Glimmers of Hope

Of the memories I most cherish, one is of a time when my daughter was having her first lesson in painting, in art. We were at a friend’s house, she was just 7, canvas, tripod, the whole 9 yards. She had been inclined to the arts since she was 2 or so. Not like every child is naturally curious and learning through art, but considerably art-oriented. There had been an episode when she was about 3 where she had become frustrated at not being able to draw things accurately, and I had explained to her that everything worth doing took practice, that it took time and dedication to get good at anything. I brought a couple of personal examples into play, asking her if she thought I was OK at this or that (for context, nothing more, and what perspective does a 3 year-old have, right?). And she had understood. I have always tried to reason with her; she has always been a reasonable person, my baby daughter, my child.

My friend, the master, expounded and demonstrated on points of view and sources of light, and how these came into play in art. She was trying her hardest, and it wasn’t coming out like she had imagined it would. Her frustration eventually led to a tantrum. I have learned since before then that my immediate reaction to her tantrums -based on what kind of tantrum – is either to let her vent on her own while remaining nearby, or to pick her up, hold her close, and let her vent while feeling that I am there for her. This time, the tantrum required the latter, and so I lifted her into my arms, held her head over my left shoulder as she cried her frustration out, and I agreed with her that, yeah, it was difficult to do this, and yeah, it was difficult to put into any medium what we see in our mind’s eye… but I also reminded her that it didn’t matter if it didn’t come out perfect or even close to what she wanted, and that I would be proud of her and love her no matter what. Again, I reminded her that this sort of thing would probably look bad for the first few if not many attempts, and I promised her I would try to paint along with her, so she could see just how good she was. The idea cheered her up and she chuckled heartily – a sound I can recall like a recording at will in my mind, a laughter that could only come after crying a certain way.

You know how parents sometimes take it easy with their kids in competitive situations? Yeah, that wasn’t it. I genuinely suck at painting and drawing; couldn’t draw a stick figure faithfully if my life depended on it. The result? Dad’s dumb old self is wasting canvas and paint on attempting a wolf, as that’s my daughter’s choice of subject, while she increasingly paints better and better before my eyes. To wit, the art in this piece is the painting that resulted from the session.

She painted that. The moment she let loose. The moment that she stopped caring about any expectations, her own included, she simply gave herself to it, and she created this.

My favorite memory, bittersweet as it is because it involved her crying, is holding her, going to her aid when she was breaking down and just being there to help her stand back up on her own two legs and her own wonderfully strong soul.

But if you you ask anyone, they might look at the result: the painting. It is an impressing piece of work, and when people realize it was painted by a child, it becomes even more noteworthy. The painting is owned by one of her grandmothers, and that’s good and well. I cared not for the result in any covetous way, and where it ends up, while my daughter lives, is of no meaning to me. What I own is what is truly wonderful: the memory of holding her – every human sense involved – and knowing that the little person that she is now, growing ever-taller, ever-stronger, and ever-wiser, has that strength in part because I was granted the vision to see the moments key to build that up. The raw material was there, as it is with any child, and I was happy to help that plant grow into the mighty tree-in-making that currently reaches up to the sky.

The Ephemeral

 

 

Night terrors are something the media somehow manages to trivialize despite its seemingly poignant portrayal thereof. It is something that seems so commonplace, so ordinary, so pedestrian. You might swear you know someone – or someone who *knows* someone who has them. But you probably don’t. Not really.

Trauma is a common thing, however. And Trauma, or so I am told, is the begetter of night terrors.

There are many apparent causes for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, for short. Acronyms have a funny way of trivializing what they stand for, as well. It’s possibly the media’s fault too, right?

PTSD. Often linked to former military who have served and seen action in the front lines of one meaningless war or another. They are all meaningless, wars.

But it isn’t just combat that can lead to the affliction. The crux of it, the root cause, is in the name itself. By strict semantic definition, it is a condition that comes about for those who have survived particularly stressful situations. It is what comes after. It is the reward. Hooray.

I have night terrors. I often wake up in the wee hours of the night, pulse racing, one side of my body or another tingling, sharp pains on my left shoulder, left arm, neck, and left side of my jaw. The sensation of cold sweat permeating the entirety of my skin. My mind races for an explanation, for a semblance of logic and reason amidst the oneiric imagery that fills the darkness of my room.

It now takes me a handful of minutes to regulate my breathing, and therefore my pulse, and gather my wits through mantras developed through experience. Ritual, calming words that obstinately drive a template of reality through sheer intention through to my panicked and near-delirious mind. This was not always the case.

The first instances of my night terrors were suffered in my mid twenties. At the time, perhaps due to some natural, age-given levity of mind, I did not seem to fall into states of utter terror. The episodes were unsettling, for sure, but not like the events that come upon me seemingly every night in recent years.

It was upon reaching my thirties that these episodes began to take a darker, more sinister tone. I would wake up and find myself hyperventilating, thinking I was near death. It did not matter that every single episode before the one happening at the time had been surived; this one could be it, after all.

I often wondered if it might not be the essence of reality, of the universe, somehow manifesting itself through me, reaching out, or rather seeping in.

It is now in my late thirties, a mere few months away from my fortieth birthday, that I have found myself able to assert some kind of control – for lack of a better word – upon these nocturnal incursions into what I can only think of as madness.

I have never… No, I would be lying if I said I have never woken up from my nightly visitors yelling or screaming. I have rarely, almost never done so. But it has happened. Most often, I simply wake up, a child startled and frightened, as if beholding something strange and unknown. The darkness espousing a myriad images, the afterglow of whatever dreamscapes and scenes had so tortured me prior to semi-wakefulness. Cue the sweats, the racing pulse, the pains, the fear… And then the litany of ritaulistic words I’d devised for my self, for the sake of maintaining both sanity and some semblance of physical health.

After a few minutes, it subsides.

But I have now found, recently, that I can retain some essence of the dream, of the terrors, of the presence…

The first time, I had found myself waking with a start, as is usual, and unable to fully shake sleep from my mind. Lost amidst that strange, liminal state between wakefulness and the surface skin of sleep, the images from the mind were there, more present than ever before… Or perhaps, it was just that I finally had the mental presence, the capabilities to process them properly.

It was as if dozens, if not hundreds of images arranged themselves in a mosaic before my eyes – or my mind’s eye – and they seemed to pulse with some strange kind of life… meaty, organic in some way, and yet reminiscent of the feeble art that some of us humans make.

There in each frame of the mosaic, a being or beings, and this I learned because once I had been able to reign in my fear, I had remained calm and stoic, marveling at the sights before me. It had then become plain, I think, to what intelects there lay in each frame, that I was not one of the panicked throng they surely witnessed incessantly. At least, I was no longer one of that particular parade.

They beheld me. I could feel it. Almost see it. Their gazes, in some approximation of human guise – perhaps for the sake of my dwindling sanity, be it by design or byproduct of my brain’s evergoing search for regonizable patterns – met mine, and I could not help but muse and wonder.

Astounding at these beings were, in multitudes before me, I couldn’t help but notice that, as finite as I am in the grander scheme of things, so too were they. Their lives, their existences, no more than blinks of an eye, stars extinguishing in media res, and that this was the true nature of existence. Impemanence.

I wondered then at what seemed to me were expressions of recognition from the beings… Some of them, at least.

I felt I had struck some kind of universal chord, some magnificent arpeggio of truth and recognition. That this moment I was partaking in, and indeed my life, were all ephemeral, and therefore transient, and therefore both significant and insignificant at once. We all know, those of us who cogitate at the basest of levels at least, that we will one day cease to exist. Realizing is something else.

I felt, for first time in my life, the embrace of something greater. This was no epiphany, no great illumination, no enlightenment… This was but recognition.

It was very much like falling into the sea, tranquil, without waves but a few eddies… The water neither cold nor warm. It was like floating amid swirling colors and somehow understanding that each color mixes with another, and in doing so ceases to be.

I think I sensed God. Not God of any religion as we know it. God the universe. God as existence. Furthermore, I think, for a brief yet everlasting moment, I understood God.