Have you ever been laying on a floor, talking to another person, while you each lie in opposite directions so it appears as if the other person is upside down? When that happened, when this happens, focus directly on their mouth the same way you would on their eyes were you both sitting up or standing.
It’s as though their mouth is a third eye in their forehead.
I want you to read this standing up.
I want you to read this upside down.
I want you to read this doing handstands.
This is all to say, that I want you to read this from a different point of view.
I want your perceptions and I want your opinions, because at this point, I don’t know what happened to mine. I want to see things in my world from your third eye.
Case in point: I’ve been thinking about my parents a lot lately. There was a realization that I don’t know them very well.
I know who they were. I know what they were like ten, fifteen years ago even. But Before that and for the more recent years I am perplexed. There aren’t a lot of stories of things they did or places they went. There aren’t stories of them growing up. They don’t have hobbies.
It perplexes me.
I suspect my confusion comes from being too much like my father. He’s a quiet man, you see. I too, am a quiet man. I don’t always know what to say when surrounded with people. I don’t know how to open my mouth and open myself up. I know how to sit and listen. I know how to accept. I want to learn how to share.
My memories of my father are very similar. Constantly driving places, him in the driver seat, I in the passenger, and dead silence. It was that way when I was seven. It was that way when I was seventeen. At 21, it’s still no different.
I want to know my dad, but I don’t how to start. Let me tell you what I do know about him:
He was born in Council Bluffs in 1948, the son of a railman I never met and my Grandma Bette, the sweetest woman I’ve ever known. His father died when he was 18 during an accident at the railyards. He went on to school at Wayne State College in Wayne, NE where he got his degree in Education. He met my mom while teaching at Bloomer School in Council Bluffs, they married in 1977, and in 1981 had their first child, me.
I’ve never really talked to my dad about his father, my grandfather, who I never met. I can only imagine what losing him at such an age did to my dad. In some ways I think it’s effected our father-son relationship as my dad doesn’t have a model to follow after that age. I don’t know. Perhaps I’m rambling.
It’s been said that our fathers are our models for God. I would agree with that. The idea of God is a mystery to me. My father is a mystery to me. There’s an absurd kind of synchronicity in that. My father is approachable and tangible, and yet I don’t know how to start knowing him.
I want to know what my father loved.
I want to know what my father loves.
I want to hear the culmination of his life experiences.
I want to know about all the things he did and thought, and the things he does and feels.
I want to hear about the mistakes he made and how he learned from them.
I don’t want to sit in silence around him and not learn. I don’t want to sit in silence with him and not share. I don’t want to do that with *anyone* ever again.
If your father is your model for God, and you don’t know him, how could you ever know God? I ask this, given my history of atheism, in all sincerity. I’m not the angry atheist I once was. While true, I have no faith still, I’m not trying to talk about that now. I’m past the angry stage of that.
The anger I have now, is directed inward more. I’m angry at myself for not knowing how to talk to the man. I’m angry at myself because I can sit down and write about this, but I don’t know how to do anything about it.
This isn’t just about my dad. This is about me and how I don’t know how to know people. This is about me and how I don’t know how to verbally share myself. This is about me and how I want to be able to talk to you about everything and I don’t know how to do that.
I want to share the world through my third eye.