Posts in the “personal” category

If I had a flower for every time I thought of you, I could walk in my garden forever.

~ Alfred Tennyson

One of the things I love about Peter Gabriel’s music is how brutally honest his lyrics are. Sure, there’s imagery and metaphor and other things that make music great, but like these lyrics from Washing of the Water, the lyrics are just raw and emotive:

’til the washing of the water
Make it all alright
Let your waters reach me
Like she reached me tonight

Letting go, it’s so hard
The way it’s hurting now
To get this love untied
So tough to stay with thing
’cause if I follow through
I face what I denied
I get those hooks out of me
And I take out the hooks that I sunk deep in your side
Kill that fear with emptiness
Loneliness I hide

River, oh river, river running deep
Bring me something that will let me get to sleep
In the washing of the water will you take it all away
Bring me something to take this pain away

It turns out he had a little magic in him: With his overabundance of unconditional love, he could change people. I know, because he changed me.

~ from this story about Zeus

That you and I were made for this
I was made to taste your kiss
We were made to never fall away
Never fall away

’cause even though you left me here
I have nothing left to fear
Fears are only walls that hold me here

You’re coming back for me
You’re coming back for me
You’re coming back for me
You’re coming back for me

This is a song called Letters From The Sky, by a band named Civil Twilight. I learned of the song from the underrated 2011 movie I Am Number Four. The end of this video is really terrific.

“Never make someone a priority, when all you are to them is an option.”

~ Maya Angelou

(I saw this quote this morning, and I was debating about whether I like it, but it does fit with a relationship of late.)

There’s a constant contradiction,
What feels good and what feels right.
But you live with decisions that you make in your life.
And what steers your direction is hard to understand,
(With so much riding on the choice at hand)
The spirit of a boy, or the wisdom of a man.

~ Randy Travis

As a brief note about meditation, over the last few years people have written more about some potential negative side effects of meditation. I haven’t experienced those, but over the last two years I have experienced hallucinations when I wake up during the middle of the night. A sleep specialist told me the name for this, but I can’t remember it now.

As an example, two nights ago — the evening and morning of 8/20 to 8/21/21 — I woke up and looked across the room, and in an area where there is a hallway that leads to the bathroom (and laundry area), I saw a disembodied head that looked like Princess Diana. Two years ago that would have been pretty freaky, but now things like this are a common occurrence.

This experience only became freaky when she began to move her eyes. It was like her head was frozen, protruding out from the laundry area into the hallway, and then her eyes began to move and look around, like, “Holy crap, where am I, and why can’t I move my head?!” That reminded me of an old Don Knotts movie where he’s in a haunted house, and it was indeed freaky.

UPDATE: I’m reminded that I wrote about the name for this phenomenon before in Sleep paralysis, hypnagogic hallucinations, and hypnopompic hallucinations, and the name for these specific experiences is hypnopompic hallucinations.

As a brief note today, for the last year or so I’ve been experiencing various “visions” when I wake up at night. I mentioned them to a doctor recently, and he said, “No, you’re not crazy, they’re referred to as hypnagogic hallucinations.” I found out that more accurately, the ones I’m experiencing are known as hypnopompic hallucinations.

If you’re interested in what these look like, here are three that I experienced recently. I regularly see images of “splatter” on the ceiling, and they can be all sorts of color. Last night they were mostly black, but the night before that they were red and pink:

“I’m such a liar.”

(said anyone who has seriously practiced
mindfulness or insight meditation)

(we lie to ourselves to make ourselves feel good (or bad);
we lie to others to hide our secrets and feelings)

When I found that Texas A&M Aerospace Engineering poster, I also found this “Anytime, Baby” poster. I’m 98% certain that I got it at Virginia Beach, probably in 1989.

I found this 1986 Texas A&M Aerospace Engineering poster in a tube in a closet. Amazing what you find when you’re moving. :)

Nobody else in my family seems to know the song, Love at the Five and Dime, but I knew it many years ago, and was reminded of it several years ago. It was created and sung by Nanci Griffith, who passed away in August of 2021.

As I’ve learned over the years, if you can touch someone’s heart in a positive way before you pass away, that’s about all you can hope for, and her music definitely touched many hearts. Godspeed.

One of my favorite songs from 1991 is Crazy, by Seal. This line always stands out for me:

“In a world full of people, only some want to fly, isn’t that crazy?”

Kiss From a Rose is another favorite song by Seal.

February 24, 2018: After a long hiatus, during the last week I finally got back into a consistent meditation routine. As usual, this helps me remember my dreams better, and to also have lucid dreams. Last night that combined with something else I had thought about casually recently: Wouldn’t it be nice to be young again, and if I was young again, what would I do differently?

After falling asleep, I wake up in strange apartment. Looking around I can’t figure out what’s going on, but having been in this situation dozens of times before, I find the bathroom, turn on the light, and look in the mirror. I’m pleasantly surprised to see a much younger version of myself. My face is young again, and my hair is longer, soft, and as dark as ever, with no touches of gray. Realizing I’ve been given a second chance, I vow to make the most of it.

After I figure out the apartment situation, I decide to go for a walk and see what the neighborhood looks like. As I walk down the road and enjoy the new scenery, a speeding car comes around a turn. I try to get out of its way, but it hits me hard. My body flies through the air and crashes hard on someone’s lawn as the car speeds away. Lying on the ground, my face pushed into the lawn, I look at the blades of green grass in front of me. I try to hold onto it in my mind because I know that my second chance at living a younger life is coming to an abrupt halt. The green grass fades into darkness.

“I have to get out of here because there are people in other places. There’s a whole world out there that I don’t know anything about.”

~ David Byrne of the Talking Heads, in this article

Dear Jackie Waller (of Ohio/Virginia): You were right, I was wrong. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is an excellent album.

Ongoing dreams are one of the top five or ten most interesting side effects of meditation. This morning I was in this rinky-dink dive motel, and I thought nobody knew I was there. Then there’s a knock at the door. I open it, and a woman tries to walk in. “Hey, hey, hey, slow down,” I say as I stop her from coming in.

“You don’t remember,” she asks.

I look at her hard, but no, I don’t remember.

So she holds up a newspaper clipping, and I look at it. It’s something I wrote. She starts to explain, “You wrote this,” but then it all comes flooding back to me before she says any more. “Okay, that’s good,” I say, holding up my hand. “I remember it all. Come in.”

“Thank god,” she says, and walks into the room and plops down on a bed, face down. “I’m beat.” Then I turn around and more people start to come in, but it’s all good, I remember them, and the dream continues from where we left off. One person has brought several containers of taco ingredients, and the meat mixture smells amazing. We begin to put them together quietly at a makeshift counter while the woman rests.

As the tacos are made, we take them outside. It’s a bright, sunny day, and there’s a Jaguar parked outside my room in this crappy motel in the desert...

Those who know me know that I was born with a rare blood disease, mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), also known as “Bubble Boy” disease. MCAS is an autoimmune disease, and I’ve written about this in quite a few places over the last five years, including these articles:

Interesting discussion of the day: A young woman who helped me at Best Buy today told me that one reason she works there is so she has something she can talk about with her father (tech stuff).

~ May 16, 2014

Mama always told me not to look into the eye’s of the Sun ... sunrise in Virginia Beach, April, 2017.