Out-boxed

"Look, John," she told me, there in her office, on that muggy and rainy afternoon in Florida. "You live inside your head."

Then, I wasn't sure what she meant.

From the window, the palm fronds were waving in the summer storm. The tropical rain falling in a typical Florida torrent. Dark, low skies lurking just over the Live Oaks; the rain blurring everything like a dense fog.

The summer storms always transformed Florida, they changed it, sometimes into a place that was more like Jurassic Park. Like Neverland. Like a Universal Studio set. For me, it was this transformation that felt like escapism. It compelled imagination.

Through the rain and the sound, through the furious otherness, one could imagine sailing on The Ghost, as Humphrey van Weyden in Sea Wolf, toward Pitcairn Island. Or on Bligh's Bounty, at the helm, fighting the furies of the ocean, looking for the whale.

For this I knew - I liked the rain better than the sun.

"John," she advised, "you can't stay in there forever. I want you to meet people, maybe take some chances." She had told me this before, in other ways, that I couldn't be content to push feelings and memories into the background; where they could become lost and harmless and impotent.



The other night, I visited friends in the city, in their eclectic urban condominium. I hadn't seen them in over a year.  Their home was astonishingly filled with the collectibles of a museum. Everywhere, there were tributes; to literature, film, architecture, and history. I could have looked through their shelves and walls for hours.

In the kitchen, on their deep charcoal wall, was a watercolor painting of a Polar Bear. My friend swept her arm out across the wall and cheerfully said, "And doesn't this look so wonderful here?"

At first, I didn't recognize or remember it. But I had painted it and gifted it to them some years before. It was puzzling. It had somehow fallen into the outbox of my mind.

Just like so many other things.

She was right - I was living in my mind. And it was masterful at protecting me, hiding things from me. Sorting and filing and filtering.

I eventually came to understand that the other side of perception and sensitivity - of tuning into music and feelings, of knowledge and words and the metaphysical self - was a vulnerability.  And to me, it's still dangerous.

But I'm trying. When I looked at the Polar Bear, my friend's beaming smile told me that it was OK to remember.

And that's one of the reasons I write these posts. I need to start keeping some of the sweetness and the music from getting pushed into the outbox with everything else.

I can't so easily forget the Polar Bear, lost to Pitcairn Island.

Maybe I need to quit wishing for rain every day.