Sometimes All You Can Say Is WOW

What a crazy last few weeks this has been in my life. I have to first give a shout out to Bryan "Devo" Devonshire for taking a look at my blog, appreciating the hand analysis stuff, but also encouraging me to write a little more about myself. He writes a great blog as well...so check it out: campfires.blogspot.com

So what about me? Well my real name is Tamara. I have been loving my new journey back into full time professional poker and have already met a lot of really cool people along the way who have been nice enough to keep in touch, read my blog, or just chat poker. Most specifically I am thinking about Bryan and Brian in Las Vegas, David in Huntington Beach, Maria and Terry in L.A., Travis in Colorado, Milton in Biloxi, "the Poker Monkey", and everybody else that I might be forgetting. Also, my two oldest poker buddies...you know who you are...I love you both.

So I have found that when it rains in this life, it often pours. My life has pretty much come apart altogether over the last several months and specifically the last few days. No need for specifics, but lets just say that when you have no stability in your life, and then you add a broken heart to the mix, it makes you think really hard about what is important in your life. I wrote this on Thanksgiving and even though it isn't really poker related, Devo encouraged me to share it on the blog. So here it is:

There are many, many drones in this world. Lost souls, dead already, driving through life in their steel coffins, each journey bringing them neither closer nor farther away from a life that they never began to live. But, it strikes me tonight, that there are also many miracles walking amongst us each and every day we breathe. Wonders, marvels, triumphs, super heroes...people who have beaten the odds, people who have fought...some winning, some losing, those for whom life has been and is a symphony, those who refuse to go quietly into that dark night. Each of these worthy of their own screen play,their own novel. So many stories that have been shared, and so many, many more that will remain untold. The prevalence of these extraordinary lives is both inspiring and frightening. So much to marvel at, so many to leave us humbled and amazed... who are we? What is my extraordinary life next to these extraordinary others? What significance do I play in a world so wonderful, so terrible, and so large?

I heard a hymn today. It wafted out of an open window along with the smell of roasting turkey..."I feel better, so much better, since I lay my burden down." Children were singing, and their sweet voices made tears well up in my eyes. Almost instictively I looked up towards heaven and felt a knot in the pit of my stomach as I realized that I had ceased to believe anything or anyone was there. Far from marvelous or awe inspiring, this chilly afternoon the empty heavens seemed just that...sad and lonely and alone. The brilliant blue sky seemed wasted in its brilliance, with no one to thank for it, and no spirit to soften its great expanse. I longed in that moment to sing praises to an unseen Being, to believe that there was order in this crazy world, to feel the quiet peace of faith, to offer thanks to someone for the breath I was so very grateful to take. I almost wished I could return to the days when doubt did not hover on my shoulder, when unanswered questions still seemed answerable. I remembered what it was like to be enveloped in the warm belief that everything happened for a reason, that my life mattered, that all of it somehow made a difference to someone.

Now I stand in the "enlightened" clarity of skepticism and I realize why we have filled our lives with motion, with haste. We do not want to stand still, even for a moment, because if we do we will have to face our own mortality, our own fraility in the face of time, the bitter realization that the wonderful things which make us individuals might just not matter at all. If there really is nothing after this life, if the heavens are empty, then what point is there in any of this? It seems to me that the absence of a purpose for living reduces every human emotion to pure selfish pursuit of pleasure. Love exists only to please ourselves, to bring happiness to the organism until the organism ceases to exist. The highest act of human sacrifice out of love for country or friend or family becomes nothing but a futile excercise in foolishness.

So here I am. I once had faith and when I did I longed for the freedom of self expression, the freedom to do anything I should please without fear of Divine judgment or reprisal. Now, free to do as Ichoose, I find that my choices seem hollow and without meaning, and I wish that I could believe again in something worth living and dying for. But I am too much of a truth seeker to permit myself false comforts or unwarranted graces. False faith would be as intolerable as forced love. And I cannot lie to myself by claiming that I see proof of something for which I have not found sufficient evidence. Still, there is the problem of love. There is the problem of morality. There is the problem of truths which seem to spread eternal through the generations of man. People love. People fight for good. People protect their children as if their future meant something...instinctually, basically, humanly. There is something within me, within us, that desires justice, that desires meaning, that desires goodness and kindness and love. There is a voice within me that cries out for truth a voice that refuses to accept the idea that none of this matters, that nothing matters. And that voice, that desire, that love...THAT is SOMETHING. It is something just as validly and as completely as the heavens are something, as truly as the skin on my bones or the sun in our sky.

How do these somethings co-exist? What are we to make of this vast universe, this gargantuan cloud of life that seems to dwarf each individual, compared to the individual thoughts from tiny human beings that can still change the world? I don't know the answer. But I feel within my heart, at the deepest level, in the core of my being...that there is something. Something. Something.

Until Next Time...Be Happy!
Tamara