Cast Away/Ulysseus

Time exploded for Tom Hanks, the high level Fed-Ex employee that had what he thought was a reliable relationship to time. A modern day Ulysses, stuck on an island for years. What does one do when there is no hope? Or is there hope even if you don't see it. Is it coming down the path but you've just turned the corner and looked back and it's out of sight.

The internet is like sending out flares on a deserted island. Like feeding the small fire created. Hoping, assuming, that there's a plane overhead, behind the cloud cover. I don't see the plane but I hear the engine or is that sound coming from inside of me? There is an attempt to be heard, understood, rescued.

Ulysses spent seven years in captivity on Calypso's island. Rescue comes from a persuasion by the Gods. Calypso is persuaded to release him by the messenger God Hermes, sent by Zeus. Ulysses builds a raft and is given clothing, food and drink by Calypso for the voyage. Tom Hanks character is sent part of his long discarded crashed plane from the Gods, and creates a raft and collects his own food and water for the voyage. His Calypso is his girlfriend, Helen Hunt's character, who'd given him a photograph of her.

My raft is literature. I travel into unknown waters using the compass of others before me. Those braver than I could ever imagine being. I hesitate because there is land under my feet. I know land. I know the earth. The water is home too, but a different home. Possibly the first home from which everything was created, but it seems anxious to swallow, to return me back to where I started. Neptune can be very patient, but then again so can I.

Vision Quest

Just returned from one. Had always heard about them, read about them from Native American Cultures and all sorts of peoples we like to describe by using words like: primitive, third world, jungle-sand or desert niggers, "those poor people over there". Well, those poor people over there aren't losing themselves, aren't falling into a void of technology they can't seem to re-surface from. They aren't shooting their co-workers, or complete strangers for no reason at all. These killers often described as the "nice, quiet guy who lived next door". These people ride the changes in life like an experienced surfer would a nice ocean wave.

Logically change happens to us, it's supposed to, but that knowledge doesn't prevent that primal feel from surging through our blood stream, causing us to doubt and worry and wither away a bit on the inside. It doesn't prevent our unconscious selves from asking our conscious selves a million questions about what we could have or should have done differently. If done differently, maybe we'd be somewhere else, doing something else or be somebody else. But I believe in plans, and in an unfolding. I don't think it's conincidence that the sun always sets in the west. That certain birds gather around each other at specific times of the year to migrate to places on the other side of the world without the assistance of mapquest. That your grandmother's rosebush will come back the next year, even after she's gone.

Well, this small being (me) needed a challenge, needed to face a fear, needed to know I could do something in particular, something daunting, alone--and come out the other side not too tattered or torn. The worst for me was lost luggage and a bit of malodorousness on the flight home. Maybe that was the worst for the guy sitting next to me in row 21 seat B. Sorry again, -- he seemed to understand, he was flying stand by too. I flew stand by all of the way to Manchester England knowing only one person who was going to be sort of waiting for me when I landed. I took a sleeping bag, and a cheap tent and slept under the U.K. sky. It felt right.

It reminded me of my truly tomboy days when I used to do such things with my father, like when we went fishing. Or, when I helped him build things in the basement. I refused to have anything to do with his hunting, I was morally opposed. I do remember waking up and drinking coffee with him, begging him not to go. (My hands still shake from drinking coffee at six). He'd smile, gulp down his coffee, and come back with flattened squirrels, rabbits and every once in a while a deer. We ate them, that was the least we could do, that way their deaths would be less of a waste. I struggle a bit with that, but hey that's me. Fishing seemed okay, I know - hypocrisy, I'm working on that.

Matthew Modine did a movie called Vision Quest in the eighties. The most outstanding thing at the time was the fact that Madonna was in it and sang a song I loved called Crazy for You. Also the female lead was beautiful.

The point of the quest was about facing something, someone, maybe yourself and the chances are you probably won't come out unscathed but you do it anyway. Joseph Campbell calls it the Hero's Journey. This was the first time that I felt the importance of the Journey --not the destination. The journey felt like a truncated life that I was living. The good (getting on the flight out of Manchester after being told by three people that I didn't have a chance of making it) the bad (some of the Delta employees at the "help desk")the frightening (once again some of the disinterested Delta employees, and a particularly dicey flight into a rainstorm in New York) the unexpected (a guy willing to share his tent if my zipper around my entrance door froze up on me one more time) the quick solid friendships (a few taxi drivers who immediately took me under their wings like I was a particularly slow family member), the hopes (these were mostly me hoping my name would be called to board an already overbooked flight).

I took planes, trains, buses, cabs, the tunnel, walked, ran and rested...alone. And it didn't feel weird, or wrong, or like I should've been somewhere else, with someone else. It was fun talking with people I'd probably never meet again. Smiling at people and having short or longer conversations about nothing in particular.

But mostly, it felt good entering my own body once again. There I was waiting for me, the tomboy, we listened to the rain beating down on our cheap tent under the U.K. trees and smiled.