This. There is more to this than this. Dimensions in “Life” itself, not being countable, while unaccountable, infinite, raison d’être. To be is not a question: we are, we are one, we are together in this. Here as one, as one being in one place. Earth. It makes me feel truly alive, happy, when I sense that we are in this together, with everyone on earth harmonious. I feel truly alive with a life blood’s vibrancy, when in a crowd, walking to different destinations, with or without eye contact, breathing the same air, having the same needs, to be truly alive brings me to the idea that we are of the same stuff. We are about love, idea and compassion. Living and loving.

Hidden along streets, on fence posts, in our nests, in casinos, on highways, floating on rivers, left unsaid, we can deny love, yet even when having been hurt, love is still there. “Love is not turning away from hurt.”  Loving, being loved once or twice, while as a single woman of sixty-eight, has given me a new, much needed appraisal of what is this all about: the desire to love and be loved remains.

The rabbit hole into which I climbed to hide, to seek, clearly undefined, had me falling and falling as an entity of one, a single woman after more than thirty years of marriage, part of a couple. Disoriented, bouncing off sides of the hole as I dug deeper and deeper into finding reason, raison d’être has given me this. Read my words. There I have had to mentally rearrange just what it is that I was meant to do, which is whatever I want. This. While I was buried for a couple of years in grief, confusion, and thought, my very own rabbit hole was comfortable in its darkness, its probing, for there I could commiserate, reinvent, sift the grains of dirt, the unknown. This comforted me in a strange, uncomfortable way.

Now, like a pop-up of consideration, of reinvention, tactics for survival, has me free and proving that I can be loved again, even for a few minutes, or a while, or maybe when I help someone with any small thing, even to cross a street, popping up on the other side with clear intention, step by step, left, right, left. Breathing air together, yet independently, I am free, I feel love.

Pop-ups are more idea than substance, unlike ‘brick and mortar’ structures, have come and gone with pure intention and some joy, proudly springing in response to “outmoded habits and collapsing institutions,” creating a new ‘living design,’ proud for the moment, or day, or week, and then proud to say, “That was cool.” Move the pop-up just a little to the left or over there, you’ll see the rabbit hole. Going down the rabbit hole brings forth new ideas for living, a new way to create, a new way to present oneself. Emerging with an invention, with a food group we never knew we needed, and now devour leaning on its collapsible shutters, we are all a “pop-up” in the slipstream of a planet’s birth and life. Be a pop-up yourself. Unpredictably.

The uncanny idea for food carts, with fake wheels, with false shutters, popped up in a food court at the Portland International Airport with inspired local innovative food, serving a new type of fast food to people passing through a forward thinking place not having ‘outmoded habits’, planned to emerge as a living design. Pop ups draw us in, sometimes fleetingly.

Like a pop-up, from deep under ground, digging long before, emerging from the rabbit hole, silently, ideas that were not spoken as full sentences, ink-bled sketches on cocktail napkins or even lengthy theses, the idea began under one’s radar, before the conscious mind, not by a silly wabbit, but stirring in each of us there is this. It began in the rabbit hole with unknown thought growing into a conspiracy. Out of the rabbit hole climbed a ‘pop-up,’ ideas that cannot be shaken, a mathematical equation challenging a theory of everything, an unknown element, or the reason to be, or the last stroke for a painting, a conviction, ultimately from the unconscious, needing to be heard. Trend might be considered in the appearance of pop-ups, now around for more than 15 years, while roadside farm stands, children’s lemonade stands, a shopping mall, a day’s garage sale, Aristotle poised on soapboxes, four year presidencies, earned tenures, your new car, one’s marriage…and this. Reinvention. Pop-ups, living design, a fix for now and then. Presently in the past.