purpleverses.com

September 20, 2007

Last night between the hours of midnight and 4:30am encases the most heightened sense of reality, existence and greater awareness, I have experienced in years. Attempting to comprehend and express its significance in writing is no easy task. The experience functions on so many levels, I suppose I can only tackle them one by one.

Slightly earlier in the evening, say, 11pm, Athena and I were engaging in what is becoming a regular interaction and display of unwarranted shared giddiness from our mutual sense of excitement that we simply exist and are so incredibly excited about where we are in our lives, what we are capable of doing, and where we will go because of our will, positivity, enthusiasm and willingness to cultivate whatever talent we are lucky enough to realize and work with.

In our continuing quest to show our slightly apprehensive new neighbors our love for them and opinion that they are awesome, I baked our next door landlord a chocolate pound cake in thanks for letting us live in the house we so adore. We then split the pound cake and brought it to our other neighbors–sharing the love, basically. Physical, especially edible, manifestations of goodwill always seem to prove so successful.

Right around when midnight hit, having satisfied our new neighbors and hopefully increased our bond with them through our cake diplomacy mission, Athena decides to call it a day–which for Athena means not going to sleep, but to continue work on her script for her television show. The girl is dedicated. As she turns away, I mention casually that I, myself, am headed up to the rooftop. “What? You can get on the roof?!” Athena’s tone of excitement is all that is required for me to wordlessly turn, head out the door to my station wagon, proceeding to position it under the roof, after which I climb the car and hop up to the roof, which requires a momentary second of fear-suspension, given the difficulty of the move. But I have done it before, and I knew what the significance of “the rooftop” meant to me and was eager to share it with Athena so that she might be similarly affected.

Athena’s struggle between sensing the potential of the unexplored rooftop versus her concern over her previously unimpressive hopping skills was apparent but short-lived, as her sense of adventure enthusiasm to explore quickly overpowered any hesitancy. She leaps, pulls herself up, and together we trek to the apex of the roof, of our house on the apex of the hill, which already overlooks in tandem Echo Park Lake and the downtown Los Angeles skyline. However, the view from the rooftop obliterated any previous view from ground-level, as we could now see, without obstruction, the entire lake and complete skyline of downtown.

We seated ourselves and proceeded to attempt to take in the banquet of visual beauty before us. We were so high up and on a fairly acute angle at the tip of the roof, yet all today I have actually had a quote from the movie 300 of all things replaying in my head that encapsulates that night, that feeling. “It is not fear that grips him, only a heightened sense of things.” Athena and I each sensed a major significance to what we were sharing in that extended moment that was to turn into hours and take forms neither of us would ever expect from that physical position and that time of night.

As we began to talk about what we were seeing, thinking and interpreting, a number of uncannily relative events began to reveal themselves. We were talking about adventure and exploration, with the rooftop at that moment representing the apogee of our adventures thus far, when we saw, in Echo Park, not one but two coyotes on our hill, a phenomenon we had never seen or heard of in our community. We watched as they trekked down the hill, across the arterial and into the park, where they jogged seemingly good-humored, heads casually moving from side to side, as if taking it all in. Athena and I, being self-proclaimed naturalists, marveled at the pairing of our first appearance on the rooftop as a shared and unusual venture with the two coyotes, who seemed to mirror our very mindset at that moment. The coyotes showed no obvious concern or hesitance in their foreign territory, which is exactly how Athena and I see ourselves interacting with our world, in any new situation. “It is not fear that grips him, only a heightened sense of things.”

Nature apparently had not finished revealing herself to us yet, as a short while later we were greeted with the first raindrops we had felt in an as-of-yet rainless 2007 Los Angeles. How could we interpret this?, we asked each other in continuation of our free-associative metaphysical conversation. We traded ideas. I saw the unexpected rain representing a cleansing of the past that reminded us of a passage from the Joseph Murphy book, “the Miracle of Mind Dynamics” that Athena has read numerous times and that I am currently in the middle of. The passage dealt with a woman feeling guilty to the point of suicide from her former lifestyle of hedonism, even though she had since completely turned her life around. Dr. Murphy was able to convince her that no matter what she did before, that she was good now, and that now was all that matters; there was no meaning in her guilt. Having read that the night before, I equated the rain with the cleansing of negative experiences in both our lives that we had been telling each other about, and our shared feeling that we were entering a period of great promise and excitement. Athena and I have both lost our path before, but we are on it now, more rooted to it than ever before. Being on that rooftop which represented this new phase in our lives, it was only too powerful to feel the first drops of rain in several months, as a naturalistic representation of the cleansing we are bringing about in our own lives.

Throughout this extended viewing, we had observed a man in his 20’s on the other side of our fence standing outside. We had seen both him and his roommates many times, but had never taken the initiative to introduce ourselves. Feeling inspired and emboldened with our neighborly extension of ourselves earlier, Athena dared me to walk to the edge of the roof and engage him in conversation. Moved by her challenging enthusiasm, I didn’t hesitate to accept. The two of us shimmied to the precipice of the roof nearest this person and began a high-energy conversation at 1:30 or so in the morning. Ryan, as his name turned out to be, was most accepting of our good-natured strangeness, and we carried on a conversation for 15 minutes or so, bellowing from rooftop to patio. Then Tony, our neighbor who received some pound cake earlier, greets us from below and says, “Hey what are you guys doing?” We invited Tony to join the party and remarkably he accepted, climbing the station wagon and then the icebox on top that we had mounted for Athena’s negative heighth differential, to be politically correct. As Tony talked to us, Ryan said he was going to go on *his* rooftop, and so he did. There were now four of us on two different rooftops taking it all in. It was thrilling, at 2 in the morning. After some conversation, we finally retreated from our heightened place back to the parking lot, where we continued to converse with Tony, who then encouraged us to step inside his car to hear the mix tape for the album his band was recording. He ended up also playing a variety of music from different periods in his life, movie soundtracks he had created, throwaway songs that revealed more about who he truly is than perhaps the music he is recording trying to make a career out of. All fascinating, and all amazing, nonetheless. During this time Athena and I exchanged looks that told each other not just how pleased or surprised we were that Tony was extending himself to us, but that this was the real affirmation of our previous talks of determination to win over our neighbors through goodwill. And here Tony was returning the gesture. Somehow, when 3 rolled around, Athena, Tony and I found ourselves still talking, now in the lot between our two houses. When Tony finally went to bed and Athena and I headed inside, we couldn’t figure out why we were so inexplicably awake, charged. We had been in such a heightened state of awareness and appreciation for life that we were intoxicated with joy, thought, ideas.

As we reviewed the night, we found a fascinating structuralist interpretation, how our vertical climbing of the roof of our house represented our most heightened experience yet with each other, on our own turf without inclusion of others. But through our exchange of goodwill and positivity, both from earlier when we shared cake with Tony and then when we engaged Ryan as a friend instead of a stranger, we were able to literally raise the two to our level–on the roof as a physical raising, but also figuratively in the sense that we all shared the same heightened experience of the view, the night, the amazing conversation and hopefully raised enlightenment on some small level for the other two the way the rooftop did for us, namely in that it affirmed much of what we had already been focusing on in terms of positive affirmation, the law of attraction, self-empowerment. When we descended from the roof, having shown and shared openly with Tony our world, Tony in return invited us and took us into his world, which was contained in his car, his speakers, his songs, his life. The three of us ended up in the lot between our houses, which functions as a shared community territory. The physical transitions from the roof, to Tony’s car, to the lot actually forms a triangle, with each vertex representing a different meaning of ownership and experience reflective of the ownership of that space.

Every experience, even our thoughts seemed to blend seamlessly into the next event and experience. Such a meaningful, beautiful, heightened event; multi-textured in experience and multi-layered in meaning and interpretation. Despite sleeping for 4 hours, I was charged throughout my 11 hour work day today, because the power of that experience continues to resonate with me, and likely will for sometime. I am thrilled to be alive.