Another Spellbinding Moment that I was obsessed with....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvbN-cWe0A0
I've watched it about twenty times. He jumped FROM SPACE and landed on his FEET. Just imagine what you could do with even better technology and less gravity!
Um, yeah.....technology. Not my area.
But did I let that stop me? Big fat liars aren't stopped by much. So, no.
Adelpho stood on the highest turret of the Devil Valley Overlook tower, scanning the clouds. He looked down at the crowd of about two hundred fans waiting on the viewing platform, milling around the manicured creosote and yucca landscaping of the Overlook.
Just two kilometers below the Overlook platform Devil Valley was a stretch of rust-red sand enclosed by 5,000 meter-high cliffs on either side, 20 kilometers apart. The wind shoved its way down the valley, blasting the Overlook audience; they clung to the iron railings as it whipped their very best quilted silk and mohair coats and hoods and dusted their clear silk polymer masks with sand. These were not people who came above ground often.
Small dust devils rose and fell in the distance. The atmo was picking up energy with the increasing heat of the day. Adelpho ran gracefully down, planting his large feet sideways on the small stone steps. He was accustomed to maneuvering his unusually large frame though a world constructed for a much smaller majority. He ducked into the ice glass broadcast pod, which was built into the base of the Overlook tower, and released his mask. He cleared his throat, waiting for the ping in the pod speakers. It sounded, and he grinned at the internal pod cameras.
“Thanks for joining us at the Company 1 Interworld flight exhibition, live from Devil Valley in Eastern Valles Marineris on Mars! The best flyer on both worlds is with us today. As always.” Del anticipated the grins of the faces on the monitor; they would react the same way they always did. It would all come together ten minutes from now after the message made it to Earth, was processed, and came back to Mars. Years of anticipating reactions had honed Adelpho's instincts, and no delay from three minutes to twenty could derail his timing. “We love Kalleyno, don't we?” Adelpho laughed, “Well, she's hunting for the perfect devil today!”
Del waited through the satellite anchor's lines in the script, reacting to them as if he were listening to them. “For our audience on Earth, please remind us about the differences in conditions between the worlds - Mars has only one third of Earth's gravity, correct? And air density is almost one quarter of Earth's by now? Also, would you describe how those flight suits work, Del?”
“Of course,” he said. With the right mixture of warmth and cheer he went on to explain baby science to an audience who had heard it hundreds of times. Again. But that was Interworld Media. Earth owned the grids and the signals and always had, so all broadcasts had to be geared to the wetbrain audience.
Mano pinged his ear comm. Del continued to plow through the speech he could have recited in his sleep, wrapping it up with, “And just now I'm being hailed by Kalleyno's father Mano, award-winning gene editor and head of programming for Interworld Mars.”
We'll come right back to you, Del," were the next lines in the script.
"OK, Interworld. We'll come back in a minute." he grinned again, then nodded to the wing-suited MC who had been watching him through the translucent wall of the pod, awaiting his signal.
The MC waved two tall red, blue and green silk Mars Planet flags at the silvery-pink blimps overhead. The pylon and drone cameras all spun away from the valley floor, focusing on the blimps and the upcoming spectacle. Music burst over the crowd.
Del tucked his chin to bring his mask back over his face and punched the panel of the pod, taking firm steps into the blasting wind as the door slipped shut behind him. Mano pinged him again. Del opened the channel.
"Where is she?" said Mano.
"How would I know that?" Del shouted it, and not just because of the blaring music behind him.
Mano sighed, his voice crackling with comm distortion. "You might have to start. OK?"
This happened more and more often. Kallo was the daughter and the real child, so Mano was blind to the changes in her attitude and tried to blame Del whenever things went wrong.
“OK,” said Del, keeping his frustration hidden as he always did.
"And." said Mano.
"Yes."
"I have a bad feeling about her riding a devil today."
"Another feeling?" Del kept his voice neutral. After spending most of his life with Mano he could almost hear the man's thoughts in moments like this. Del waited a beat, then finally said,
"That's why Interworld bought the broadcast. That's what everyone wants to see-"
"I know that. I just have a bad feeling. I think you should start with a stunt jump.” Mano clicked off.
The crowd began to shout; the monitor feeds from the drone cameras swerved, blurred and now focused on Kallo, coming in fast. Too fast. As always.
This was a tense moment for Del. Although she had grown no older in the last ten years Kallo's personality was changing; she was increasingly unpredictable. She never repeated an entrance and refused to choreograph anything. But it was good show, and the worlds ate it up.
She began tumbling end-over-end, too late on descent. Then she pulled up, predicting thermals the way no other flier could.
It was a gift of her design, and one of her late mother's most brilliant gene edits. Kallo had an extremely enhanced sense of smell (the addition of a canine gene) and could predict changes in air currents before anyone else. That, in combination with her athletic instincts and the perfect muscle strength-to-weight ratio of a child's body that never changed, made her the most intuitive flier on both worlds - and her mother Ang's masterpiece. In many ways Kallo would always be unbeatable. Beneath the bitterness of the last few years, Del was still wonder struck by her. He still admired her. He even still loved her.
She rolled into a bank, throwing her arms back and legs forward and apart in the denser rush of air, stalling in mid-flight like an owl. Then she fell into a series of back somersaults, stretched flat, and deployed her largest chute. She turned and glided in sideways, bypassing the landing platform. She landed on the edge of the Overlook, barreling through the middle of the screaming crowd and forcing them to duck out of the way of her recollapsing chute, until she finally threw herself on top of Del.
He caught her and swung her around. He wanted to toss her on the ground like a sack, but instead he offered her to the pylon cameras with an overhead twirl like a dance partner. She laughed. He lowered his head to speak into her ear.
"He doesn't want you to spin today," said Del.
Kallo gaped at him, then laughed again. "Well, he can jump off. This is a perfect day!"
"He says-"
Kallo slipped under his arm and into the broadcast pod, locking the door. She popped her mask and faced the cameras.
Without hearing a word, Del knew how the scripting would go; Kallo would go off-book, truncate the points and leave early with barely a smile, creating an editing nightmare for the Interworld staff on Earth. Despite all of his coaching she was as awkward and unlikeable on camera as she was magical in flight. Del marveled that she still got away with so much rudeness, but Interworld would just make jokes about it. When you're a champion, Del thought, all is forgiven. Well make your own rules, then, champ.
Del's private (and illegal) channel pinged. He glanced past the broadcast pod, past the crowd, down the valley. Conditions were nearly perfect for devils. He shouldn't go underground at this moment. But when he looked at the private channel readout inside his mask, he recognized the one sender he had been waiting for.
He stepped quickly through the subentry door and into the underground hallway, running down and stopping mid-stairway, away from the brilliant light of the greenhouse windows that ran along the tunnel walls. He glanced up at the ceiling screens, which constantly shimmered and blinked with real-time images from the camera feeds above ground monitors. It was quiet in the sublevels right now – most people were watching the exhibition at home. He was alone, and safely in a blind spot.
He opened the channel. Jennifer Tran smiled on his mask screen. Her delicate features were bent slightly by the satellite relay transmission, coming all the way from Earth three minutes ago.
"Adelpho, it's Jennifer from Company One. Is this a good time?"
It was always best to start negotiations with the upper hand, Del reminded himself.
He said, “I'm busy today. Make your pitch.” Then he waited the three minutes.
Mano pushed his gliding chair with his single foot, sending it to the center of the Grid Tower observation room. He bit his lower half-lip as Kallo's image tumbled across the stack of screens that ringed the room, just above his data screens. She knew what she was doing. Still, his single eye lingered; he watched her stretch in a horizontal pose and pull her chute. He laughed out loud. She was a remarkable child, the most remarkable child on both worlds. He and her mother had made sure of that.
One data screen blinked and scrolled a new set of deep space reads fed from the Luna and Phobos arrays and from the comet stations, in columns of racing numbers. He watched every bit of data as his daughter made her spectacular, shocking landing on the Overlook, right into the crowd.
He looked at the readouts again for a few moments, while she interviewed for Interworld. Still, he couldn't find data to confirm what he was feeling.
He pinged Kallo on the main channel; he wanted the whole crew to hear the exchange.
"What, Daddy? We're getting good winds out here with real potential. I gotta go!"
"Something feels wrong today, Puffin," he used the nickname affectionately, but it also worked to get her attention when she was distracted.
"What feels wrong?" Then he overheard someone talking to his daughter in gushing, enthusiastic tones. She would shrug them off and walk away. Del complained about Kallo's lack of social grease, but why did she need any? She was a smart girl, and knew what was important.
"Just shut it, why don't you?" he heard her shout at someone (this always made him laugh) then, to him, "Well, what do you want me to do, Daddy?" then she gasped, "Oh!"
Mano looked up at the live screens; the drone cameras were focusing on a row of dust devils.
"Bye, Daddy!" the end of the word cut off, which meant she had muted him again.
He wanted to tell her to stay down, but he didn't have data to justify it. They had already spent the money from this exhibition on equipment. And it went against nearly all of his instincts to keep her on the ground.
A ping from the Overlook broadcast tower sounded. Mano's one eye looked at the comm panel, and the channel opened.
"Everything alright?" It was Anso, Overlook operator and producer of the broadcast, calling him from the control room in the Overlook tower. Mano had left the main communication channel open for this reason. At the very least, everyone should be on the alert.
"So far," said Mano, "But keep your mask on. They don't want me, do they?"
"No, I made it clear this time. No interview,"
"Come back after she's done," said Mano, "I'm going to merge."
Anso hesitated, then said, "I thought you weren't doing that as often anymore. "Isn't it risky if-"
"Come back when she's done." said Mano, and clicked off.
Mano hated interviews. He especially hated being asked the same questions every time about the old scandal, about being dragged before the United Mars Science Council. Worse, he hated being asked if he would share the “secret”. He had been officially reprimanded for violating genetic ethics law, but that was a slap on the wrist. What truly ticked off his fellow scientists and Company 1 was his refusal to share the “off switch”. No one had yet hacked the code he had used to freeze Kallo's adult development. Someone would figure it out, probably soon, but that was not his problem.
He was indifferent to the opinions of anyone but his daughter, and all she had ever wanted was to be a flight champion.
"I want to be the greatest flyer of all time, Daddy. That's all I want.” Her big silver eyes had pleaded with him, open so wide that thin milky strips of her third eyelids were showing. “Right now I'm aerodynamically perfect. And when I grow up I'll lose it all!”
It was not a childhood whim. It was his daughter's longing to live to her full potential. So he and Del had set the surgical bots to alter her metabolic code, freezing her age forever at twelve years old;and he then ordered Del to delete the settings. It would have been irresponsible not to. Mano of course worried about misuse of the procedure.
She was an oddity on both worlds, but that just sold more tickets. Kallo, the freak who had not aged past twelve, was a star, a champion athlete, and an extreme wing suit pioneer. No one could match her, which had been the whole point. Kallo had never known her mother. And Mano hadn't been able to save his wife in the accident. He couldn't fix that. But he could make sure their daughter had a chance to live her dream.
Usually, Mano had a sense of power. His monitoring systems relayed deep space data at the highest speed available. He was able to upload supplemental data into his own cortex to collate with his intuition, then download it back into the central grid quantum porcessing data system for cross-checking. Still, nothing looked unusual..and yet.
Mano looked at the desk assistant bot; it reacted to his glance, marching across the tea-stained work surface. The cushioned arm of the skull support interface slid smoothly up out of the surface and locked into position. Mano nestled his one unruined cheek in the saddle. Through decades of practice he had mastered starting the interface with a thought. A window opened in his vision.
As data poured into his mind from the central processor his one eye zipped rapidly, his mind sieving anomalies that the program, being inorganic, was powerless to spot. He couldn't stay here long with his unsteady health; the interface could cause more neural injury if he stressed himself. But he needed to search deeper.
Most scientists were embarrassed by intuition – it came with that “wetbrain” Earth stigma. But Mano had been raised by his Hopi scientist grandmother to use both intuition and data in conjunction, and never one without the other.
Kallo managed to get away from the people who wanted to talk to her. Why don't they leave me alone? Do they think I can fly with them hanging on me? She fumed to herself, breaking away and running to the edge of the Overlook, pushing past people in the crowd who hung on the iron railings. She ran out onto the landing platform and stood shifting from foot to foot on her unsteady ankles, inhaling through her nose and open mouth, swaying, turning her face in the winds, snuffling, gauging.
The shimmering dance blimps, scrolling brilliantly colored cactus flower designs on their skins, had descended to performance elevation. Aerial dancers slid down tethers in formation, their red, yellow and pink costumes fluttering and streaming with ribbons as they bounced and whirled to the Tuvan chorus with soaring violins and pounding beat of powow drums. The crowd smiled and clapped politely. This was just the pre-show.
Cool prevailing winds were buffeting Kallo's face. More from south than north, warmer from the south, colder from above - good rotation conditions. She sucked in the slight funk from warming sand, still waiting for the ground to gather more energy. Then came a faint smattering of scent from a higher elevation as cold air was pulled down from the mesas, carrying the sting of bristle cone and a bite of frost.
Kallo leaped from the platform, spreading her wings. She huffed deeply and quickly to catch more scent of cold downdrafts, then barrel rolled right, following a dense run of chilled air down. The drop from the Overlook was only one and a half kilometers but she hit the ground at the fastest speed she could run, following the cold air onto the warmest spot and Yes!
She sprang off her hands and into a triple leap, landing exactly where she had wanted to, and exactly when. Her ankles crunched on impact; she cried out, but put the sensation out of her mind.
There was a kick under her feet as the first twist of the dust devil began and then she was at the pinnacle of the jump, all her muscles jamming tightly, spinning into an updraft.
She cupped her wings over her chest, adjusting with a series of minute, faster-than-thought instinctual shifts and turns, keeping herself in the plume until it began to fade out, catching another, climbing inside the spiraling air currents.
The energy was building as she ascended; the currents were denser and more powerful as she rode higher and higher, jets of sand slapping her suit. Her heart began to thud with more than the athletic effort. She began to imagine the curve of the world from high in the atmo, the milky orange of Mars capped in a crescent of black. The edge of space.
Now there was less power driving her up as the air began to thin. It was colder. But here came another strong, warm upward jet full of dust and sand, and Kallo rolled herself into it, cupping her wings and muttering, Come on, come on, as splatters of fine silica rattled against her hood.
Kallo's breath was frosty inside her mask. A weaker jet of warmer air was slipping by and she rolled onto that one now, hunching, poised in the most aerodynamic position possible, all her senses trained on going up, up.
Kallo was breathing even harder. The plume beneath her was weakening and there wasn't another. At the same time the edges of her vision began to shimmer as she searched above; the sky directly overhead was dark, but she couldn't see the black curve of space yet. She searched for the stray sparkle of a star.
Then she was blinded with blasting light.
She squeezed her eyes shut in reaction but the vicious brightness wasn't dimmed-her eyes throbbed with red and white and then her vision simply went black.
When I was a kid I loved the wide Wide world of Sports, with the The ':human drama of athletic competition....The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat," and the same film of that poor Austrian wiping out on the ski jump week after week. But what I also loved was the scope of the show; one week it was shot in the Alps, another in Maui. You never knew where the cameras were going to be panning over next. I used to imagine what it would be like when the cameras were sweeping over the landscapes of other planets. That's why the Wind Spindle opens before an athletic exhibition on Mars. When I read about dust devils on Mars going all the way to the top of the atmosphere, right to the edge of space, my imagination spun out. What if you could ride one all the way up there? What would that take? How tiny would you have to be? How aerodynamic? How skilled? How well-geared?
I did my best to get as close to the reality as possible for this story, although I did cut some corners, and as my idol, Ursula LaGuine, boldly states, storytellers are all LIARS, and I am a Big Fat Liar and that is the job by definition. I just hope to tell vivid, entertaining lies.
Thanks for reading.
The Wind Spindle, Part 1Kallo glided through the clear Martian sky, looking for a devil to ride into space. She opened her arms wide, catching an updraft, gliding higher to her favorite altitude. Five kilometers up, the air pressure was just low enough to give a spaciousness in her chest that was like euphoria. She guided her eye camera over the landscape of Mars below, fromcentral Grid Tower carved into Citadel Cliff to the mosaic of pearlescent ice-glass windows of the basalt cave cities of Dxi.
She dropped her left wing and barrel rolled twice, correcting her glide to get another shot of the landscape on this bright morning. One hundred kilometers to the west of the oxblood-colored cliffs on the buff canyon floor, herds of ironwool sheep meandered along the trench steppes south of New Khan. The yurts and hogans of Kinlani were obscured now by the misty circles of the central atmospheric processors (the villagers called them CAPS) spewing the moist mix of nitrogen and O2 over the little communities, creating the bumpy pillow of air up here.
“How was that? Good live shot?” She said into her comm.
“Perfect, Puffin. Interworld will love it for an intro. I'll send it,” her father's voice replied.
“I'm going to take a break, Daddy.”
“You're opening the exhibition.”
Kallo sighed. “The dancers haven't started yet. I'll just be a minute.”
“The transmission starts in five. And don't you try to-“
Kallo ticked her left shoulder, muting her comm. He hated that. But she had one errand before the show.
She tucked her arms tight to her sides and pulled her legs together in a dive. Cliff walls striped with desert varnish zipped by as she pitched into Olivine Canyon. She pulled her legs forward and apart; her ironsilk wings and legwing, which pulled taught between her legs, caught the thin Mars air but would never have been enough on their own to slow her to landing speed. She tensed the muscles in her forearms, causing her skin to pull on the silk anchor patches embroidered into her epidermis.
She felt the soft jerk as the air caught thousands of silk microfeathers emerging from the suit. She rolled her right shoulder, releasing the tail, which plumed and rippled behind her as she brought her arms high and back in a sudden braking posture. Her small chute deployed; she touched down on Olivine Mesa. The chute and tail chased her, rolling and folding themselves into tight packs on the back of the suit as she ran with an awkward, pigeon-toed lope. Kallo's ankles had never been strong and she had never been gainful on foot. She slowed next to the cliff edge and plopped down, legs crossed.
Her mask, eye shield and hood slid back, releasing her coarse shrub of short black hair. The dry, cold sting of true atmo instantly dried the sweat on the bridge of her wide, flat nose and her delicate upper lip. She rubbed her hooded eyes with the back of her gloved hand, blinking them quickly in a flicker of silver irises.
She laughed as a dozen crows circled and began landing around her.
“You are so slow!” She pulled a package from her belt, sifting crumbs of pinion cookies made with yucca honey and cactus figs. She scattered the crumbs, which tumbled along the sandstone in the canyon breeze, but kept a large one in her palm.
“Goat, come here.”
A small crow with grizzled feathers bristling on the back of his head suggesting horns and one tarnished iris hopped onto her arm. Goat was descended at least one hundred generations ago from the most recent adapted crows, but he already showed a sign of mutation: he had only the one mercurial, radiation-reflecting eye and even that was deteriorating. Kallo's mother had designed the self-updating adapted gene code, but crows mutated very quickly. The imperfection made her feel closer to Goat and to her mother,plus her father knew nothing about her secret friendships, which gave her deep satisfaction. She stroked the black bird's ruffled head, and then offered the cookie fragment in her hand.
“Got a show today, Goat,” she said. “So wish me good winds. I'm looking for the right devil today.”
“You're that spinner,” said a soft voice behind her. Kallo jumped. She had never seen another person up here on the mesa.
The old woman's face was deeply creased and red-brown, her hair tied at the back of her head in a mound under her sheepskin hood and compressed by her cheap glass and leather goggles. Tendrils of white escaped and fluttered around her face. The laser brand on her cheek, logo of the long gone Iron Sheep Corporation, had been burned so deeply into her double-thick skin that it must have been too risky to cut it out. The poor old thing didn't even have adapted skin. Kallo had a moment of pity for the everlasting mark, mixed with revulsion at the idea of skin that never sluffed. She was so old!
The woman was swinging a long spindle and feeding a large fluff of ivory wool onto it, churning yarn without a glance at her hands. “But spinning isn't everything,” she said.
Kallo had seen herders on the steppes and workers in the silk labs hand spinning since she could remember. So many people just stood around on the ground all the time, making yarn and other stupid things and meditating on Spider Woman. Kallo was instantly bored by the woman and wanted her to go away.
“How long have you been twelve years old?” the woman asked.
“Ten years,” Kallo's voice was leaden with resentment. “You can read all about it on the grid.”
Same questions every time. People could just read about her on all the grid fan pages. Why did they always want to make her listen to their morbid curiosity when they met her? It was just one reason Kallo hated most people.
Goat bounced over to the old woman and flapped his wings twice, raising himself to the level of her shoulder and settling there. Jealousy kicked under Kallo's breastbone. She wanted to call him back.
“So you are a made, but still you’re a child of fate.”
Kallo glared. “Everyone knows my mother made me. I'm her design. But I'm her child, and my father’s.” she snapped. She waited for more insulting questions, but the woman did not ask the usual ones after that. Instead she said,
“Your mother gave you a Greek name. Do you know about the Fates?”
Kallo scanned the pale grey sky. She opened her mouth wide and sucked air through her mouth and nose at the same time, tasting very faint juniper ash and burnt mutton grease from a miner's lunch fire(they were not supposed to burn above ground)and iron ore. That mine was 40 kilometers away to the southeast, which was also the source of the prevailing winds. She gazed at the distant, feather-fine cirrus clouds. A dust devil could get pulled up very high in the atmosphere today. This thought made her heart race.
“The Fates are three goddesses,” the old woman lifted her goggles and placed them on her forehead, blinking rapidly as her Earth eyes met the merciless, dry cold. “One goddess spins the wool, the next measures, and the last one cuts. You are young and still spinning. But one day you must measure, make decisions. And one day you must decide to let go of something. One day you must make a cut.”
Kallo stood, with only a slight stumble. “Kid stories. My Daddy raised me on science, not things that never even happened. Why are you up here?”
“I came to tell you. One of the Blue Flint Boys is going to break his ax today.”
Kallo scowled. The Blue Flint Boys? That's what they called the Pleiades in Kinlani. Was that supposed to mean some kind of radiation event? She snorted. Her daddy knew everything about space weather. If something was coming, he would already know it.
“Why don't you go jump off, grandmother?”
“My name is Dohna.” Dohna covered her eyes again with her goggles and resumed her craft. Her thick knuckles danced as the yarn whipped, piling onto the spindle even as it bobbed and swayed in the gusty winds. Kallo turned away, looking to the sky.
Not many air molecules up there, she thought. But she longed to get high enough to see the curve of the world dissolving into space, to see the sky going black. Riding a devil all the way up, if she could hold her breath long enough, gain enough velocity on the initial jump this time...
Gote jumped from Dohna's shoulder and glided to Kallo's. He cawed and hopped down her arm.
“Daddy says I'll pass out before I get to see the black,” she whispered to him, turning her back once more on Dohna. “But I’m going to make it. I just need the right devil. Well, it’s show time!” She puckered her lips. Goat met them with his beak, spread his wings, and leaped into the restless air.
Kallo gave herself a shake. The flight suit shifted in some places, rotated slightly in others, and clung to her child's form as the network of integrated microbots in the suit's armature readjusted to her posture. The dull grey triple ironsilk fabric stretched and tucked a million tiny pleats, drawing into an exact fit over her skin. She ticked her chin down, making her eye shield and membrane-thin atmo mask close again over her face, and checked the readout on the inside of the mask. All the components of the suit were on line and show-ready, including her chutes and cocoon ballute, wings, spoilers, tail and legwing.
But she couldn't go like this. The default setting of reflective gray made her virtually invisible in fight.
“Orange!” said Kallo, and the suit blushed brighter and brighter, stopping at a blinding orange with dancing gold designs that changed direction every few seconds, scrolling across the fabric like ripples on water.
Kallo ran seven steps, leaped, pushed off the ground with her hands and flipped once, twice, twisted, thrust her wings wide and just missed Dohna, her toes brushing past the old woman's face as she dove and caught the downdraft from Olivine Mesa, swooping out of the canyon.
It's trucking right along.....like a do dah man.....
The brain surgeon is disappointed and feeling a little helpless.
We're looking into clinical trials and hoping to find one or more in Aurora or Greely rather than Phoenix.
Waiting till late January for the next MRI. Suits me fine. Covid will be peaking in hospitals in January. Maybe I could dodge the peak.
Thereis a surgery that could buy me six months or thereabouts, a laser ablation of the tumor, which is minimally invasive (if any brain surgury is). so that's a not-horrible choice I have, the others potentially being the clinical trials.
We're out of the snuggly territorry of early treatment now. We're in the merciless land of the tunor is gaining and here are our choices. Whatever our choices, the outcome has always been the same, and guaranteed. It's 100% recurrence. Same guarantee we've had since the beginning of this. Same one everybody has.
And now I've got the most overplayed Grateful Dead song in history stuck in my head...
can't help me when I really need ya can ya, tumor?
ANew Age friend was talking to me on the phone the other day as she circled a parking lot, trying to "manifest" a parking space ( Yes, I did mention that she might have a safer "manifesting" if she hung up and focused on one thing at a time.).
Also,I thought to myself, "Let's unpack this Harry Potter magical trunk. So to 'Manifest' that parking space she would have to be controlling a minimum of how many people?.... thousands in traffic! i mean, to you would have to be Dumbledore. This is WAY beyond Harry, much less an ordinary muggle.
I personally know and love several New Age people who are not control freaks, megalomaniacs or raging narcisists, but that's not to say that these aren't traits found among some New Agers.
Unfortunate oncologists dread the day they have to explain to patients that the time has arrived when you can't stop a tsunami by fighting it. This is Nature. People aren't prepared to accept the reality. They've been fighting all the way along and it mattered;suddenly it doesn't matter anymore. Why not? What if we just fight harder now? Because this is cancer. You can't hold off a tidal wave with your defiance.
So then, ow much Manifestin are people to be held metaphysically responsible for?
Some people will rush to hold you resonsible for your own misfortune, which in my view is thee most cowardly of the manifestins. Holding someone responsible for their own good fortune is encouraging, possibly a little codependent ( nobody gets anywhere totally on their own, I'm sorry); But blaming someone for heir own misfortune is solid third-grade mean-girl. "You have bad teeth and have to go to the dentist because you're stupid!"Is built on that logic.
I don't hold with the code of third grade mean girl culture, nor general New Age manifestin cuture, evem though I recognize that at this juncture it's self-serving. I did not manifest this cancer that is eating into my brain. I didn't want this for any purpose. I don' care which doctor theorizes that I manifested it to deal with my subconscious need to externalize my anxieties about fear and self-defense. He can blow me. I did not choose this. Sometimes life hands you shit you didn't choose and you have to deal with that. So this is me dealing. A. Don't say that I in any way wanted this. Fuck off. B. I am not dead yet, no matter what you might be hoping for..i'm still throwing dung like you are. C. Don't feel sorry for me. Brainn tumor patients sleep a lot toward the end and then one day just don't wake up. It's not exactly like being tortured to death by Dr Mengella.It's not even as painful as many cancers.
But if anything I'm saying here matters to you, please take this with you: Stop Blaming People For Their Misfortunes. That's justt MEAN. STOP IT.
Oh! And it's NOT JUST ME after all!
