between light and shadow

Last night we had dinner with friends and watched two episodes of "The Twilight Zone" (1959) via Netflix. The opening lines describe the twilight zone as that space between light and shadow. This is a good description of where I feel I have been living this past week.

Light has been my time with the fifth graders at Pueblo Gardens Elementary School as they prepare to read a scene from "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone". It includes my swimming at the Y, coffee with my son and yesterday with a friend, my blooming flowers, my second to the last physical therapy session, my in-the-moment work with Imagine Greater Tucson.

Shadow has been keeping on my side of the street as Mark deals with his loss of job reality, not getting sucked into fixing my dad's minor concerns with ill-fitting tennis shoes, slow weight gain as I seek comfort in carbs from the challenges of future implications of my professional life--or the lack thereof, including my shelving writing due to increased pressures of consulting billable tasks.

That "twilight zone" space in between surfaces in my dreams which have been vivid narratives that are patchworked like the quilts I continue to study as a link to my inherited past. I observed from the two episodes we watched last night that mirrors are used a lot in the narrative of the twilight zone. Also a theme seemed to be loss of individual identity. The show was done in 1959 and we were living at a time of the Cold War with WW II only a decade behind. We had not yet expanded our frontiers to space, although the possiblity was looming.

Now we are in a time when our NASA program has launched one of its last manned/womanned spacecraft. We are looking beyond the moon to Mars and yet, we are tethered to Earth by wars and diminishing natural resources. Our time for self-reflection (aka, looking into the mirror to see a) if we exist and b) if we do exist, who we are) takes place on the Internet (here, I am doing that with you) via blogs, Facebook, twitter, etc. I still write the old-fashioned daily journal and memoir-writing is a popular genre, so some of us continue to seek self-definition in our lives.

I guess that's a good thing. I experienced the seduction of Rod Serling's voice last night as he opened and closed his show with the narrative explanation of the twilight zone. Having a start and finish to the stories offers me comfort of rationality in an often irrational daily life.