Further Enlightenment

Another day, another miracle.

I hear, readers, your (weak and pathetic) hisses of disbelief, and I sympathize. Back in the dark, dark days before Big D and I became BFF, I spent much time wandering in the wilderness, and now that I have reached the Promised Land (which you, most assuredly, have not), I can understand how others might find my exalted position hard to take.

Nonetheless, I continue to be the Chosen One. Unmistakable signs of my close, personal friendship with Big D have begun popping up at regular intervals.

Now, I realize that some folk say that there are signs of God everywhere if you only know where to look. This, of course, is utter nonsense. There are signs of Big D everywhere if I know where to look because I am among the elected. Unless you have also been chosen (and trust me, you haven't), your best bet for experiencing the unknown vast is through the repeated ingestion of hallucinogens.

Anyway, yesterday morning, I reached for my coffee mug to take it to the kitchen to clean it and then refill it with coffee. I've been using the same mug for the past 2.5 years, and I never remember to clean it until the next morning. This means that my mug almost always looks disgusting because I always take my one cup of coffee with two Splendas and a heaping teaspoon of my coffee mix (roughly equal parts unsweetened cocoa powder and nonfat dry milk, plus a healthy dose of cinnamon), which makes the coffee taste good but doesn't really dissolve. I drink the coffee in about ninety seconds, then I set the mug aside, and it looks something like this picture until the next day.

That is, until yesterday morning, when I picked up mug and saw this:

If anything confused me about my initial experience with Big D, it was his/her/its choice of symbols. The outstretched hands of blessing are universally recognizable, yes, but they are not so much in keeping with my particular religious views. I believe in a much more diffuse divinity, some sort of blend of animism and pantheism which says that god is everywhere and everything. At the same time, I only believe in god in a metaphorical sense, so I'm really more of a panatheist than a pantheist. In fact, when Big D tries to tease me about something, I sometimes resort to the retort: "Maybe, bitch, but at least I exist." He loves that.

The nearly perfect yin-yang sign that I found in my coffee mug yesterday is a symbol often associated with taoism, which is a both a diffuse faith and a faith in diffusion. Much more appropriate and comforting than the outstretched (some might go so far as to say grasping) hands of (y)our Lord.

That one example notwithstanding, Big D is not so much a hands-on divinity. Feeding the multitudes, parting the Red Sea, writing his name in the topography of Africa: all not his style. (If you catch him in an unguarded moment, he'll cop to turning water into wine, but he says that it was very much vin ordinaire. Perhaps he's just being modest, though. It's hard to tell.) He's not one to hit you (well, me, really) over the head with obvious messages; he leaves the interpretation up to the chosen.

But in this case, the interpretation is fairly obvious. The yin-yang symbol represents balance, and the slight muddiness in the symbol in the cup is a reminder that I need to restore balance, a clear reference to the fact that b&c has been getting a lot more than I have this week. In fact, on Wednesday evening, when I got home with the kids, he bragged that he hadn't negotiated the contract for his upcoming trip to Jordan because "opportunity knocked twice."

When people tell you that open relationships thrive on honesty, they're right, but only up to a point. The partners have to honestly negotiate the rules of the relationship, and if they do more than nudge the outlines of the rules, then they have to come clean about it. Much more than that can pretty quickly become TMI, unless, of course, you're a particularly gifted story teller and your partner gets excited by the details. B&c is not a gifted story teller, and his details are always much tamer than mine.

This, truly, is not about jealousy. I was above jealousy even in my pre-enlightenment days. I do not, on the other hand, ever expect to be above envy, and if I've just spent a full day at work and then spent ninety minutes negotiating traffic and the multiple pick-up points of the kids, I don't really want to hear about how you spent the whole day on your back. (Especially when you've made meatloaf for dinner.) This is almost sure to lead to (momentary) petulance of the he-got-his-candy-I-want-my-candy-too-it-isn't-faaaaaair nature.

Fortunately, we're about to enter a long weekend, and I hope to have at least some opportunity to settle the score. In reality, envy is a very short-term emotion. I was over it almost immediately, and in my more rational moments, I don't care much about the body count, but I have to pay attention to the messages the universe is sending me, don't I?

Besides, I'm kind of curious about trying out my new line: "God told me to fuck you."