The other day I found myself thinking I might like to have a gun.  Not to shoot, it, of course—well, maybe.  It was the gun as a piece of intricate, precision machinery that attracted me.  Delicate mechanisms, superbly honed, flawlessly fitted, I could almost feel the pleasure of its balance in my hand. 

It would be a small gun; a derringer, wasn’t that a lady’s gun?  Something with a mother-of-pearl inlay.  Almost like a piece of jewelry.

I remember when I bought my first—and so far only—pocket knife.  The handle separated lengthwise and folded around to encapsulate the blade.  Such a powerful feeling it gave me to hold it. 

So what’s the attraction of the gun? 

Just having it, I say. 

Liar.

It’s power.  The pocket knife, upgraded. 

I have to tell you that this desire, springing to mind as I came to the end of a peaceful walk with my dog, astonished and horrified me.  Yet, I saw quite suddenly the beauty of a firearm, the way gun enthusiasts describe it.   A small thing, so exquisitely precise as to be considered almost delicate—yet still deadly.

There was no redeeming value for me.  And I knew if I possessed it, I would fire it.  It had to be so; else why would it call to me?

Perhaps I am a firearm, compact, deceptively put together, masking my true form and purpose behind attractiveness.  Perhaps humanity is a firearm, waiting to go off.  But the trigger is so often pulled by some childish hand—and the world is never the same.

Desire rising.  I heard a radio interview last night with a Jewish Biblical scholar.  She said God desired Desire.  And humanity was born. 

Every time I feel desire, I am God.

Only God did something about it. 

Will I?

Families disintegrate. 

Parents die.  Children may or may not do their best to keep the ties close, but the geographic and emotional center is gone. 

It is the way of the world.

Sometimes, new geographic and emotional centers have been forming, even before the old ones passed away.  Children marry and have their own children.  For a while, the family expands.  Like a cell dividing, it separates but the molecule remains. 

Until death comes.

Life goes on as it must.  It has always been this way; it seems likely that it always will be. 

The Great Hand of Nature turns the kaleidoscope and shuffles the elements; new beauty arises. 

Yes, someone close to me is dying.  I am struggling to accept it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about barriers and boundaries recently.  For a while, I thought they were the same, but then I came to realize that they were quite different.  And actually now, I’m toying with the idea that barriers might not exist at all.

I got started on this particular exploration because I felt like I kept running into barriers.   You know them—rules, bureaucracies, laws of physics, etc.   I didn’t like being prevented from doing whatever it was I wanted to do.  I experienced the barrier as an obstacle to be gotten around somehow or—particularly when I was in a ferocious mood—demolished.   

One day, however, a revolutionary thought popped into my head: what if I stopped trying to circumvent or push through the barrier and instead investigated it. 

Now I’m in many ways a visual person, so in my mind I immediately saw a wall, and in my mind, I approached the wall with the intention of discovering as much as I could about it.  Imagine my surprise when, as I got closer, I began to see that the wall was not a solid monolith.  It had cracks and spaces.  And it wasn’t a thin, hard thing; it was wide and porous.

And then a really curious thing happened.  I began to see the barrier as a very dynamic place, a place where energy is being exchanged all the time.  Far from being static, it was always in flux.

I could see particles of energy moving in this wide band, leaving, joining, traveling within the borders, which were themselves more like those clouds I see in the sky, fraying at the edges.  It reminded me of a crowd of people, and suddenly, I knew how I could cross it.

All I needed to do was cooperate with it.  It was the most natural thing in the world!

I mean, if I want to get through a crowd, I could just throw myself at the edges of it.  I would probably be bounced backwards, maybe even fall down and hurt myself.   A better strategy would be to move into an opening, any opening I see, and then find my way, small space by small space, through the mass until I reach the other side.   And so what if my path is not a straight line?  Nothing in nature is a straight line!

And here’s something even more exciting.  As I feel my way through the crowd, the crowd itself, the flow of its very energy, can help me get through!

I bet you can see now why I’m thinking that there might not even be any barriers in life, just—let’s call them boundaries.  Because, after all, a boundary is just a border area where something ends and something else begins.  And if I want to get to the other side, it’s just up to me to find my way, step by step.

The lights went out.  A sharp spurt of fear shot from my stomach to my heart.  My heart responded by pounding.  Thud.  Thud.

Why was I afraid?  Was this not still my house, with doors and windows closed and locked, with solid roof overhead?

But so dark!  No LED glow from the bedside clock, no soft reflection from the kitchen night light, no comforting red bar telling me the phone was in its live cradle.

And so silent, too.  No TV-DVR hum, no refrigerator rattle, no soft purr from the ceiling fan.

So dark, so quiet.

“Too quiet,” said a voice in my head, from a thousand movies—usually just before something horrible happened.

Is that where this fear comes from?  The primal alert system that is triggered when things go too quiet in the dark, coupled with the tribal lore of the terror that can be unleashed only when the visual and auditory barriers erected and constantly maintained by modern life, fail?

Beside me, my husband snored.  Why was that?

Why do women wake and not men, our protectors?  Is it because we can never forget our own vulnerability?  Is it because fear has been trained into us?

Every religion in the world praises the light and shuns the dark.  Is it because we remember the darkness of the womb?  But the womb was a safe place where we were nourished and protected.  It was the light that heralded separation, pain and loss.

I have heard that in the time before patriarchy, darkness was revered.  All life comes from darkness.  In darkness, I return to the unknown, the potential, where anything is possible.  Maybe that’s what scares me.  Who—or what—I might be when I am stripped of everything I use to distract myself.

When the power gores off, whose power is it?  Am I not the same person I was a minute ago?  With the same intelligence, the same strength, the same will?  If there is a power failure, why should it be mine? 

The lights came on.