A Metaphoric Siesta

I fell asleep on my couch today.

I'm back home in Kelowna, in the house I grew up in. Everytime I come home something has changed, whether it's the location of furniture, or the color of a wall, or the absence of a tree. This time the most has changed, as my parents are getting ready to move. They painted a hallway, they replaced doors and put up a tree. They traced from the wall where we marked the progression of our height as we grew. This way, we can take it with us, wherever we go.

My family was just doing their own thing today. My mom baked some cookies and my dad shoveled the driveway. My sister and her husband just lay around and watched old episodes of Survivor, catching them up to the season finale that we all could watch as a family tonight. We made deep dish pizza and ate it together, as a family. This afternoon I threw myself into one of Douglas Coupland's novels, Life After God. It's a collection of stories about a postmodern world. One page says nothing but, "You are the first generation to grow up without religion". I knew this, but I never really thought about how badly it's impacted our society. We really are the first generation to be built without a faith system in place. We have the choice, and look at what a choice we've made.

Reading made my head tired, and as the sun set my lighting faded. I was sitting in our upstairs living room, my back to the open window that my dog was staring out of, perched atop two pillow cushions in the corner of this particular loveseat. I put the book down on the coffee table in front of me, rearranged the dog's tail so as to make room for my skull, and took off my glasses. I curled up into a little love seat, six feet fitting into four. My knees protruded far out over the edge of the makeshift bed, but I was balanced and I was tired. As I lay there, I entered into a world of transition; a world between reality and the supernatural.

I wholeheartedly believe that there's more to this world than what I see and hear and touch. There's something beyond us; something that is hardly expressable in anything except symbolic language. I am unable to literally describe what is hidden behind light and objects, all I can do is hope to allude to a metaphor of understanding. I think most people would agree that there's a God, or at least a celestial order or design that is exhibited in the world. Nature is too refined and organized to have been adventitous or inadvertent. Biblically, we believe that the apostle Paul had a "second sight" that could see beyond the current physical realm to something beyond himself. For centuries there have been countless numbers of people who were willing to lay down their present life because of their belief in the future. Something is out there, above and beside us.

As I lay on the couch, my mind played dreams through my head in the style of Douglas Coupland's writing. His disjointed sentences and fragmented narration clearly reflect the postmodern world. My dreams came and went, some were remembered but most were forgotten. The dog left her perch and I rolled from one side to the other. Now my feet were hanging loose, free for predators and assassins to strike. The scarf I was wearing around my neck began to choke and warm me beyond my original intentions, but I was lost in another world. The clock on the wall was my only source of sound besides the constant clatter of family member's movement throughout the house. The quiet drone of the TV downstairs drifted up the stairway to ears that were unwilling to listen.

Perhaps it was because I was reading postmodern literature, but I saw my torporific nap on the couch as a metaphor to how I often live my life. I like to take a backseat in the majority of affairs. I'm not the kind of guy that would willingly step forward in crisis situations to become a leader. I don't grab the reigns of the runaway horse, even if the woman in trouble is beautiful and potentially rewarding. Sometimes things happen that disturb me, that might "push me over the edge", but after a short, brief time of intermittent discomfort, I resume my previous path of self satisfied slumber. The things that I hold to most dearly in life, the things that I believe will keep me warm and safe, are often the things that choke me and slow me down. And sometimes, people will think that my behavior is odd and come to take pictures of me in the fading light of day.

I don't know if I'm reading into coincidental situations like that time I thought I was getting a pony for Christmas, but maybe there's something to this whole unlikely situation. Maybe there's something more to life than simply existing; just waiting for the next day to start so that it can finish. I seem to think it is conceivable that sometimes things happen for a reason, and that we can find reason, truth, understanding and beauty not in the literal, but in symbolic, in the metaphoric, and in the emblematic. I can't define God, but I can read you a fairy tale about Him. I can't grasp ahold of beauty, but I can allude to it. I can't describe my love, but my poems will shout it out.