Building the dream

11.29.2020

She found herself to be curious about the most obscure encounters. It is not as if she had been waiting and lurking. It was just another chance encounter which sparked the interest in the workings of the mind of another. On this occasion, she was on her daily journey to her garbage receptacle. It is a large container that is shared by the eight units of the rental building where she resides. It sits in the alley along side two more containers that are identical except for the address that brands the container to the building across the alley, another eight-unit building but here they employ two containers. They are not free. It is a paid vendor service that the residential rental building pays. On the other side of this same alley are two private residence containers that are allocated to the homeowner. One is used for waste and the other to recycle. Neither container is as large as the ones assigned to the residential buildings. The city provides the containers and the city removes the waste. The residential containers that are assigned to the apartment buildings employ a service to pick up the waste and pay a fee. This sets the scene.

She walks to her container only to witness the man, who resides in the million dollar plus single family home and who typically uses the city service for garbage, placing his yard refuse and Halloween decorations into the one container that this apartment building employs, filling it more than half of the way. She comments to him that now she is of a better understanding, often wondering why their container fills so quickly. He is quick to retort. He is intolerant and in denial. He does not have time to squabble. He feels that two wrongs make a right since, Afterall, he claims, he has witnessed other people, unknown assailants placing refuse into his cans. This, apparently, makes him even and he protests that he is right. He seeks to dismiss her, and she replies with quick wit, putting him into his place. Humility is hard learned for the plutocrat but when one fights based in principals, as she had, there is no way to deny truth.

She considered her neighbors again. They did not employ an ability for an individual to live a peaceful existence. They were often gluttonous and drunk. They were self-righteous and unable to retain new ideas. They were the elders stuck in a lie where they were never wrong. Peaceful enjoyment free from the neighbor who lived beneath her unit on floor below, but also on a psychological mature mindful level of human awareness, this neighbor lives on levels beneath her own conciousness. He called her names. They were painful to her but she has buried the words, “toothless whore”, retired them to a place of hope where she believes that the Lord will take on her battles, she sets the pain inspiring words free, lets it go, types it out onto pages to be lost in the libraries of decades, recorded for humanity. Another neighbor, a man likely twenty years her senior has continued to make sexual advances upon her. Finally, she was able to deliver, in what she felt were clear words, her disinterest. Since that denial of sexual interest to this man, he has called her crazy, he even went as far as to say he was frightened of the less than one-hundred-pound senior woman, as if she could harm a fly. False narratives that declare lies to be truth based in a refusal to understand those who would be brave enough to expose themselves in a fully transparent declaration of self, of truth of ideas that conflict with the mainstream. She knows it is now the time to be brave and share the stories that can impact the change of a self. It is time to practice the art of transformational art without fear of judgements since while processing the unprocessed years of her life she served as her own harshest judge, no one can compete with her own former harsh judgements of herself. They, those neighbors, are one of many inspirations that drive the stories of her life. She has learned to transform not only art or herself but the essence of pure energy. She builds her American Dream. It has a fireplace for those nights in front of the keyboard with a cozy blanket overlooking a snow-covered starlit mountain view. Knowing that medicinal therapies have given her a sense of balance and a feeling of an ability to make mindful enlightened choices without judgements based in antiquated laws. She feels herself at peace, at rest in a place that is the fluid sense of home finally arrived as the once only imagined home filled with family, joy, laughter and love.