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There is a great line in Scarface, well there are many great lines, but one is when Al Pacino – Tony Montana says, I want what is coming to me. His bud Manny asks, What’s coming to you? Tony says, “The world, chico, and everything in it.”

I juxtaposed that line against another line from a poem, The World Is Too Much With Us:

The World is Too Much With Us
by William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

A dear friend told me the other day that she had seen this shaman in New Mexico, a kahuna or the likes, who was wild and crazy and inarticulate but who told her, “When you ask the world for more my dear, specify, specify what you want, because if you want more money, and you just ask for more, you just might get more mosquitoes.”

I was walking home from City Park and ran into a neighbor who I had wanted to talk to about helping out with the Bridges, but then I had to write him and say I was stepping down from the Bridges to focus on me. He asked if I was okay, and then he proceeded to tell me a story that now has a familiar ring. He had thrown a party, one that has now become a tradition, and it has now gotten out of hand. He had spent the evening cleaning up the trash and serving hundreds of people he didn’t even know who had trod all over his house and made it and him a wreck. He said, “I’m done.”

This morning in City Park I ran into a dear friend who has been a consummate friend to animals and she told me that she had recently considered moving to another state because she can’t take on anymore, she is once again overcommitted to animal welfare to such an extent that her own is suffering. She said, “I feel done.”

I used to be proud of my Cat in the Hat behavior and had no shame in taking on the world:

“Look at me!
Look at me now!” said the cat.
“With a cup and a cake
On the top of my hat!
I can hold up TWO books!
I can hold up the fish!
And a litte toy ship!
And some milk on a dish!
And look!
I can hop up and down on the ball!
But that is not all!
Oh, no.
That is not all…

“Look at me!
Look at me!
Look at me NOW!

My last husband said I was like those Army commercials where “before you rise, Rachel has done the laundry, paid the bills, walked the dogs, cleaned the house, made the breakfast, and found a bargain online, while writing ten thank you notes” – the super heroic, the Wonder Woman of the ages, she does it all. Whew.

And now Ponder Woman has inhabited my earthly being and sits here wondering why I can’t smoke (everyone else does), why do I have to do this or do that? Why don’t you take care of it yourself?, her inner Ponder Woman shouts in a whisper. “What was I thinking?” Ponder Woman responds to those who compliment how handsome her dogs are she is walking in the park.

Life is a roller coaster – up and down – they say, but I say round and round – we rarely have time to pop off and change costumes so given this ultra fabulous opportunity to shed my Wonder Woman golden star and slip on this elastic, cape-less Ponder Woman one, I should find more time to repeat the mantra, “I live in my own little world, but that’s alright, they know me here.”

This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2012 at 11:39 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.