{"id":6102,"date":"2023-02-14T18:36:33","date_gmt":"2023-02-15T01:36:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/?p=6102"},"modified":"2023-02-14T18:36:33","modified_gmt":"2023-02-15T01:36:33","slug":"reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/archives\/6102","title":{"rendered":"Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Our friend Jeff said to me the other day, \u201cI don\u2019t believe in reality.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wish I could remember what I said to him right\nbefore he said that, but I can\u2019t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The moment Jeff said, \u201cI don\u2019t believe in\nreality,\u201d my awareness of reality shifted. Not that I stopped believing in\nreality, but I began to see the world differently. How so? Hard to say. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You will recall the scene in the prophetic movie\nThe Wizard of Oz<\/em> when Dorothy and the\nScarecrow and the Tin Woodsman and the Lion are standing before the big screen\non which is projected the frightening head and face of the supposed Wizard of\nOz and they are quaking in fear of him and he is telling them he can\u2019t help\nthem, when Toto, Dorothy\u2019s dog, possibly the sharpest member of the cast,\ndiscovers an old man standing in a booth adjacent to the screen, and the booth\nturns out to be the projection room, the image on the screen an illusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPay no attention to the man behind the\ncurtain,\u201d says the Wizard of Oz on the screen as voiced by the old man in the\nprojection room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He might have said, \u201cDon\u2019t believe in reality!\nBelieve instead in the nonsense on the screen intended to entrance you and\nentrap you and empower me at your expense.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Yesterday I was on my way into Corners of the Mouth<\/em>, the worker-owned food cooperative in Mendocino where I shop twice a week, and there were two people, a man and a woman, standing in front of the store gazing into their smart phones. The man said, \u201cMixed reviews.\u201d The woman replied, \u201cSeems more like a bulk foods place.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I passed them I said, \u201cPay no attention to\nthe man behind the curtain.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cExcuse me?\u201d said the man, frowning at me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a great store. Full of wonders,\u201d I said,\nsmiling at him. \u201cI\u2019ve been shopping here multiple times a week for seventeen\nyears. Every time I go in I discover something new. The produce is\ngrandiloquent, the employees spectacular, their selection of chocolate bars\ninspiring.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The man looked at his phone. \u201cSays the layout is\nconfusing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The woman blinked at me and said, \u201cThat was from\nThe Wizard of Oz<\/em>. Pay no attention to\nthe man behind the curtain.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRight you are,\u201d I said, entering the store and\ninhaling of the magnificence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which is to say, reality seems to be largely\nwhat we make of things. Descartes said, \u201cI think therefore I am.\u201d To which I will\nadd, \u201cIf you think what is projected on your screen is reality, so it shall\nbe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

My mother was essentially mistrustful of reality whenever things were going well. In other words, she was always expecting something bad to happen. It was almost as if she wanted<\/em> something bad to happen. I don\u2019t think she did, but her expectation was so strong it might as well have been the desire for disaster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I inherited this mistrust of happiness from her,\nwhich created in me a lifelong propensity for self-sabotage. I am ever amazed\nat how this manifests on both the physical and emotional planes in my life, and\nI\u2019m not kidding when I say I really don\u2019t know how I made it to seventy-three.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

My mother said the thing she disliked most about getting old was all her friends were dying. She did not say that what she disliked most about getting old was all her friends were falling and breaking various bones and hitting their heads, but for me that seems to be the era we have entered vis-\u00e0-vis our friends, along with some of them dying, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As one who has fallen many times throughout my\nlife, though not recently knock-on-wood, I can tell you that in my reality every<\/em> time I fell I was either\nneedlessly hurrying or not paying close attention to what I was doing, and\nprobably both those things. My most recent injury resulting from needlessly\nhurrying and not paying attention was to smash my bare toes on a rock\nprotruding from the path I was on, the result of which was a broken toe, an\ninfected toe, a wonky way of walking for some weeks, aches and pains from\nlopsided posture due to compensating for foot pain, and so forth ongoing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why was I hurrying and not paying attention\nafter a delightful barefooted walk on the beach? The short answer is: I\u2019m an\nidiot. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Why do we needlessly hurry and not pay attention to what we are doing? We might say the answer is different for each of us. We might also say the answer is the same for all of us. For one reason or another we are not content to fully inhabit the present moment. We are entrained to move forward, to keep going, to stay busy, to keep ourselves entertained, our brains stimulated, even if by junk. We don\u2019t know very well how to saunter and to pay close attention to what we\u2019re doing and to what\u2019s going on around us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marcia and I take a walk on the headlands south\nof Mendocino every few weeks, and after a two-mile jaunt we come to the end of\nthe trail overlooking a rock outcropping just offshore on which harbor seals\nlike to roost for several hours a day. Sometimes there are a dozen or more seals\non those rocks, sometimes just a few, and sometimes there are none. The seals\nare light gray and dark gray and various shades of brown, their colors very\nclose to the colors of the outcropping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now here\u2019s an interesting thing to me about this\noutcropping and those seals. We have arrived at the point overlooking the\noutcropping a hundred or so times in my life, and the first thing I do when we\narrive there is to count the seals. And many of those times, my first count\nmisses at least one and sometimes more of the seals. My second count usually\nincludes all the seals, but sometimes it takes a third careful scanning before\nI clearly see all the seals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

fin<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conception Vessel Seventeen<\/a><\/em> piano\/cello duet from Through the Fire<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our friend Jeff said to me the other day, \u201cI don\u2019t believe in reality.\u201d I wish I could remember what I said to him right before he said that, but I can\u2019t. The moment Jeff said, \u201cI don\u2019t believe in reality,\u201d my awareness of reality shifted. Not that I stopped believing in reality, but I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7764,7761,7763,7760,7762,7759,7753,4305],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6102"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6102"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6108,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6102\/revisions\/6108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}