Oh dear blog readers…I apologize for the lack of timeliness in my postings—the delays. All I can say is that if you could see my house, you might understand. I give the expression “pillar to post” new meaning, and in fact recall many years ago when first reading about the newly identified disorder labeled “Attention Deficit Disorder,” feeling an enormous rush of relief, as in oh that’s what’s wrong with me!! I thank you for your patience, and humbly submit the following:

I was in my garage a few weeks ago and stumbled across (probably literally, considering the state of my garage) a stack of books. Not remembering the purpose of the stack—for giving away? for keeping?—I took a closer look. Ah…I could see the purpose of the stack—all books with a more or less metaphysical theme I had deemed worthy of hanging on to. And as the stack most likely had been made some years ago in a frenzy of organizing that must have petered out, I realized when looking through them that some of the books that had made the cut back then I no longer found so interesting. Perhaps they were just too much—too out there, as in the ramblings of some mystic in the throes of some heightened experience, etc., or detailed research on thought transmission or something. Which made me think about the fact that one person’s enticing rabbit hole to go down is another person’s cause for a smirk and a roll of the eyes. When considering the continuum of people ranging from those who live life believing that what you see and bump up against is all there is to reality, to those who sense that there’s infinitely more to this setup we call life, I’m probably more on the “out there” side, but not, I would say, extremely so. I am and always have been drawn to the mystery underlying life—that which science cannot yet explain. And yet I have definitely smirked and rolled my eyes, at least to myself, at some of the books, talks, workshops, etc. I’ve experienced over the years in my personal quest to unravel the big mystery. Call me the Curious While Healthily Skeptical Explorer.

One of the books that made the second cut—that I decided, again, to keep—was Shirley MacLaine’s Out on a Limb, which details her personal exploration and embracing of concepts such as reincarnation, past lives, and other topics. The title of the book came from the expression that “to get to the fruit of the tree you have to go out on a limb,” alluding to the inherent risk in seeking that which is of true value in life. The book was mildewed and a little funky smelling, but I had a memory of having read it before and finding it very interesting, partly because the writer was someone who was familiar from her work as a movie star, and so the revelations had the added twist of cool settings (Malibu! London!) as well as characters who were from the writer’s real life, although with names changed to protect their identities, so you could try to guess who they might actually be. One of the frustrations Ms. MacLaine expressed throughout the book was that of finding that some of her friends either thought she was loony and worried that if word got out about her proclivities her career would suffer, or simply were not interested because they had more important (as in, concrete reality) things to do. On the other hand, she had friends who were portrayed in the book as exercising great patience with her as she tentatively explored terrain which they had moved way, way beyond.

So when you consider the enormity of the range of beliefs among our population—from down to (if not buried deeply in) earth to just barely tethered to earth by the most gossamer line a couple million miles long, it’s no wonder that we have the cacophony of discordance and palpable tension of polarity stretched to its limits in these times leading up to the Presidential election. Some of us are still grinding around in the bottom of Maslow’s Pyramid, trying to secure our basic needs, and others of us are surveying the view from the very top where the air is thin—healthily self-actualized and wondering where to jet off to for a change of scenery or what noble cause to support while also doing next year’s taxes a favor. Somehow all of our connecting and crossing and opposing thoughts and feelings and intentions and energies will coalesce into a decision this November. I try to remind myself that we’re all in different places in terms of how we see ourselves, how we see our communities and the challenges in them, how we see the world, and therefore how we see these two candidates vying to be our leader. Some of us are willing and able to go out on a limb, and others of us hug the trunk—for a myriad of reasons. We are where we are, and the view is different depending on where that is.