Part Twenty-Seven

Gems of Wisdom

Joan Ann Lansberry

January 31, 1998

I often think of that quote my favorite art instructer told her beginning art students. Ms. Sharlene Kassiday said HER teacher had told her when she was just beginning, as well. "To be a great artist, you must suffer." A similar adage is of the oyster who only produces a pearl because of the irritation it receives from a grain of sand.

It's not the IRRITATION of suffering that is the catalyst within some people. It is the desperate need to PROVE themselves bigger than what vexes them which goads them on towards their lofty goals.

February 1, 1998

Visions, life, death, misery, and the "whole nine yards":

An advertisement came to the house the other day, for a "women's health newsletter" which made females sound as though an alien species the medical establishment have hardly bothered to study. This is to incite feminist anger. I'm angry, but not because of what they think. I DON"T like being made to feel like an alien species. I prefer a non-gender specific philosophy that values each human as a unique individual. I agree the medical establishment is in need of improvement. They need to discover what makes us ALL different. There is no one solution that works for all. We all react wildly different to medicines. What works for someone just fine, will send another into an agony of allergic reaction. Gender variance is just but one tiny speck of the whole human variance spectrum.

This newsletter also promotes the belief that our beliefs can make us sick. My mother espouses this. She thinks people cause their own illnesses. "Blaming the victim", says I. Yet I agree with her in thinking my Dad willed himself to die of lung cancer because he wasn't happy. Easy for the living and relatively healthy to say. So judging of others, perhaps I should apply this to myself, and explore this philosophy.

The ad featured a chart which co-related various illness to different emotional needs. This would appeal to the masses, for we all can find emotional hunger within us. "Carpal Tunnel Syndrome" having been tested for and dismissed, I could have "tendinitis" or the beginnings of "arthritis." The chart said of arthritis that the sufferer felt "unloved" or felt "resentment". Well, the "unloved" part certainly didn't apply. I feel well secure there. "Resentment?", I queried myself. "I don't know..." Finding scant anything of THAT on the emotional horizon, I decided to plunge into my inner depths by having the conscious dream. I know better than anyone else what is within me. I let images come to me unbidden. Then afterwards I interpret them.

Deep orange-red fills the sky. An angry orange-red sea is underneath me. I have only a rickety wooden boat and canoe paddles to navigate this lake of fire. The Statue of Liberty stands observing on one islet, but there is no place for a boat to harbor there. "Muse, Brigit, Magna Mater" is only quietly watching. I try to paddle, but it hurts me so. Each stroke makes my wrists, elbows and shoulders ache excruciatingly so. I look in all four directions. What is the point of paddling? There is no land anywhere! Not one leaf of green to relieve this endless seascape. A sense of crushing futility. I look back at "Lady Liberty", but she has only the look of a teacher, curious to see if her student will get the lesson. I am SO frustrated. Nothing I do can get me anywhere! I give up, and lay down in the boat. It feels strangely good. In fact the hot sea's warmth, felt through the bed of boat, feels amazingly good. So comforting to all my achy joints, I drift off, dreamily. I drift back to awareness to find I am laying on my own bed, safe and secure.

Inner "teacher" seems to be saying that the attitude of "fighting" so hard will only get in my way! Strife will never bring any solution, peaceful or otherwise. That is not in the nature of "proving oneself bigger than a problem", which is not letting the problem break your spirit, but motivating you to reach beyond it.

If I have 'resentment', it is because there is never enough time to do all the things I want to do. The world seems to be getting faster and faster, while I am caught in "slow-motion". THIS is frustrating to me. Furiously 'paddling' against the brevity of time is also futile. There is an answer in the flow if I listen.

I doubt I gave myself arthritis because I resent never having enough time to do all I want! Preposterous! Maybe my Dad didn't will himself to die, either. He might not have been exceedingly happy, but just possibly he wasn't ready to throw in the towel. It's too easy to come up with all these pat, judgmental answers for life's mysterious problems.

later this evening...

"The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe..."

Has Turned up Full Handed Again! Tonight we watched Lily Tomlin's fantastic performances . . .I want to make that plural, she played all the characters in this movie, and did them so well, it seemed as though several people played the parts. From her first words, my eyes and ears were riveted to the screen. The play by Jane Wagner, upon which this movie is based, won a Tony Award in 1986.

I kept scribbling down quotes from the movie. Can you imagine that, a MOVIE that inspires you to TAKE NOTES? If they are as tasty as these, you just might:

All my life I wanted to BE SOMEBODY. Now that I'm older, I realize I should have been more specific.

I have delusions of grandeur, and now I feel so much better about myself!

He listened with an intensity others only have when talking...

The problem with evolution is that there should have been survival of the WITTIEST, instead of survival of the fittest. Then those who didn't make it could at least die laughing.

We laughed a lot tonight. Interspersed with the laughing were some real gems of wisdom. She speaks of the wonder in the universe as "Awe - Infinitum." She made me remember my own moments of goose-bumply awe. Quite often, when I was a kid, I'd feel this spine - tingling rush come over me: "Wow! I'm ALIVE! I'm not just dreaming that I'm alive, like when I try to recall a dream I've had the night before, and it's all hazy. These vivid sensations rushing through me are real. I exist. I'm ALIVE!" Back then, the intensity of it would almost scare me.

Now I find it exhilaratingly precious. At thirty-nine, I still have moments such as this. Just the other night, I got up from sleep to go to the bathroom. As I carefully made my way there, trying not to stumble into my honeys' overhanging feet and hurt myself on sharp dresser corners, this unexpected RUSH comes over me. I embrace it, thrilled to not be too old for such youthful joy. A welling-up of love for myself comes up through me and over me. It's good to meet yourself like that.

February 3, 1998

A writer's resource website a friend of ours has set up has inspired me to do an article encouraging more people to write. If I can encourage the art of writing, it may do more good than I can possibly imagine.

February 4, 1998

The search for signs of intelligent life has been surprising me quite often lately. Fitz, Arizona Daily Star's editorial cartoonist, has artfully mastered some refreshing zingers at the high-mucky mucks of politics. Other columnists for that paper, such as Bonnie Henry, have provoked unexpected chuckles. A mainstream (!) singer, Celine Dion, has awed me with My Heart Will Go On, the love theme from the movie Titanic. This lush song has me in thrall. It speaks of how love transcends time and place. "Near, far, wherever you are, I believe that the heart does go on. . ." I believe that. I play this song over and over. I know "there is some love that will not go away" I believe that even after we shuffle off this mortal coil, our love will not go away. Whether or not our souls survive and go on to another corporeal body, all the love which we have engendered while we are alive radiates outwards in ever-spiraling circles of infinity. I believe that. I can touch with fingers of faith our love reverberating itself into some future shore and back. The glow in Laura's, Julia's and my eyes for each other will reflect that far.

Other songs on her album Let's Talk About Love thrill me as well. In the song for which the album is named, she sings of how no matter who we are, the experience of love is the same.

There are people around the world - different faces different names But there's one true emotion that reminds me we're the same... Let's talk about love . . . (Bryan Adams, Jean-Jacques Goldman, Elliott Kennedy)

It doesn't matter who we are, that experience of love is the same. People like to make barriers, like to say someone else's love couldn't be like theirs. But any barrier they try to erect is false. There are no dialects in the language of the heart. There is nothing that can destroy its pure communication. People may try. But their evil won't succeed. For love is stronger than that. Those ever-reverberating circles of love just go on and on. Call me a hopeless romantic, but this fire feeds my soul.

in the early early morning. . .

I've been finding more web - jewels. A fascinating site called PYROWORDS has created an interactive poetry page. Anyone may start a poem, or add to an existing one. The imagery of this result was spell-binding:

The February sun is a prophet of shadows and strengthening light. The fickle moon is the most distant fortune teller's crystal ball. But here, below, the earth shoulders deep to slumber until equinox, no less, and merely dreams in shimmering gold and sapphire blue, turning in restless sleep towards the veiled warmth of closed eyelid red. by "hedda" and "cms", who added lines three and four, earthing the poem to the present!

February 7, 1998

Tucson has rock show fever! Yes, it's that season. Every year, in the first two weeks of February, gem and mineral dealers from all over the world come to Tucson to sell and trade wares. It's a rockhound's paradise. You can find pretty rocks for any budget, from fifty cents to five hundred thousand dollars. I have enjoyed these shows for years now. My acquisitions now fill many shelves. Some are even hid away, because there is no room to display them.

But my most favorite rock is one I acquired early in my history of collecting. One fall weekend perhaps eight years ago, Laura surprised me with a spontaneous trip into Bisbee. We'd never seen the old miner's town, now a small haven for artist types. All the old buildings are charmingly nestled within the mountains. This particular weekend Bisbee was hosting a gem and mineral show. What fortunate luck, as this was a new hobby I was only cautiously exploring. My acquisitions then never were more than five dollars worth, if that. Most of the dealers were in the large basement of one of the buildings.

But some had their tables in a nearby parking lot. One of those dealers had a quartz specimen, about two inches by two inches square, and a inch and a half high. It seemed to have the world in it, like the view you get when flying over the earth. Dark green mossy areas looked like forests seen from above. I was fascinated by it. The dealer said, "Everybody keeps picking up that stone and looking at it. Nobody buys it though." "How much does it cost?," I timidly asked. "Twelve dollars. It cost more than that just to polish it!," he replied. It was so very well polished. That's what made it so easy to see that green forest within it. But TWELVE dollars! I couldn't spend that much. Laura encouraged me to buy it. "Are you sure? That's a LOT of money!" She, by this point, insisted I buy it. I was thrilled. It would be the cornerstone of my collection. And it still is. I have since bought rocks that cost quite a bit more than that rock did. But none hold the warmth this particular piece of mineral has. For every time I look at this rock, I remember that special day we had in Bisbee.