The Very Real New and Improved Me, Part I
I work at Artella, on The Artella Daily Muse. Artella is more than a job to me: It's a support network. It's like-minded spiritual seekers. It's friends. It's family. It's home.
My husband will never understand this. He keeps saying, "But you've never met these people."
In the most insignificant factual sense, that is true. We PM, my Artella people and me. We email. We Instant Message. We meet at online Webinars, teleconferences. We telephone. Never met them? Why, only in the most superficial way could it be construed as Truth that we've never "met".
The only real glitch, a mere misplaced pebble in the cobblestone of virtual reality, occurred when Zura asked me to provide a photo for the staff directory. A small thing, really.
But...
See, these Artella people really know me. Photos, as you know, lie.
After wading through boxes, bins, baskets, and bedroom overhead shelves and underbed drawers for my neatly organized Creative Memories-destined photos, unfortunately wedged amongst wedding and birth certificates, tax returns, Christmas cards I'm going to do something with some day, a now classic TV guide or two, a needlepoint kit with parts missing, some crocheted daisies in a color I've never taken to, an empty nut can with stale salt and settled grease still in it, and a couple of bills I'd have sworn I mailed three years ago, I settled on the most eye-pleasing photo I had.
The truth is, given my choices, this School Year Teacher photo best represents Me. But my husband, the little bad-mouthing demon that sits on my left shoulder arguing typically against the supportive, sweet angel-husband, all reason and light, on my right, kept agreeing with one another: "It's a great photo. Send it. So it's from 1992. These people don't even know you." The fact that both Hims were for it gave me great pause.
He will never understand Truth, my husband, what with his childlike fascination with Facts. Like "virtual office". He doesn't get that. Or "barter pay", which he obstinately insists isn't "pay" at all, but "stuff". (Query: What does one do with "pay" if not convert it to "stuff"?) East Coast Going Live vs. West Coast Going to Bed -- he sees no need to meet a deadline that doesn't include a bell ringing and co-workers taking off their hardhats or storing their guns and gear.
I know our problem precisely: It's Ernest Hemingway and Sylvia Plath lunching at The Artist's Studio. "Whale. Real. 'I am Vertical'. Who isn't? Ooh. Bearmeat Good."
Here's me: Who among us, along our nonoseconds' sojourn on Terra Firma, has not recognized that one's feet are made not of clay, nay, but of basest concrete, the petrified dung of the asphalt streets of William Butler Yeats' Lake Isle of Innisfree -- (here I lift smooth translucent silver-rimmed China teacup to tongue and lips, tip my chin to one side and muse) -- and whilst longing to be soul-kin to the good sweet earth -- real and true Self one with the grass and waters of the cosmos' gem, The Earth -- am helplessly and uncomfortably vertically aligned with foreign-minded two-legged creatures overreaching for goals as unattainable as the skies? My husband will never, ever understand this, lounging there with a beer lodged securely between the arm of the recliner and his thigh, a remote in one hand and fried leg of bear in the other.
Sighing, realizing my choices were limited, I reluctantly elected to scan the photo and send it -- virtual courier, if you will.
But a funny thing happened: When that 5 x 7 rose across my high-resolution screen to a larger-than-life pixelated representation of the Me that used to be, I thought, "Why, this isn't me, not me at all!" True, there was no other acceptable option.
I pondered: How to make Me out of the Me That Once Was...