Field
Guide to Wonderland
“You
see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, Alice had begun to
think that very few things indeed were really impossible.”
Lewis
Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
I woke
this morning with an image of the hookah-smoking caterpillar from Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland sitting in my mind. Curious and curiouser, Alice. So,
I thought, why not google that, and see why it might be cropping up in my
liminal time. I discovered that Lewis Carroll may as well have been writing about
the last few years in the America—truly a Wonderland experience. And now, instead
of “getting back to normal” we are once again faced with possibilities that no
one wants to contemplate. A new variant, the possibility of another lock-down, and
just as masks are coming off, reach for them again. Not to mention a new war; this
one with nuclear capability.
Usually
change happens slowly over time, especially institutional change. But in the
last two years, everything around us has changed, so much so that people are ambivalent
about going “back to normal.” Some of us can’t even remember what normal looks
like. As Carroll says in Wonderland: “Alice had got so much into the way of
expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite
dull and stupid for life to go on in the conventional way.” What, ho! Here
we are in Wonderland!
As lazy
human beings, we do not like change, and we especially don’t like fast change…or
change that we are expected to prepare for ahead of time…or, really, even slow
change, where we know all along what is coming but look the other way. Let’s
face it, we are so self-absorbed, we are more concerned about how we look in
the mirror than we are about climate change, or nuclear weapons. “Does this
make me look fat?” Did anyone read the headline this morning about Australian
cities being under water? “I need a little bit of color on my cheeks.”
Alice
encounters all manner of unexpected people and creatures in Wonderland; she
shrinks and grows, and she almost loses her head. Sounds familiar, right? I’m
sure she was so pumped up on adrenalin from all the tumultuous excitement that
she never slept—and that all by itself will make you have conversations with hookah-smoking
caterpillars. I told my son yesterday that I am now having two-sided conversations between myself and myself out loud. He said, “I’ll tuck that away for future
reference.” I think “the home” is coming closer all the time.
One of
the take-aways from our pandemic—for those of us who have survived, at least—is
that gentleness is in order. Be gentle with yourself and others. We have passed
through a wormhole into another dimension, and we are slightly disoriented.
When the furniture stops moving and our heads stop spinning, we will get back to—if
not normal—at least to familiar territory. I’m guessing it will seem “dull
and stupid” to our now multi-dimensional minds.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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