the alphabet game
I woke up at 4:30am this morning, los angeles time, of course. 7:30am New York time, where I am from. I ended up thinking, surprise, surprise, but the thoughts were actually somewhat, well surprising.
I ended up remembering, with the most enormous amount of joy, a game I used to play with my best girlfriends in high school. in new york, where I am from. It was called the alphabet game. we would write lengthwise on a piece of paper the alphabet and then lengthwise next to it a sentence, a line from your favorite song, a poem.... anything. It looked like this:
a i
b l
c o
d v
e e
f y
g o
h u
...but for the whole alphabet of course. then we would set a two minute timer and fill in as many names as we could. Famous people, fictitious characters, people we knew in common, whatever. The only rule was we had to have all known them or known of them. It looked like this:
a i - amy irving
b l - bruce lee
c o - carol o'conner
d v - diane von furstenberg (kinda cheating but not really)
e e - emilio estevez
f y -
g o - georgia 0'keeffe
h u
My gosh we played that game for hours, over and over. We would not tire of it. Well, I specifically would not tire of it. It made me miss my girls, miss my childhood apartment, miss the innocence of those child hood days. It made me realize how many people I have loved and how many names I knew in my brain. It made me wonder how many names there were now as opposed to then. Shoot, I would probably ace that game now. I smiled thinking of my life gone by. I smiled thinking of the life to come.
Then, my 4:30am/7:30am brain started to wonder about letters, and where they came from, and how we picked them, and what we would do without them. My grandfather wrote a whole book about the first greek alphabet. A small book but a book all the same. Funny to think we would wonder similar questions so far away from each other on the chronological timeline of things. All though relatively speaking, on the chronological timeline of of the alphabet, he and I are basically the same age.
It's amazing what we have done with letters, with the alphabet. It's amazing what we can do, what we will continue to do. Think about it, as my brain started to do at 4:30am/7:30am. Can you let yourself wonder? Can you let yourself wander?
Through a's and b's and c, d, e's.... really, I invite you, take a journey discover what we are.
we are after all....
Amazing
Beautiful
Creatures
Doing
Everything
Fantastically
Growing
Humbly
Inquiring
Journeying
Knowing
Loving
Meaning
Never
Owning
Proper
Queen(and King)domship
Rarely
Sensing
(the) Truth
Universal
Value
Worth.
Xeroxes
Yearning (for)
Zen.