Energy

I have it today, for some inexplicable reason that is probably explicable if I cared to examine it properly.

When I was quite young, maybe nine years old and just learning about adult behaviors such as Getting Drunk and High, I marveled that anyone had to do anything special to feel good.  Back then I could lay on the couch, read a book for half an hour, then tip my head back so my eyes, closed, pointed toward the ceiling.

In this position, face supine, my head sinking into a cushion, I could feel something pleasant pooling at the back of my head — a combination of images, words, and feelings that felt like limitless pleasure and possibility.  It was a kind of optimistic energy, a glowing that radiated out and through the rest of my body, if I would only care to focus on it, allow it to penetrate my consciousness and fill me.

Energy, I realized then, and still believe today, powers everything.  Without it, we are depressed, hopeless, lost.

I haven’t felt that kind of glow in a long time but today it’s with me.  I want to do things — get the fake Christmas tree out of the basement and assemble it before J gets home, put the stockings up, clean the kitchen while listening to the new Peter Gabriel album I/O, take apart my record player and fix it, and maybe even write — something for myself, a work of fiction.

Adjacent to the glow I am aware of all the things that can and will snuff this feeling out — a call from my sickly mother, a text from J saying that our one and only blastocyst from the latest round of IVF has failed to completely mature, panicked emails from co-workers calling me in to fix problem X, Y, and Z — but for now, I’m trying to simply ride it, enjoy it, and remember what it’s like to be nine again.

I’m going to race out ahead of everything else today and do something for myself:  Go into the O’Neil library where I work and check out A Handbook on Witches and race home to read it for an hour before noon.  It was written in 1967 by Gillian Tindall.  She researched and documented accounts of the occult and supernatural — events attributed to witches and warlocks and users of magiks.  Tindall is a skeptic — she wrote the book in the style of a journalist and historian, from what I understand, and compiles theories of origin for the witch mythos.  It’s a hard to find book and I was surprised to find a Catholic school would have such literature present.  Maybe I shouldn’t be shocked, being that religious types seemed to lead calls for burnings and hangings and pointings-of-fingers during the Salem Witch Trial days of yore.

My hope is that I enjoy the book.  My hope beyond hope is that it inspires me to do more for myself — more creatively.  I usually work so tirelessly in support of J, my job, my house, and our families, that it wears me down and snuffs out any bit of inspiration or energy that might have been present in the morning when, even in middle age as I am now firmly in the midst, I still believe we all wake up to before the obligations of the day cover us once more.