01-16-2014 Newsletter

The drug is instant, entering through my lungs and igniting my blood.  There is no street name for it, no generic Rx, and yet in any dose oxygen is the most powerful and transformative inhalant on our planet.  I marvel that the chill crystal air can taste like fire, but it does.  When you suck it in on the fly because you have absolutely no physical reserves left, it does.  And just now, mile upon mile of swift transits over nightland trails on skinny skis is purging my strength and leaving a sweet ache in more muscles than I knew I had.

For all the blur and throb, the snowscapes are remarkably vivid.  In fact, a heightened sense of awareness pierces the darkness in ways that re-wire my senses.  Stars scream in the midnight vault of the universe as my red Cheetah skis chatter madly over the crust.  Silhouettes swipe at my passing and shadows pursue.  I soar into sweeps that end in a pale blue glide across a wetlands.  And stop.  Because it is impossible that this is not a destination.  I sense the reference point it will give my future understandings – a perspective, a moment in time, a crossroads of the cosmos.  Legions of life under reeds and in trees inhale with apprehension.  Am I friend or foe?  They are the jury, and I enter a plea of stillness under the scrutiny of a baleful moon.  Silence and majesty deliberate the verdict.  When the collective of fight-or-flight reflexes realize I have no territorial imperative, no predatory appetite, I am acquitted.  Peace and serenity are restored.  Hollow heavens rear up all around us, spilling jubilant luminescence over my path.  Magic!

You see how it is.  I’m sitting here now in a warm room telling you this, and it’s as if it never happened.  So I have to go back to make sure.  Because remembering magic is never enough.  You have to make a little happen each day.  Fortunately I live in a place and in a way where that’s possible.  Wishing you the same for 2014, my friends.  Make yourself some magic.

Follow-up correspondence since my last Q&A column has me kicking off the new year with another one over on StorytellersUnplugged.  Reading what you share makes me feel like I’m living dozens of lives.  How valuable to a writer and a person who just wants to understand what life is all about, thank you very much.  Wish I could post all your input – the writer stuff, the off-the-wall funnies, the challenging questions, and especially things about relationships.  Relationships continue to dominate your emails.  A sample from this month’s column:

Q [Bridgeport, CT]: You have some interesting takes on relationships, but to me it's pretty simple.  When a woman loses her looks her marriage grows cold.  Why are men so superficial?

A: What is beautiful?  So many women feel bad about themselves – especially how they look – but maybe a lot of that is needless.  Speaking as a male I can tell you that what registers with the right spouse – what bonds you and locks in your image – isn’t his daily assessment of your physical allure.  It’s his knowledge that you chose him to give it to.  Doesn’t matter what your superficial marketplace value once was.  Whatever your range of choices among men at that stage of your life, you passed them up and made him your soulmate – sole mate.  That decision never ages.  It was the gift of the total you and, yes, your physical prime, or at least the maximum prime at the time you met.  Having confidence in the mutual spark of intuitive passion that was there in the beginning is itself attractive and affirming.  Sometimes women lose sight of that or underestimate its lasting impact on their mate.  Now I know, judging from my email, that a lot of women feel as you must have before you wrote off the male gender, that they’ve never picked the “right” man.  Maybe that’s so in our culture of shallowness and divorce, but that’s an entirely different subject and not a reason to gulp down poison.  If you want to keep your dreams alive, value the total man as you value the total you.

The whole Q&A may be read here: http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2014/01/15/thomas-sullivan-from-knights-in-armor-to-nights-in-amour/#respond

Photos at the end of this newsletter include a healthy mix of places I’ve been along with those Blast-from-the-Past shots you seem to like: #1-3 hiking and skiing in Idaho; #4-5 an all-day party I went to last month; #6 my girl child Colleen; #7 Sully and Sully Jr; #8 our family in another millennium on a car trip to upper Michigan; #9 a mission trip to the Dominican; #10-11 me in Lathrup Village; #12 one-eyed Tess gnawing my Christmas present to her.

You can’t change the past.  And that’s a good thing.  The past, after all, informs the present and the future, both of which you can change.  So, hello, 2014, and Happy New Year, everyone!  New year, new moon, but still 365 days & nights flowing down like sand – like dreams – in an hourglass from the glittering glass globe of our past to the slowly filling showcase of our present.  It isn’t gravity that propels dreams in an hourglass, however.  It is by force of will that we transfer our hopes into reality.  If I know nothing else, I know how to preserve the best of the past.  Maybe that’s just my nature, as facets of my life keep reminding me.  I can still wear clothes I wore in high school, my bedroom hasn’t changed in seven years, and my energy and physical vitals never seem to vary nor require medications. 

It’s a good marriage – this combination of past and present.  Not so very different from how I once imagined I would live.  I like the role of memories.  Makes the calendar, the hourglass and the crystal ball irrelevant.  A good fit with what I wrote earlier about making a little magic each day.  Memories are like that.  Summoned on instinct, savored in the moment, recalled without debt.  It takes very little from the present to refresh if not reinforce that.  Sometimes life gets it right.
Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

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