37/?? - Liminal Reality

Everything is the same only completely different.

Tarot Card of the Day: The Magician

I am in transition. I am currently living in my past, present, and future all at the same time. I am where I was, where I am and where I will be. None of this is in order. None of this is sequential. I orbit my life and lived reality with speed that is so fast it feels slow. My body shows me the signs of the speed. And yet it simultaneously mocks these signs with a reactiveness that takes me back to the very beginning. And truth be told there is no beginning. At least not one that I can be sure about. For the stories change. The memories morph. Even the images do not appear as they once did. For what am I seeing in the image now is not what I saw before. And yet it is exactly what I saw. This makes no sense. None of it makes any sense! Both the comfort and the discomfort are palpable. My mouth utters the phrase “I am scared.” compulsively throughout the day. I don’t know how to rest. How do I relax?! My stomach holds a rebellion and I hurl and then hurl again. My daughter looks at me and says your eye is bleeding! My eye is bleeding! And this is not a big deal. It looks worse than it is. It will go away in one to two weeks. It is caused by the pressure from hurling last night. I am old. I am young. No I am old. Not that old. Not that young. But I am old. Which makes me young. For I am older than my mother and I am younger than my sister and my daughter. There is an arc to life. I have passed the tipping point.

I perhaps crossed this threshold just before the pandemic in 2018 or 2019. I think it was when my dad died. He died just down the hall from where I lay as I type this in bed. It was a Sunday after post church family dinner. I was in Las Vegas (the city of Lost Wages as he called it) at a metal music festival. I had eaten some gummies and was about to see the most intense band in the lineup that day; Indian. My dad once said that in his family there were 7 chiefs and 1 indian. He was the indian. And I got a call from my brother in law as Indian was about to take the stage. He never calls. I let it go to voicemail because it was so loud. I stepped out and the message said to call back as soon as I could. My dad was / had died. Now I am here and my mom is across the hall in their / her bedroom. It is 8 years later. I am now 50. My daughter is now 20. So much has changed and yet it is all just as it was only completely different.

The physical world is the most linear of all reality. It is the slowest to change without brute force. And yet the change is constant and consistent. You would not know the world is spinning at 795 miles per hour here in Lexington, Kentucky. Did you know the Earth spins at the equator at 1,040 miles per hour and at exactly 0 miles per hour at the North and South Pole! I wonder if a person can feel the difference between the world spinning and not spinning. I doubt it. We are so small we can barely notice anything. And yet it is all happening all the the time. Like the movie title of that film that won best picture at the Oscars in 2023; Everything Everywhere All At Once.

So my stomach spins when I lose my faith and acknowledge that all of my core beliefs are in fact fictional. I hurl from the awareness and the blood vessel in the corner of my left eye can’t take the pressure and decides to explode and I am not even aware!

I get so upset at madness. I disdain the madness in me and in others. I want order. I want predictability and understanding. This is the way of fascism. My body is an aspiring fascist. And yet the madness of my mind saves me once again from the tyranny of the lust of such comfort in predicable familiarity. So I indulge my madness and play with the absurdity of all things all the time. Yes I do trust in science and use it to spring myself into the air of the inevitable as I pretend I can fly while I am simply laying in this bed across the hall from my widowed aging mother and down the hall from the spot where my father died. I am in transition. I am in between. I am so old that I am actually growing younger. I have passed the point of peak sanity and now get to return to the delights of the playful imagination. I get to indulge my madness because I am both old enough and young enough to accept the absurdity of this existence. I yawn and a single tear slides down my cheek. My stomach feels off still and I wonder if I will be able to sleep tonight.

Tomorrow is another day of facing how much things have changed and stayed the same all at the same time. My daughter and I will visit family members I have known my entire life and she will ask them about their experience as an Arab American and what it was like to grow up and be a part of the Dawahare family. I will be with her to facilitate the meetings and to observe. I will pay attention to myself, to her and to them. And hopefully if I am lucky I will catch a glimpse of who I was, who I am and who I am becoming.