StandingWater Creations

As a young child, and probably not so young, I had a few directions I wanted to go in my life. Admittedly, these directions were not well founded in reality as being an adventurer or locator of antiquities didn?t seem to fall in line with degree pursuits or international law. Indiana Jones is not the paragon of virtue and excitement his movies would make him out to be. Many countries, most countries, feel it a grievous act for someone like Indiana Jones to enter their country and take their cultural heritage. Cultural heritage has, almost, become the bedrock upon which many societies have replaced religion.

Growing up in Central Texas you, as a student, become indoctrinated with Texas history. Not having grown up in other states, I am not privy to whether or not places like New York state, Delaware, California, or Ohio require their students to take rather intensive courses in state history; regardless, in Texas you learn about the history of the state. One element of that history is the history of the Spanish and gold. The Spanish wanted gold and gold was mined out of the ground. Cherokees, who had a pretty significant presence in Texas, at the time, and no interest in gold. Gold is only valuable if you, as an individual, or a society makes it worth something. We ascribe value to rare and desirable gems and minerals. Gold is a mineral. Diamonds are gems. As a result of the Spanish desire for gold they would mine it and then transport the gold south to Spanish controlled ports in today?s Mexico.

The Cherokee nation had no need for gold. As far as they were concerned gold was useless and held little or no value. I would imagine, or I do imagine today, that all they saw was gold dust, dirt, and didn?t realize that the gold had any value whatsoever. At least, they didn?t understand why the Spanish were transporting dirt from one part of their nation to another. Cherokee?s were interested in the horses that helped transport the gold and after attacking and killing the Spanish would discard the gold into rivers. In many cases they discarded smelted gold in bricks into the rivers. Gold held no value to them.

What makes this interesting, and important, is that I am almost constantly in need of some kind of stimulation. My attention span is nearly non-existent. What looks like me paying a great deal of attention and appearing to be calm, amidst the storms around me, is long practiced patience and sitting still when I want to be outside running or moving about. It feels unnatural for me to be cooped up in a building or sitting still. Imagine sitting at church for three hours and what that does to me. Church, though important, is very difficult in the sense that I have to sit still and listen. There is nothing to do but sit and listen.

As a child, though, I wanted to find some of that Spanish gold. I wanted to wander along the Lampasas River and discover an undiscovered cash of gold. Barring the Lampasas, wandering along the creek, and in it, that ran down the hill from the house I grew up in, I wanted to locate caverns, buried treasure, antiquities ? those items of cultural importance that cannot leave the country of origin legally, and make a name for myself by having stumbled across treasure. I wanted to be Indiana Jones and Alan Quartermaine all rolled together. I wanted to be James Bond and every other action star turned big screen hero because that was what, in my mind, I was destined to do. But more than anything else, more than life and breath ? almost, I wanted to find Spanish gold and barring that, I wanted to find Brigham?s Bees. I?ve never found either.

Growing up with these fantasies was not easy. My younger siblings would get dragged along behind me as I wandered, without sharing, through storm drains and up and down creek bottoms looking for something. I?m not sure I ever really understood what was special or important about what I was looking for. I don?t believe I understood the significance of finding Spanish gold or even in looking along the creek bottoms for turtles and frogs and crawfish (I don?t recall seeing any of them). For that matter, I was impressed when I came across iron pyrite (fools gold). These adventures merely took me on trips out of the ordinary and out of the day-to-day doldrums and into the realms of fantasy and illusion. Though the scrapes and bruises, the muddy shoes and wet trousers were all real, the reasons for the adventures were false and lacked reality. My entire life I wanted real and all I could do was play act.

As I grew older I wanted to create something lasting and exciting; something that resembled, barely, Indiana Jones with a hint of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, and smacking of James Bond. In my mind I wanted to be the main character and anything I wrote or created would be based off of me but would be as exciting as all of those characters and their escapades combined. I wanted my life to be exciting and what I got was something decidedly less so. I?ve never left the North American Continent. I never pursued a desire, or dream, to travel to space. I?m just now working hard to complete my degree, and I am looking at a few more years of famine before I can expect to sit down to the feast. My life is not what I wanted it to be by the time I turned 25, 30, or soon, 32. I look at those numbers and all I see is a bottom line that grows larger with nothing to show as a return on investment. My life?s work has produced nothing of substance and I wonder how much longer I must go before I finally produce something.

About six months ago, while working for Borders Books, Movies, and Music in Concord, NH I was standing around talking to some coworkers. These are people I might?ve made friends with outside of work, but had gotten to know as a result of that place. I worked hard and hated that job. I don?t know that I hated the job so much as I hated the fact that I made an agreement to stay for a period of time, which stopped me from looking for anything else, and by the time I could start looking for something else, nothing was available to me until I took a job with Fidelity in Merrimack, NH. The job with Fidelity Investments was important in that it helped me redirect myself back toward Utah, education, and refocus on what I wanted to accomplish in my life, but it is a job and one that, like so many others, smacks of no future because I haven?t the background to be successful. That seems so true of so many job that I often wonder what I am expected to accomplish, or to have accomplished, up until this point. Why do I wake up in the morning if today is going to be exactly like yesterday?

There are answers to all of these questions. There are answers to the doldrums our lives, my life, seem to take on. We go through the repetition of life in order to provide, to live and pay rent or the mortgage, to gain confidence, to gain experience, to become better tomorrow than we were yesterday, to be someone. Being someone does not denote being famous or well known for our cooking or house wares, for the ability to act or sing or play an instrument, or because we have achieved notoriety as a result of a video we made while drunk and stupid and thinking we were in love. Being someone does suggest that our ducks are in a row and our priorities are straight and you have an idea of where you are going. Not the lack of knowing.

At Borders we were standing around, sitting around, walking around, and talking. We were discussing things and suddenly an idea struck. Out of the blue I had this notion of what needed to be done and how it could/should come about. I had an idea for a story that could combine a lot of the elements that I tried to incorporate into my life and never really succeeded. I?d stumbled upon an idea that would allow me to adventure, but do it through the eyes of a central character, once removed.

Yet, therein lays the woes and the problems I?ve encountered for almost a decade. I keep thinking I can do something that history and perseverance dictate I may never be able to do. Am I capable of following a dream or is it time to drop what I want and just move forward? Can I write effectively or is this all just a pipe dream. The successes have been too few and too far between to allow me to, forever, keep the illusion alive that I can find success at the one thing I?ve wanted my entire life. I look at 32 and all I see is a large number with nothing behind it. I have nothing to show for 32 years of life. There are no successes I can hold up to the flame of scrutiny. There is nothing that sets me apart from my peers.

I spent the other night meditating on the future. I sat there thinking about how I would take care of rent and other bills come January when I plan to start attending school full time. My schedule, I hope, will have me in classes every day of the week, but most of the day on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. How can I afford to go to school when I look at my financial situation and continue to see a mess? I would imagine that you don?t afford to go to school just like you don?t afford to have children, but the question of money and paying for things still looms large in my mind. How can I afford to do the things I want (and need) to do?

As I consider this I am reminded of J. M. Barrie?s Peter Pan and Mr. Darling. When Mrs. Darling became pregnant with Wendy Mr. Darling went into his study and studiously began going through the books looking to see if they could afford to have Wendy. What he discovered was, with a little scrimping, they might be able to afford it. If they couldn?t Wendy would have to be sent to the orphanage. Mrs. Darling was excited to learn that they could keep Wendy, then John, and finally Michael (and eventually the Lost Boys). At each stage in the process, though, Mr. Darling had to go and work through the finances to make sure it was possible to keep each child, otherwise, the child would have to be sent to the orphanage.

School is a lot like that. How can I afford it and at what economic threshold will I be forced to send my dreams to the orphanage? I can see, clearly, what kind of money I may be able to make and I know what it takes to pay my bills every month. I can adjust some of those bills, but the outcome is that I have bills that have to be paid and if I am going to be in school full time how do I make the money necessary to pay those bills?

So, as I sat there meditating on my future and money and bills my mind has a tendency to grasp at straws, play through a scenario, and then discard what doesn?t seem logical or practical. It has that tendency with most areas of my life except for writing. When it comes to writing, for some strange and weird reason, it grasps at that straw and holds it up a banner and an answer. Four, five years ago that would?ve been something I could mentally hold onto and decry the naysayers who chanted I would fail. Will I fail?

Does it matter?

The point is that several years ago, before things got really bad; I could grab that straw because, regardless of what happened, I would always land on my feet. That and I have a tendency to jump jobs and sooner or later I would find one that met my needs, at the time, and allow me to work hard and earn what I needed to make the ledger add up at the end of the month. Money is not important, paying bills is. Gold is not valuable, what it represents is. To the Spanish, it was wealth, to the Cherokees, it was horses.

For me the gold at the end of the rainbow, the bottom line of the ledger, the horse is writing; and I keep wondering if it?s worth the effort. Is it worth holding that dream and goal or is it time to follow the advice of my father and let it go? He?s never told me to let it go, but he has shared with me his own dream and goal and what caused him to start working away from what he considered facile to what had to be realistic. Is writing, to me, facile?