The Ledger

On good days, I am comforted with a pacified thought: one day I'll know what I really want to be when I grow up and I shall never again touch financial statements, debits and credits, budgets. In difficult periods when the mundaneness chokes my innate artistic expression: I am a whore to the paycheck and benefits. This was the spectrum of my 9-5. For 25 years.


Here is a strange awakening: A writer is an accountant. The writer accounts for his imaginations in words. The accountant is a writer who uses numbers to present what has transpired

I bring the accounting to my written word; to straighten the accounts of my life's beliefs of what life is, of my warped perceptions of humanity's place in it and the misunderstanding of what my role is in the midst of it.

I was born blue. Breeched and an umbilical cord coiled three times around my neck, 21 hours of labor and with forceps and midwife, out I finally came. The first trauma is from birth, it is said. Unacknowledged it remains unhealed; it becomes a subconscious template for life's decisions and motivations.

The ferocity of my father's love for his children was expressed in over protection. He instilled fear of the world and its dangers with the sincerest of intentions. Education, listening to the news, avoiding less than the best company of men and women, and most of all, listening to his advice are what we, his children, must have in order to be truly safe.

He and my mother waited outside in the car for four hours while I, dateless, boyfriendless, attempted to be a part of the prom. A few weeks after my engagement, my father, in a tone of sarcasm borne out of frustration and fear for my well being said, "I sent my daughter to college and here she is about to suffer poverty in marriage. She has chosen to marry someone with no college degree." Fifteen years later, upon meeting a man I fell in love with, but again lacking a degree, he threatened to never speak to me again unless I desisted this most monumental mistake of my life (thus far).

Marriage gave me the much longed desire to finally find my own safety measures against the world. Even at ten years old, I knew Catholicism was not for me. It didn't make me feel safe from damnation; its dogma and what it takes to reach heaven seized my child mind and put me into panic attacks which no one knew of. My chosen religion would make all this go away. Permanently.

With tremendous relief (and even deep happiness), within three years of the search, here was Hinduism and a Guru. A Self-Realized being in human embodiment loves me, saves me, the world, and every single human being on the planet. I can finally relax. Now, all I need do are mantras, selfless service, live a righteous, pious life and I am freed from harm and from the curse of having to return, in human form {or any kind of form!) into this hell house of a world.

I despised the news. All news media are but shallow and made up demagoguery; the worst is not publicly shared. I however searched, read (devoured) only books upon books of conspiracy theory threads, the dark sinister machinations behind the scenes of the New World Order, Big Pharma, and all of this type of ilk. This is the truer evil my father knows nothing of but I, feeling internally superior to his antiquated news gathering, am protected because of my knowledge.

But after all that, something shifted.

Perhaps it is to the credit of finally loving unequivocally, where there is effortlessly no terrain for the mind. It is only one amorphous, undefined, borderless, unpredictable uncertainty. And in this human love, my myopic lenses of the world became painful to look into.

My belief in the Oneness and sacredness of life is hypocritical of my belief in wanting protection in the arms of the Guru and religion, of salvation and damnation. The strength of my belief in the reality and sanctity of my personal self perpetuates the perversion of the dogmas, of the merit of possessions, of the value of judgments. And with all these, the consequential anguished loneliness of life.

If I do not protect my foot from my hand, or my eye from lips; if I do not analyze and seek to reform or transform the particular way my heart beats or voice sounds; if do not have a need to comprehend how and what the bad bacteria are in my body which nourishes it in its own way then, so must I take the mystery, malevolence and magnificence of humanity in toto.

Love's true accounting makes whole the writer's imaginings.