Skip to main content

From Nothing

I’ve been following the news like everyone. The King of Pop is dead. The Dream Angel for boys my age is gone too. The moonwalk is gone. The one piece bathing suit fantasy too. What is it when icons die? How do we cope? Where do we file that info? When a god dies, the demi-gods are filled with angst and fear. The common folk weep when their idol perishes; when great lights are blown out. It doesn’t matter if those lights were freaky, we still are drawn to them, mere moths to their brilliant celebrity…

So I’ve been watching Bodhi, my two year old. He is magnificently filled with so much life. He not only is growing fast, but absorbing everything and learning at an accelerated rate too. He is getting to be himself – a little bundle of personality. He is beginning to believe his dream. I love it. But sometimes I look at him and realize he came from nothing.

A sperm on its own is unable to create. An egg by itself cannot produce Life. Each depends on the other to merge and unify and begin the process of Creation. But really from nothing comes something. And how much does that something develop into a person, a personality? I see that with Bo – he is becoming a personality. It is beautiful to watch this process, but I also wonder at what point does the personality take on a life of its own? When does it just find its place in the world? Or does it need to continuously seek attention, constantly reinventing itself? When can talent or looks be enough? Or do we as mere mortals project our yearnings onto our “stars”, those “exceptional beings” and ask more of them to satisfy our own longings?

I mean all of us originally came from nothing. Are any of us greater or more talented or prettier or smarter than anyone else? Sure if you believe that. But that doesn’t change the fact that we all came forth from Life and eventually in death, return to Life.

And that my dear friend makes us all the same.

No?

Long live the King of Pop. Long live our favorite Angel. But please don’t forget where we all came from…

J

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Life: Italian Style

This morning I woke up feeling just like I have the entire past month. Dog tired (even after eight hours sleep) and lacking the morning fire I’m so accustomed to. I could feel my frustration build as I mentally scrolled through all that I have to do today. It got even worse when I visited a couple of projects we have going and saw things either not moving fast enough (according to me) or done the way I wanted (again, according to me). Ahhhh. Yet again another beautiful day off to an ugly start. I mean obviously all the ugliness is inside of me as the rest of the world is clearly oblivious to my inner turmoil. That’s cool. So I stopped by the Atomic Café for my morning cappuccino (yeah, yeah, I got it rough huh?) which Andrew so generously gave to me no charge. That was the beginning of a subtle shift inside me. Mellissa was bopping around behind the cash register and I could feel the energy just crackling off of her as she greeted customers as if each one was her favorite pers...
3 comments
Read more

Waking Up with the What Ifs

Apparently last night I had been dreaming of a life I left behind 11 years ago.  Snippets of memory like peering through a gauzy veil, and scenes vaguely reminiscent of my life as a builder in a small coastal town north of Boston. I woke up with the What Ifs. You know how dreams are: like your eyes can’t completely focus, situations that are seemingly disconnected but maybe not, faces you know but can’t place, yet the feeling in the dream is quite real. I was back in Old Town and trying to figure out why the house I was in was unfinished. There was a meeting to be had there, but it was just me. I walked down a cobbled street to what I figured to be the office of the architect and it was a room of all glass and about 10 people seated around a glass table. I tried to get the attention of the man who was the architect on this particular job without disrupting the meeting. He looked like a friend who wasn’t an architect but a realtor and a neighbor.  I wondered how he switched care...
4 comments
Read more

Renovation Anyone?

I had an unusual dream the other night. It was about a client who was upset that she had changed the design of her project and felt like she had made a mistake in doing so. Now the project was built, and what was she to do? We were talking over the phone and I could tell she was struggling to get her words out without getting emotional. I thought this a little odd but didn’t have any real judgment about it – I just listened. As she spoke she got more and more upset and she began to cry. Finally I said what to me seemed like the obvious. I said that she really didn’t have to get so distraught, there was nothing a sawzall and a nail gun couldn’t fix. And you know what? In that moment I said that with 100% conviction. Like talking to someone who was sad it was dark in their room and me saying to them then just turn on the light. She seemed to breathe a sigh of relief after that and then the dream ended. I mentioned the dream to Meg the next morning and she laughed. Meg in her l...
Post a Comment
Read more