Time Travels and a Shiny Something.

I've been doing a little bit of time travel in an effort to avoid finishing the job application from hell. (It's long and it's useless. Essentially they're having me retype my entire resume for them in tiny little boxes. It seems like a terrible waste of time, but I need a job and a job at Sequoia National Park would be stellar, so I'm going to suffer through all of this useless typing in the hope that I will land the job, establish residency and spend a year calling Sequoia my home.) Anywho, the time travel I've been doing has been via email. Whenever I come across a piece of information I don't think I have I type a few key phrases into my gmail account and shabam! an email from two years ago appears and answers the question for me. I relived the tragedy that was Naknek and witnessed as I tried my best to be as mature as I could in a situation where everyone was acting like they were five and I really wanted to do the same, but wanted to do my father one better than that since he had only recently passed away. That's where I thought I was. In retrospect I looked like a five year old dressed up in her father's suit and shoes, using words that didn't fit in her mouth yet. I hope no one else could see that because at the time I felt so right, so mature, so in pain but so dealing with it. Such is life.

The next stop on my time travel excursion was actually a mistake, but an interesting one. I stumbled upon one of the earlier emails in a chain between a high school friend of mine and me. I sent this before my Dad died. It makes me sad because it proves that I was making a turnaround spiritually. It marks a me that was willing to see the beauty in something that I had hated for quite some time because it made no sense and it hurt people. He died and I regressed. So it goes. Enjoy:

"I had the coolest dream last night. It was only a little part of a dream, actually, but it was amazing. Basic story is this. There is a woman looking for her children or something like that and I think that she's outside of an orphanage. There are a couple kids walking about and I start following one (I being an invisible presence...pretty much like we're watching a movie, that's what I mean when I say I here.) as she goes up the stairs. She's moving toward the mother and she's holding another little kid's hand in the kind of way that makes you think they're best friends that can and do hold hands for no reason other than that it feels good to know that you have someone there who knows you. I look around and I see these little classic, classic cartoons walking around. Not a lot of them, but a few. No more than fiveish. There are more kids and then suddenly I am where the mother is, looking at them all coming toward me. It sounds creepy but they were all so nonthreatening that it wasn't. It was like a group of friends coming to meet her, or, better, people who happened to be gathering in one area, not even seeing her as a goal. They stopped and she she sees a couple nice cars (which backed toward her as a way of movement rather than going forward) the classic cartoons and children. They're all standing in this sort of quad area behind the brick building (presumably an orphanage, but it has a good vibe coming off it). One of the little girls, who is wearing a dress, looks at the mother and says "This is God."

"This is what I wrote after I woke up: I think that it means that "God" is imagination, creativity, invention, tradition, acceptance and innocence, softness and security. God encompasses all of the comfortable and exciting parts of life because that is what is good in the world and if we are going to have a god we are going to have something that makes us feel good. We want a god who is all the good in the world so just taking pieces of the world that are good: cars, proof that we can make something big and amazing. Chidren, the innocence and memory of the world. Cartoons, something comfortable and nostalgic. All of these can have a little evil in them, but when they are presented with no threat, presented in only their positive lights, slightly pastel and very shiny, all we can see is the beauty and good of them and all that can be said that this, this is God.

"Thoughts?"