Shape

The word for today is SHAPE. I wanted to pick a simple word, a word I could get my head and my hands around. Then I started thinking about SHAPE and as with so many things, the simple became complicated.

SHAPE is one of the first things we learn. I remember a set of colored wood blocks. Someone held a block or put it in my hand and said circle, square or triangle. I felt each different block, I remembered the word that was said, I remembered the name of the SHAPE. Later there were blocks shaped like bars of soap or candles or towers. Later still there were parallelograms and trapezoids, and other shapes containing angles and formulas I could not touch. When I was a toddler there were holes I could fit the shapes into. I wrote about the word FIT before. When we're young we're taught that shapes FIT into spaces. Things FIT.

I don't remember anyone ever teaching me about dimension. What makes something flat and what not? I didn't really understand the concept of dimension until I took hallucinogenic drugs. I saw the shapes of leaves, like cookies cut from the light blue dough of the sky, I saw the other side of the stars, I saw the roots of trees beneath the soil. Often drugs are referred to as a gateway to a life of abuse, but for me they were a gateway to another way of seeing. For the last twenty-five years, I have not used drugs, but I have seen many, many shapes that I never could have imagined. Nature has given us the gift of a myriad of building blocks, an infinity of shapes.

It is difficult to imagine how things will take shape. I am planning a political event with a friend. We conceive, we discuss, we set forth our intentions, yet the shape of the event will not be known until it happens. When I graduated from college, I did not know what shape my life would take. I could only see a long black tunnel. I have always hated tunnels.

Now I know my life is as big as the sky, as big as the ocean. I live next to Lake Michigan. Can you see across the lake, someone asked, is that dark line the state of Michigan? Oh no, I answered, that's just a different color on the horizon. I want to feel the SHAPE of a bar of soap or a cup of tea in my hands; I want to be able fold a clean, dry sheet into a rectangle. I don't want to know the shape of the sky or the ocean or even of a great lake. These shapes, which are constantly changing, and even the SHAPE of my life, are all well beyond my grasp. That pleases me very much.