Memories are not memorials. There is magic in every moment of living, and time has nothing to do with it. You can summon back the meaningful and the worthy parts of your life, because if they had an impact on you – if they changed you – they became a part of you. You are different – better – because of them. They are part of your DNA, your soul, your heart, your mind, and you cannot shed them without shrinking to what you were before they enhanced your life. Being aware of this is an added bonus. If you know specifically when you changed, and why, it is easy to cherish and revisit those memories. You can re-live them each day if you maintain the bridges from yesterday, brightly painted with the colors of now and your own newness. Call it keeping faith with who you are. Magic.
I’ve filled my life with that. It keeps me centered. Sort of like a jigsaw puzzle where each piece is unique, but when you get enough of them properly linked they flow into a single picture. The puzzle I cannot solve, though, is why people sometimes throw away worthy pieces of themselves. Is it fear that if they try to grow, they might fail? To my mind, the only time we are actually living is when we are motivated by something positive. Subtract defense mode from growth mode and that’s your actual lifespan – the amount of your life you are truly living. If you suppress aspects of yourself, allowing emotional swings to annihilate moments of truth, like a clock pendulum sweeping away each second before declaring the next, you accumulate nothing but lost time.
Whenever I see that kind of self-abandonment, I see a misguided act of will. If you have enough self-discipline, you may be able to force yourself into a mold, but acts of will that suppress the passion of the heart and bypass the courage of the soul are exercises in stagnation. Heart/mind/soul are a triumvirate. Life is complex and full of dead ends. If you want to find the secret gates and sanctuaries to your true potential, search with courage, passion and insight. Hmmm…sounds like Dorothy & her trio on the way to Oz.
Well, March IS a yellow brick road for me. Like winter leading to spring. I meet a special magic in March and make it “new and now” again. And then I go to Idaho – or at least I have for the last couple of years – for some more adventures with lifelong friend Bruce Norvell & his Wonder Dog Ziggy.
Hit the following link, if you can stand more purple prose
and black-and-white thoughts from me. My
StorytellersUnplugged column is kinda hard to describe, so I’ll just give you
the title. CROSS ALL BORDERS can be read
here: http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2013/03/15/thomas-sullivan-cross-all-borders/#respond
True magic is a blend of meaningful insights of reality
outside yourself and what you keep faith with inside. Photos this month try to capture that. #1-5
are shots of a fav skinny ski sanctuary at Elm Creek. #6-7 is moi
on some snowswept savannah, wearing sunglasses and a “cougar light” at the same
time on account of the moon would be miffed if I spent all my time with the
sun. And I’d sooner baptize a cat than
offend the moon. Photos #8-10 – well, I’ll
quote a FB post I made to explain them: “Ever since reading the Pecos Bill stories as a lil
pfeffer I’ve wanted to rig a real prairie schooner – Conestoga wagon with a
sail soaring across wind-swept prairies. Crust skiing today on glazed open
fields with the wind at my back, I BECAME a prairie schooner! The tracks in the
photo are from 2 days ago when my Red Cheetahs and snowshoes punched through
the crust. No tracks since then…unless you count contrails from glorious Mach 5
skiing! There are miles of frictionless rolling hills like that, and no one
else out there past the barricade with the sign that says, ‘There be dragons.’” #11-12 are this month’s Blast from the Past
photos. Yeah, I made it to age 2 still
looking like I had possibilities. I
believe my right hand is actually resting on our magnificent Irish Setter (so
imagine he’s there as a tribute to St. Pat’s Day). The last picture is outside Greta Garbo’s
casita in LaQuinta, CA, where soul bro Glenn Frey put my lad and me up for his
50th birthday bash – a most memorable three-day happening with magic
(there was an actual magician going table to table at one of the fiestas) and
music. A little surreal with luminaries
like Tom Hanks in attendance, but the topper was when the lad’s boyhood hero
Don Johnson tripped over him.
My son Sean (aka Shane, The Boy, the lad et al) has the most
disjointed, if thorough, orientation to music.
I tried to explain it on a Facebook post, so I’ll use that link
here. Hit CTRL+Click on my name in the
next paragraph to go there, though you’ll have to scroll down to March 5 and
the exquisite video of Olivia Newton-John’s “If You Love Me, Let Me Know”:
Thomas Sullivan Medleys of song frags “play” large for me. My lad grew up hearing me segue from one tune to another of wildly different songs/lyrics, and I never recognized it till I realized he has an incredible range of songs from any era you could name (he became Best Buys music manager at one time on the strength of that). Now he comes over to chill, and it’s part of the ritual – me singing at the stove making his fav meal, still leaping from one scrap of song to the next. It’s our home thing, you know?
Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
You can see all my books in any
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