Pine: II

“Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don't much care where.
The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.
Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere.
The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.”

 ~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

School was my nemesis. And every weekday morning, I was forced to look it in the eye. 

If I had lived within the pages of an Arthur Conan Doyle novel, school would have been my Professor Moriarty,"Motionless, like a spider at the center of a web." I was Othello, school was Iago, hellbent on the destruction of my 8 year old soul. If I had lived in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, school would have taken on the character of O'Brien, "One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship." Elementary school made the revolution and I became the brave revolutionist.When the teacher excused us for recess I ran like a felon fleeing the scene of a crime. I tried to rally my fellow comrades but they were weaklings who coward in the face of our dictators.

In the immortal words of one of my favorite humans to ever live on this pale blue dot, "Resist much, obey little." 

During my tenure as a juvenile delinquent I attended more schools than I can remember, they were all the same though, little boxes on the hillside. They came at me like an invading army trying to infiltrate the walls of my mind, walls that I had been building since birth, diligently stacking stone and mortar. They came at me with flickering florescent lights, raucous bells, absurd rules and work that I believed to be completely inconsequential. Dick and Jane have killed the brain cells of millions of children. 

My fellow cell mates rarely offered any reprieve.  As a matter of fact, if these were children then I was something else entirely. A displaced species. An alien, equipped with Strawberry Shortcake glasses, a field guide to insects and my stuffed Ewok. I was a spy. A finder of patterns and a collector of connections. Small ones lead to big ones, and big ones lead to small ones. I learned that from the universe. It is present in everything I see. We are trees.

The number of neurons in our brain are tied to the number of trees on the Earth. Neurons are trees. The axons, the sturdy trunk. The dendrites, which come from the Greek word Dendron, meaning tree, are the branches. The number of synapses in a neuron are bound to the number of branches on a tree.  Neurons create forests, their branches nearly touching. The life of every individual neuron is entangled with every other neuron. Trees in a rain forest.

A mystery bursting with clues.

They did not want to discuss this mystery. My conclusions led me to believe that most of them were devoid of even a sliver of logic, creativity or primitive reasoning skills. They had no interest in helping me to investigate this greatest of enigmas, the origins of the universe.

I would lie in bed at night, eyes closed, projected images playing out on the surface of my mind. Watching it all unfold over and over again. Backwards and forwards, what was before and what will come after? Colors swirling, objects colliding.

Ear shattering screams, pushing in lines, the mingling smells of sweat and artificial cheese.

I was terrified of the bathroom. I couldn't go if there was anyone else inside. So I stood in the hall, legs crossed, waiting. But I couldn't hold it any longer. I ran down the hall and out the front doors leaving a trail of shame in my wake. A block away, drenched in urine, I realized that I had no idea how to get home.

I was always packing. Always on the move. Ramshackle red brick buildings, laundry hanging from lines strung between the balconies.  It always smelled like curry.  In the back, there was a hill leading to a river. I made the ironing board into a sled. I rumbled down the hill, gliding into the water. The yellow house. I rode my bike into the garage door. It took two boxes of band-aids. The townhouse in the woods where we caught frogs. The house on a street named Marigold. The side cracked when the earthquake shook us like rag dolls. Home came in every shape and color. Sometimes I forgot where I was.

Intricate social structures. A maze nestled in a labyrinth. They left me dumbfounded and friendless.

The girl that always stood in front of me in line, clad in a flowing white dress. I was captivated by that dress. The way it caught the wind. The sun lighting it on fire. I always held up the line. Shoved forward by the boy behind me. She wore it everyday. I would have too.

She said that if I gave her my crayons she would be my friend. I traded the contents of my desk, one item at a time; my Punky Brewster folder and the indigo pencil box where my caterpillars lived. I put them in my pockets. so afraid that I was going to hurt them. I didn't have anything left to give her. The next week I walked home without my shoes. They were pink, she said that was her favorite color.

So I ran. And when they caught onto me, I stopped going altogether. I stuffed my backpack with as many books as I could. Sometimes I remembered to pack myself a lunch; peanut butter and jelly, triangles, no crust. The trick was to walk to the bus stop as slow as you could while still looking like you were trying. I would watch, peeping from behind a bush, as the bus pulled away from the curb. Freedom.

A park, a shady tree, the tepee I made by the creek. I read.

I'm still reading.

Some people claim that fire is the most powerful force on Earth. I say that it is art. It is a gathering of words on a page. The stroke of a brush on canvas. The silence between the notes. It whispers to you. Reveals a part of you to yourself. Another piece of the puzzle.

Art resides in the space where the known meets the unknown.  It is in that space that I became an artist. The architect of my life.  Where I learned that time is not linear. That our stories don't read from beginning to end. This is a choose your own adventure book and we are the authors. We can change the past and write the future. Where there was suffering, we can add meaning. Where there was loss, we can find joy.