Down the Rabbit Hole
Never again, Nai Cha Tea! I drank 16 oz. of it after lunch today
and I felt like I had done tea with the Mad Hatter and friends many times over
this afternoon. Now THAT is sheer madness! With a zillion profound
thoughts like "It must be great to live in Havana and salsa all day" and "Why do dogs have to pee at each and
every lamp post they pass by?" criss-crossing my mind at warp speed, I
felt pretty much like Alice
chasing after the White Rabbit all through Wonderland. Dazed and
confused, not to mention a bit rundown.
I’m glad though that during my own
personal Mad Hatter’s Tea Party this afternoon, I also got to thinking about “crazy”
stuff. I thought about what it is for ME
to “follow the white rabbit” (a reference in the film “The Matrix” that the Wachowski Brothers got from Lewis Carroll’s
immortal classic, meant to signal the beginning of new and strange adventures) and
come tumbling “down the rabbit hole”. I
HAVE been avoiding certain decisions about life and work, have been avoiding
DOING certain things all together. Heck,
I can’t even finish my “morning pages” and the Chapter 1 tasks in “The Artist’s
Way” (Julia Cameron)! (There I admitted
it. I’m now waiting for the part where
the truth is supposed to “set me free”!).
I have stories to write, books to read, pictures to shoot, resumes to
send out and laundry to wash, among others. The Alice in me, though, believes that “real life” will just
be a drag. It won’t be as colorful,
wacky, fascinating, creative and beautiful as my “Wonderland”. But isn’t that the whole point of Alice’s being
bored, falling asleep, dreaming and then waking up in the story? I should see things as they are, then dare to
imagine and then ACT to create a world in which the two are seamlessly
intertwined. In that world I will be
free to be, as the Mad Hatter says, “mad, wonderfully funderfully mad.” That’ll only happen WHEN I take the first few
steps and, like Alice, follow the White Rabbit and go down the rabbit
hole.
______________________________
*a cold tea with
milk, jelly and caramel syrup
(1) Read
more about this in Wikipedia’s entry about Famous Lines and Expressions in
Lewis Carroll’s book Alice in Wonderland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice's_Adventures_in_Wonderland)
(2) Uttered
in Hallmark Children’s Classics Presentation of Alice in Wonderland,
Chapter 6: “The Mad Tea Party”.
