MsTiara’s Thoughts

Dragon is curled up on the bed surfing the web while Kitten is taking one of her catnaps.

“So, Astrid, where do you want to work?” Dragon asks as he stares down at a map.

“Why? We have a job here in Virginia and it is beautiful here, you love flying through the trees with the painted leaves.” I ask as I have learned to always question when one of the soul pets suggest a change. They seem to know more about the patterns of the universe than I could even begin to imagine or pretend to make up.

“I dream of mold, every dream has mold creeping and crawling up the sides of the building. I don’t like mold. This isn’t where you should be.” He said as he continued to click his way through the computer world.

At this time, Kitten mumbled in her sleep “get it off me, it is covering my paws, stop it before I become a mold person! Help me… mold, mold, everywhere.”

I looked over at Dragon, caught his eye, and we both looked at Kitten at the same time. “A bit of a drama queen, isn’t she?” I asked as I saw a smile flicker over her face. “Maybe she isn’t really a kitten, maybe she is a Miss Piggy, I think I see her tail curling and her fur turning pink.”

Kitten popped up in a huff, “I am NOT a Miss Piggy, even though there is nothing wrong with her, I think she is a great role model. But I am not a Pig! I am a Kitten!”

“Oh, Kitten, I thought you were napping.” I said ever so innocently.

Kitten did her best angelic kitten expression, with the big aqua eyes and the little halo glow over her head. “I was, but I had this horrible dream of mold attacking me and making me into a mold kitten.” She shuddered delicately after saying this.

As I watched Kitten give her academy award winning performance, or at least her pork winning one, I wondered what was up with the two of them. I have known them in the past to try to manipulate my timelines in this lifetime, but not quite so noticeably.

“So, Dragon, you are searching for places for us to work? I thought you liked the fall leaves here in Virginia for flying and you know we committed to this job…” I started out.

But Dragon, who is normally the easy going one of all of us, had a very stubborn expression on his face. “we made the choice without having all the information. They didn’t tell us the place was filled with mold and that the company would go bankrupt while we were sitting here and they said they had structure. Kitten is complaining constantly about them not having structure and I am tired of her meowing about it. You know how Kitten has to be in control?”

I looked at Dragon in shock, all of this out of the easy going one? I don’t know when he was last so serious and intent about something. Sometime in the 18^th century when he tried to get me out of town before I was burned as a witch was the only other time I remember.

“Dragon, we committed” I tried to explain.

“No, Astrid,” he said very forcibly, “If you commit to something and they don’t tell you that you are flying into a war, then why should you continue to fly in when you find out? If you don’t believe in something, you shouldn’t do it.”

“But, Dragon, the money” I tried to start out.

“Money isn’t everything,” said Kitten. Now this is from a Kitten wearing diamonds and sleeping on silk.

“But,” I tried again.

“No,” said Dragon. “You are going to talk about responsibility and commitment and that is why I am going to find you another place to work. Then you will have no excuse. “

I made a long sigh, realizing that the soul pets know best, they always do, something about all those millenniums of living. “So where do you think we should work?”

In my life, there are many books which have shaped and changed me dramatically. Sometimes those books make small incremental changes in perception, a turn of phrase that you start to incorporate or a new way to look at people which hadn’t even crossed your mind before.

When I was a young child, I was extremely shy, battered around by everyone and being a victim to the cruel whims of everyone around me. I felt lost and out of control. I remember the day I read Illusions by Richard Bach, I was sitting on the breakwater at Dana Point Harbor overlooking the ocean. There was a quote that changed me, wove into who I was and became a mantra for my life. “I gave my life to become the person I am today, was it worth it?” From that moment forward, every morning I would wake up and if I didn’t like who I was, then I would figure out why I didn’t and I would change my life. From being someone who was ‘destined’ to fail to someone who goes through life living their dream and just ‘living’ life and enjoying it in all its glory.

A couple weeks ago, I picked up another book that I read which changed my perception of reality. The person who first read this book was around 20 years old and believed the ‘dogma’ of the world. I was in a class called Gods, Clocks and Religion which focused on world religion, physics and philosophy, the only class that I actually ever attended in college and felt that I learned something from, and remember thinking how little I knew in such a vast sea of knowledge. Logic Tables (thank you for helping me learn to program), the amazing depth of ways that people work to justify who they are and why they live, and physics and how it all ties together. I so did love that class. But most important of all, it gave me a book called A Canticle for Liebowitz.

Imagine for a moment, what the word would be like if the nuclear bomb hit, the loss of knowledge, the destruction of neurons, 90% of the population wiped out and the rest reduced to just trying to survive. The great cities reduced to rubble. Now slowly move through time a thousand years. Scavengers for the last thousand had cannibalized whatever rubble was left in the big cities and time had buried what was left. The need to communicate in a written form is just starting to come back to the masses and as people are picking through the rubble they come across artifacts, written documents, blue prints. The only thing that survived in the last thousand years was religion who had been trying to preserve knowledge, documents, but over time had lost meaning and had slowly filled in the blanks… Now time progresses another thousand years and new dogma, new beliefs, old legends and people try to piece together the past. As you piece together the past you come across blueprints of technology and you start to try to build it. But, people haven’t changed. They are still greedy and power hungry, suspicious and judgmental. Time has progressed, but the growth of the human soul is the same as it was before.

So three thousand years later, where would we be? Who would we be? What have we learned? In the book, we have learned nothing. More bombs were built and wars occurred and power hungry people destroyed. Till once again, we are lost in the arms of another nuclear war and they cycle continues from scratch.

So, how did this book change my perceptions? It made me stop and think about dogma, rituals, the books being absolute truth. Humans did the copying, they created their own formulas, they made mistakes and they filled in the blanks. There is no ‘absolute truth’. It made me stop and re-evaluate us as a society, we look back at the pyramids and the Greeks and we either venerate them or sneer at ‘what did they know’ since they were obviously lacking in ‘sophisticated knowledge’. Finally, it made me stop and look at the world that we create, our society, and question the ignorance and the judgments and the power hungry struggles and shake my head at what we as human beings do in the name of our ego and our gods.

I thought that when I re-read A Canticle for Liebowitz that I would find it ‘less’ than what I remembered, instead as I re-read it I find it more.

“Dragon?” Kitten looked up at him as she called his name.

“yes, Kitten” he called back, a little bit of smoke curling around his head in a question mark.

“Astrid’s birthday is coming up and I think we should do something special, but I can’t think of anything special enough.” Kitten sighed.

“What have you thought of so far?” Dragon asked as his attention sharpened on the potential for an adventure and he flew down to where Kitten was lying next to the pond.

“Well, I thought we could take her to the planet made out of blue diamonds and we could go swimming in the lake there and have a picnic. You know the one that is underneath the waterfall that goes up and up and up and where the water shimmers and glows because the stones at the bottom are all blue diamonds.” Kitten smiled at the thought of swimming in diamonds and wondered how she would look in a collar made out of them.

“Astrid would like that, why did you discard the idea?” Dragon asked.

“Cause it wasn’t special enough for her.”

Dragon thought a bit and the puffs of smoke from his fire formed into little gears working together around his head. Kitten was giggling at him behind her paws, she thought he was funny when he was thinking really hard on something that his smoke gave his thoughts away. Dragon, however, did it on purpose because he loved for Kitten to giggle and be happy.

“Maybe we can take her to the fire planet where the lava runs down the mountain made out of rubies?” Dragon offered up, thinking how much he loves to go there and how warm it is.

Kitten thought about that for a minute, remembering how beautiful it is when the lave flows and the rubies shine as if they were on fire. But then thought of Astrid there and said, “No, I don’t think she would like that. It would be much too hot for her.”

“So, what do you suggest?” Dragon asked, watching the fish swim in the lake and wondering if he could talk Kitten into getting her fur wet and swimming with him. Kitten really only liked swimming in the ocean where she could play with the clown fish and anemones. She liked their laughter and they tickled her until she giggled.

“I think all the other ideas are fun, but Astrid can do them any time, it doesn’t have to be her birthday and I want her to feel special.”

Dragon focused his attention on Kitten. His intense green eyes shone like emeralds as he watched Kitten lying next to him. Kitten was a smoky blue color with eyes the color of the sea, a Blue/Green that sparked in the sun, and in the middle of her forehead was a star, it was the symbol of the human whom she had connected her soul to all those billions of years ago. Dragon also had a star hidden on his body, but you had to know where to look to find it and only Kitten and Astrid knew about it. Dragon’s soul was connected to Kitten and he had adopted Astrid as his human a long time ago, so long he couldn’t even recall the exact moment in time. “Astrid is special,” Dragon said intensely but ever so quietly. You need to tread very carefully when Dragon’s get quiet and intense. “Who is making her feel un-special, I will talk to them.”

“No one is making her feel un-special.” Kitten said, patting Dragon’s paw to calm him down. But, inside she was smiling, she was very proud and happy that Dragon is loyal to Astrid. It was the thing she admired the most about him, his fierce loyalty to his friends and loved ones. He would rather hurt himself before he would ever hurt a friend.

“It’s just on birthdays people can feel down. I want her to know how special she is and loved, but I don’t know how to do that.”

Dragon thought in silence for awhile and watched a butterfly flutter around the flowers on one of the plants that surrounded the pond. Kitten was thinking so hard next to him she had her nose all crinkled up.

“Well, it has to be something that no one else can give her but us.” Dragon thought out loud.

“And it has to carry a bit of our soul and love so she knows that we did it because we love her.” Kitten added.

“Yes, but it also needs to make her smile. I like when she smiles and laughs, there is nothing more special in the world or in the Dreamlands than her laughter.” Dragon shared.

Kitten yawned really wide and let out a rumble, “I’m hungry, what should we have…”

Dragon popped up and started fluttering in the air like the butterflies he had been watching. “That’s it! Kitten you are the smartest soul pet in the universe!” He started flying loopdiloops in the air. First going one way and then going the other, his joy spilling out over the pond and his smoke floating up and over like confetti being thrown.

Kitten was bouncing up and down on the ground, trying to grab Dragon’s tail and get his attention. “Dragon! Dragon, stop flying around and tell me your idea!”

Kitten was bouncing more like a tigger than a cat and Dragon looked more like a kite than an actual Dragon.

“Stop it” Bounce “at once” Bounce “Tell me” Bounce “your” Bounce. Bounce. “Idea” Kitten huffed as she got particularly high at the same time as Dragon got low and she grabbed hold of his tail.

“We will make her a cake! A beautiful birthday cake!” Dragon said as Kitten started to climb up his tail.

“Ooooh what a wonderful idea! We can put flowers on it and a Dragon and a Kitten!” Kitten dreamed out loud. “it will be the most Beauteous cake ever.”

“ummmm, Kitten? Do you know how to bake a cake? Or decorate one?” Dragon asked with a concerned look on his face as he landed on the ground.

“No, but how hard can it be?” Kitten smiled.

From Jonathan Carroll’s Blog -http://www.jonathancarroll.com/blog/index.php

Most people like to imagine themselves as big novels– 800 page doorstops that include forty fascinating characters buzzing around each other, major crisis and triumphs, perhaps even a world scale event like a war or a natural disaster in the background. All of this preferably described with the panache and poetry of a Russian master like Tolstoy or a French wordsmith like Proust. But the truth is most of us live 243 page lives, if that. There are only a few major characters in our individual stories, maybe a mid-level crisis or two, certainly some triumph or tragedy sprinkled throughout. But none of it is profound or interesting enough to demand more pages, more explication, more background. Thoreau famously said most people live lives of quiet desperation. He could just as easily have said most lives can be summed up effectively in 200 page novels written by adequate midlist authors.