will always be there.

The work doesn’t care about you.

Eckhart Tolle doesn’t necessarily care about you either, but he cares that you care about you.

And that is as bright a light bulb moment as we’re ever going to get from anyone.

Our beginnings, middles, and endings are largely structured by us—in an everyday sort of way, although if you want to start the argument that covers the whole “ultimately, we’re fooling ourselves if we think we have free will,” then the first part of my sentence is a moot point.

And I really hate moot points, unless they work in my favor.

The grand message here is that endings— for this essay in particular—are all around us, and personally, I love endings. I like all loose ends tied up and solved, I’m drawn to the last chapter of a book, the last scene of a movie, the last forkful of pie—okay, that one I might wish were never-ending, but it’s technically still a delicious ending.

But the thing about endings is what follows them.

Beginnings.

A little meta, I get it, but valid nonetheless.

And beginnings are fresh starts. Clean slates ready to be scribbled upon. A whole new pie ready to be forked over. Where some last breath is drawn, some other lungs are filling with air for the first time—and I know that’s a little morbid, but death is morbid.

Except when it isn’t. Like the death of a day. Sunsets are not morbid.

The death of a bad law. Slavery was a very big and bad idea to begin with. Not morbid.

The death of longhand penmanship. I’m pretty sure there are millions of school children across the land who are prepared to throw a parade in honor of that withering demise.

It’s perspective, really.

But you know what does not have an ending? Work.

Work never ends. You finish one pile, and another grows exponentially in that same space. One project overlaps another. Years of effort accumulate and you can no longer remember the pitch you made to start the mission.

To be fair, work is truly important, as it’s what makes many of us feel as if we’re making a difference. But we also crave feeling a difference.

In everyday life.

And the way to make that happen is to experience things that are mostly outside our ordinary sphere of interactions and practices. AKA, that bucket list.

It doesn’t have to be big or grand or cosmically so noteworthy it’s on the 6 o’clock news. It just has to be worthy enough to us.

Because it would be awful to come to your own ending only to realize that there were a million things you wished you could have at least started.

So, I say hop to it. Get on the ball and make some movement forward—toward the middle of something new and exciting and un-work related.

Because the clock is ticking and time is running short. Pretty soon, you won’t be able to smell December anymore.

~Shelley

Happy New Year to you all!

Don’t forget to check out what’s cookin’ in the Scullery and what we all gossiped about down in the pub. Or check out last month’s post and catch up.