Friday Night at 8: To Receive

You can’t pour anything into a vessel that’s already full, so there’s all sorts of fancy words to talk about emptying it first and cleaning it out, purification, purging, catharsis, all that.  Psychological terms, spiritual terms.

I remember once hearing about a spiritual practice that purified a person, emptied them of all the negative feelings and thoughts and attachments, and I remarked “but then there would be nothing left!”  Yeah, scary thought.  Nothing.

New moon tonight, and emptiness is on my mind.  Empty of thoughts and decisions and opinions.  Empty of expectations and desires and demands.  The moon waxes and the moon wanes, eternal cycles of emptiness and fullness.

Fear can fill the human spirit during times of great change and makes action into panic stricken yelling and dashing about, “save me!”  “Save me!”  “Somebody DO something!”

Elton John – “Grey Seal,” 1974 (courtesy of Regdwight23 from YouTube)

My nephew is now a doctor.  In his college application “essay” he wrote about a time when his grandfather (my father) had a seizure.  He was alone with my dad at the time, and he panicked … ended up running right into the screen door, took twice as long to do what needed to be done, and he said in the essay he learned a big lesson that day.  (Oh, and my father did survive the experience.)

I remember once, I was at work in the first law firm job I had when I moved to New York City.  We had just made the transition from the old mag-card memory typewriters to stand-alone WANG word processors.

One day as we were getting out a rush job, a big pile of documents for some important litigation, our new computers decided to have a glitch party.

As an avid reader of science fiction, I was ecstatic when we got computers.  I felt I was on the bridge (or sometimes in the engine room) on a Star Trek starship and when problems arose, I was Scotty.

There was another secretary at the firm, Yvonne, who had a very different and fearful response to the change-over to computers.  It is scary to change, because one has to let go of one skill, or emotion, or plan, and there’s that gap before one feels competent in the new situation.

When the glitches occurred, Yvonne panicked.  I didn’t notice it at the time.  As I was enjoying the chaos and working on the problem, Yvonne came up to me and almost screamed, “Why are you so calm!  It isn’t right!”  She was really mad.  I didn’t quite know what to say, being only in my 20s at the time, so I didn’t say much, just looked at her like she was nuts.

Of course I’ve been on the other end of that scenario as well.  My panic attacks are legendary.  Not trying to give any impression of steely courage here.  I actually made my dad stop an amusement park ride when I was around 6 or 7, because I panicked at being tilted upside down.  And don’t even start with me about roller-coasters!

Sometimes even fear and panic can be comforting compared to emptiness, that gap between letting go of the old and embracing the new.  That split second where we are nowhere at all, having let go of our old ways but not yet firmly on the new way.

New moon.  Emptiness is on my mind.

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Hot days in the Baked Apple, fashionable young women wearing sleeveless sheaths as they enter the subway train or walk on the midtown streets.  And they’re all barefoot wearing flip-flops, with giant handbags (still!) and water bottles or iced coffee in plastic cups and the young men watch the women but it’s too hot to move very quickly, the hot dog vendors and gyro makers and crepe/empanada vendors are all out in the broiling sun, I get fruit shakes on 52nd Street, banana, mango, strawberry, today it was too hot during lunch hour and five people were ahead of me, so I said hell with it and dashed across the street to find some shade in the pedestrian area beneath skyscraper building.

Subways are sweltering hot, there’s a Q train that stops across the platform as I’m waiting for the N or the W, I sometimes wave my arm into the cold air of the car, sometimes walk into the train but always terrified the doors will close on me and I’ll end up going in the opposite direction.  Hasn’t ever happened but there’s no need to be careless.

Rockefeller Center has Farmer’s Market but I am always too lazy to walk over there when it’s this hot outside.  My fellow secretary always comes back with wonderful peaches or plums and usually some nice green plant.

Just a little NYC weather report on this hot August new moon night.

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And for a little lagniappe, 1935, Mae West, “Now I’m A Lady” (courtesy of ASOEBTrainer on YouTube):

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Have a groovalicious weekend.