Adell Shay's columns touch me. It is if she can somehow read my mind and then express in words the mood. I guess I like imagine that my thoughts and feelings can simply breathed through the ether to be caught by someone else who might actually know how to articulate them.
I used to believe that thoughts have power and energy. That was when my thoughts were filled with love and joyfulness. I am not as sure of that as I once was. Or maybe I don't want to believe that right now. My thoughts have not been a lot of fun lately.
But sometimes Adell Shay's words make me realize that in our aloneness, there is enough sameness with our fellow travelers that there are kindred souls not far away. And that they are reaching out with thoughts of peace.
I am probably breaking some copywrite laws in doing this, but I have copied a column Adell Shay wrote a couple of weeks ago for the Daily Breeze. I had put it aside to read before I went to sleep one night after watching too much television. It shook me awake from the dream which has held me in its thrall too long. So with no further ado, here is the column I read that night:
If life is just a dream, let's be done with nightmares
-By Adell Shay
"Lately, the remembrance of beefsteak tomatoes ripe and hot from the sun, and soft serve peach ice cream with pieces of peach in every bite that my stepdad and mom and a carload of us kids would drive for miles to get on hot summer nights, have come to mind.
So have those same summer nights hanging damp and endless and still, except for the sound of insects hovering in the yard and that of the shrill noise of the whistle that rang at exactly noon every day in Lexington, Mich., where my grandma lived.
Sometimes, too, in my classroom, the smell of lilacs from our Ohio bush, nowhere to be seen around me, will fill my nostrils.
Everything about them, the purple flowers heavy with moisture and darkening on their ends; the fragrance, unyielding to the smell of chalk; the scattered petals around a vase in which they rest, curling as they dry, will at that instant be more real than my body or the students, or the room itself.
It's as if the room melts away around the memory. And, in fact, it does.
A realization, one entirely clear now -- though I intellectually understood it before, it never held any meaning -- is that nothing I experience resides outside of my perception.
All of you, all of the thoughts and feelings held, do not filter, but actually are created through this wonderment called mind.
Everything experienced is internal to the perceiver. I don't know if there is anything out there, nor do I know whether I am dreaming all of you and will awaken at any instant. Remarkable.
I remember learning that very thing in a class at Ohio State when I was 19 and feeling sorry for the delusional existentialist professor; how things in a life come around.
When the mind becomes focused on any memory, such as the memory of lilacs, it is that which is real to me. Nothing else exists at that instant. You are not there. The room is not there. Now is not there. Only that held in the mind is there.
When the memory, a fragrance for example, is determined as pleasant by the mind, I feel pleasure. When the memory is the smell of my first boyfriend's cologne (Polo, which he horribly overused), I feel displeasure, nausea, in fact.
I smell both from the memory, my body responds to the lilacs with tingling sensations and a dopamine surge and my skin actually crawls from memory trace of cologne.
Now tell me we don't create our world.
At 48, I am keenly aware of the life breathed into me from this Mystery I cannot name. I am equally aware that I have spent most of that creation manifesting a reality out of disturbing thoughts, misperceptions and abusive self-talk.
That realization is both jolting and liberating.
It means that changing my reality is not only possible, but inevitable, for a magic shift always takes place for me in the space where erroneous thinking once resided.
And all errors, or perceived problems, lie within my thinking. No one is doing anything to me. Nothing out there can ever fix me. None of you can hurt me. Only my mind can do those things, or not do them.
That is the Great Fact. What liberation there is in realizing that everything I thought was true, everything I have ever thought, in fact, is as real as the memory of peach ice cream.
If life is a dream, let's enjoy it. As for me, I'm done with the nightmare scenes."
Adell Shay's column appears each Saturday. She can be reached by e-mail at gorilladance@adelphia.net or by mail at the Daily Breeze, 5215 Torrance Blvd., Torrance, CA 90503-4077.