Of Monsters and Money
BREATHE!
“One conscious breath in and out is a meditation.”
-Eckhart Tolle
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My mother woke us up in the middle of the night, screaming that Frankenstein’s monster, and Dracula, and the Wolfman, were coming to get her.
This, after crying at night over a stack of bills we couldn’t understand. She was an adult, after all. Didn’t adults know all the answers?
And when we didn’t have vegetables to eat with dinner, and she went out and clipped dandelions off the lawn to wash and cook…that was just exotic fare, right?
And when con artists offered her cut rate car repair, or color television set, and she jumped at it and then had to deal with the humiliation of being taken…these had nothing to do with the stress that was breaking her even as we watched, even though we couldn’t understand.
And if, today, when I watch monster movies I wonder what demons the writers felt…who in the audience with me sees not Micheal Meyers or Freddy or Abigayle or Meghan but the dwindling bank account, or the fading health, or aging parents, or broken marriages or confused and frightened children…can I be blamed?
And if I write of things that grow from my own fears, and of the men and women who find the hero within them and conquer those monsters, not to rise again from the ashes in the next bill cycle…I mean sequel…is that some urge to make sense of life? To try to tell my mother, long gone, that her son has never forgotten her struggles, that as she was drowning in quicksand she threw me not a rope to pull her out…but a lantern by which I might light my own way…
Can I be blamed for wanting to share that light?
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Steven Barnes is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Firedance
Time: Friday, Sept 20th 12 Noon Pacific at www.thefiredance.com
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