Why Fish Bladder
and why now
Why Fish Bladder?
The name makes me laugh.
Fishes use their fish bladders to increase and decrease their buoyancy. They draw gasses out of the water that they swim through, and they put those gasses in a little balloon inside of themselves, and they use this balloon to ascend and descend. Whoah.
“Fish Bladder” is also the literal translation of “vesica piscis,” which is the name for the overlapped bit of a Venn Diagram.
I want a place to articulate things where I feel no need to categorize the thoughts as as exclusively one thing or another. I want a place to articulate the things that help me ascend and descend, psychologically speaking. Day-to-day spiritual survival-speaking. And I want a place where it’s okay to be absurd, where things don’t have to be polished and complete.
Why now?
People are saying their goodbyes on Twitter tonight, and it feels right that many new things might be born as ballast.
This morning I had a dream:
i had a dream that it was possible to jump from one parallel reality to another, but every time i jumped “back” it was a different reality than i had left. (this is becoming a theme to my dreams. very quantum leap, except i keep finding the same people in different circumstances.)
in one of the realities (the first one) there was a young woman who i realized was trying to help me.
she had long brown curly hair. she was giving me hints and insights. it took me a long while to figure out, but eventually i realized i was the only person in this reality who could see her. she couldn’t physically interact with the environment, either.
she was a jumper of realities, and she was now in the mode that every time she jumped into a new reality she would use her insights from the other realities to try to improve conditions in one she now inhabited -- help people make connections, ease troubles, give them tastes of what she had observed they liked and needed.
this struck me as deeply deeply deeply kind.
she was the one who made me realize it could be possible for me to jump realities too. it took me even longer to realize that i would maybe never return to my original reality, and even LONGER to realize that i too could use the insights from other realities to make whatever reality i was in better.
at first i was unsettled by the realization that i might never get back to my original reality.
then it started to occur to me that knowing someone is more than circumstantial. that it kind of didn’t matter if i met them in a reality where they happened to be lucky or unlucky, happily-familied or lonely, confused or oriented.
that their circumstances were not immutable conditions, and that my knowing them mattered.
this makes me weepy
So here’s to overlap.