Excesses

Saturday Aaron and I take a stroll around downtown Mesa. If you know anything about Mesa, you might be laughing, but there are a few points of interest there. Not including the plethora of statues commissioned by the City of Mesa, some interesting, others a little too sentimental. I like the “dripping horses.” Called “Two Horses,” I think.

If you enjoy antiques and just a bit of craft, you might pass an hour or two on some weekend. I’m not terribly impressed with the crafts. Bought a melted glass necklace a couple of weeks ago, but it was the only thing that intrigued me enough to make a purchase. Tooled leather Bible covers and woodcuttings of pine trees, skip. Photographs blend together—all the lone cacti and red canyons and sagebrush start to feel like a mirage at some point.

What I really have come down here to look at are the antiques in stores which happen to be still open. The economy is hitting everyone in the pocketbook. I saw it there too—shops closed or moved. No surprise.

But I am of the mind that there is beauty in emptiness, and emptiness in beauty. Even the buildings, with still rooms and shadows swept across the bare wood floors. We walk past the windows of a large boutique, still open, with Christmas ornaments and home décor on sale. Oh, the glass, all air and light in the center of the delicate, silvered skin—I am reminded of what it is like to be a child, in the middle of winter, standing on a street outside a shop and looking in on sugary, frothy confections in a bakery. Only these are tree ornaments, not cookies I can sink my teeth into. Yow—painful, all those shards!

I stopped decorating a few years ago—combination of laziness and my conversion to another spiritual path that doesn’t include December 25 as a major holiday. Still, I enjoy looking at decorations, all the color and light thrown in my path. I particularly fancy glass ornaments, the old-fashioned kind, hand-blown and painted. Imagine glass Christmas pudding under glass, a crystal bowl filled with red and white glass ribbon candy, giant blown glass stars and elongated, space-age glass balls in red and pale snowy blue and silver glitter. Yummy! I don’t want to go inside the store, I just want to stare at the glass through the glass windows. Glass upon glass upon glass, as far as the eye can see . . .

The antique stores are another thing. I have a problem with these spaces sometimes. They are collections of memory, and collections of the energy created by memory, and sometimes these memories aren’t positive. Because I do energy work, sometimes places with so many old things in them bother me. I’ve had this happen in museums at times—been hit with waves of energy and impressions which have left me a little woozy.

This happened, as well. I am enjoying looking at a case of Fenton Glass—I went to their factory in West Virginia many years ago and watched men blow and shape fiery glass into vases and decorative pieces—possibly where my glass fetish started. Blown glass hummingbirds in oily cobalt blue, creamy white with delicate pink flowers painted over its body, shimmering green . . . a vase in grass green with violets on the face of it, a glass lawn of violets.

But suddenly I feel the overwhelming urge to walk outside . . . my head starts to feel funny, pulled in a number of directions all at one time. Still wander a bit, staring into cases of crystal bead necklaces and funky brass and glass bead earrings braided and knotted in intricate, labyrinth like patterns, that, at some other time, I would want to explore. Excesses of jewelry and excesses of energy? Exit, front door, for me.

Find myself outside again, after I tell Aaron what’s going on. Now we are looking into a jeweler’s window. These are not the norm. Green glass scarabs wrapped in gold on a chain. Maybe not glass, maybe something more glamorous and precious, like jade. I am thinking about my own excesses, what they lead me to desire. If I had all the money I wanted, would I be able to buy enough glass and baubles to keep around and dazzle me? Or would I continue to go out into the world again, looking for the next beautiful thing?

The sensual world IS the world . . . I am in this body, cannot separate myself from it, and do not want to. There is too much to be loved in what is temporary but wondrous. This is the mistake, the heresy of Western organized religion, to separate us from the bodies that house us and from the world that houses us, too. Do I want my body to be full or emptied? The paradox is, both. What do I want to be on the surface? In the center? Don’t know yet. Today, perhaps, a pink, blown glass pink rose with painted glass leaves on the branch of a tinseled tree. Tomorrow, the real thing.