What is the Meaning of This?

In keeping with my usual “get-up-early-so-I-can-loaf-longer” mode, it is o’dark-thirty and I have been up for over an hour and a half.  So far, I have picked up my pen instead of my computer (a major start-of-the-day accomplishment), meditated, walked and fed the dog, and just settled down to enjoy my second cup of coffee.  Somewhere between the twenty steps that separate the kitchen from my Lazygirl, a small kamikaze fly took a suicide dive into my coveted second cup. Bummer.

My normal modus operandi would be to immediately ask myself,  “What is the meaning of this?”   Today I have admitted to myself that perhaps there is no meaning in this.  But hey—it wouldn’t be like me not to wonder just a little bit—and to use the incident as a springboard to the discovery some sort of magical, mystical, amazing hidden Truth that suddenly reveals itself as a reward for my continual forward march on the obstacle-strewn path to Nirvana. What is my life after all, if nothing but a search for meaning?

The fly-in-the-coffee routine is reminiscent of the wasp-in-the-purse number that occurred a number of years ago.  It makes me wonder—why bother to search for meaning when I have already found it long ago (and apparently forgotten it again)?  That would be a little like reinventing the wheel.  On the other hand, what with my forgetful ways, I always do appreciate a good reminder because Heaven knows, I can use all of them I can get!

Just so you know—the little story that you are about to read was lifted right out of my book, Amusings—Looking at Life Through a Stained Glass Window.  Is it blog- cheating to plagiarize myself?  I don’t know, but I’m going to do it anyway, so here goes.  The following little vignette is titled The Wasp.

Have you ever popped into your car, reached your hand into your purse to find your keys and discovered that there was a wasp wandering around somewhere between your checkbook and wallet?  It is probably a moment you would prefer reading about when it happened to someone else than actually experiencing for yourself.

Well, we had quite a time, the wasp and I.  We had a little conversation—seems I did most of the talking—while the nosy little itinerant inspected the contents of my handbag.  Hitching a ride to somewhere, and looking for a bite of free lunch, I supposed.  I wasn’t much looking forward to being his mid-day meal.

Apparently, I managed to talk some sense into the tiny critter’s head, because before too very long, s/he flew out the open car window, rather than risk being bludgeoned to death by the contents of a closed purse being pounded in panic against a hot asphalt parking lot.  Thank goodness.

Once my heart rate returned to normal, I immediately launched into my usual what-does-this-mean mode, and concluded that the wasp had given me a very great gift.  I drove away thanking the clever powers that be for the experience, because now—ta dah—I had a juicy little tidbit of insight for the subject of my next writing session.

There was a time when I thought that daily bread was a tangible, like money, or food. (Naturally, I’d be thinking in terms of food).  But that day, thanks to my friend the wasp, I came to an entirely new understanding about the meaning of daily bread.  Daily bread became transformed in my mind from the tangibles of food and money into food for thought.  I moved from the tangible to intangible, then back to tangible again, by bringing ideas, creativity, wisdom and inspiration into physical manifestation through words as a personal expression of individual creativity.

Some folks can take their ideas and build buildings, or paint masterpieces, or write great American novels, or take embryonic ideas and turn them into enormous business empires. Well I had an unfortunate relationship with geometry, never got past kindergarten art, and my grandiose, highfalutin entrepreneurial ideas have long since gone up in smoke, along with the dream of making it onto Oprah’s book list.

But I’m not dead yet! Thanks to that unexpected, uninvited visitor in my purse, I was given an idea and a story to tell, along with a healthy dose of insight, inspiration, and willingness to use it creatively. So the idea is to write the idea. And who knows?  Maybe one day the idea will be published somewhere and I’ll even get paid fir it.  Now wouldn’t that be something!

Either way, published or not, when I fail to write for myself as a personal expression of my own inner creativity, I’m starving myself to death.

Oh Lord, give me this day my daily bread.  I’m too young to die.