(no subject)

[katallison]

I've been following the "Ask My Characters a Question" meme, but had felt a little diffident about inviting such questioning, I suppose because it presumes people have that level of interest in my characters. However, shellmidwife said she had a question or two for Fraser, and so I'll toss the door open--if you want to ask any of these people anything, go to town! I warn you, though, that they're not always responsive to the questions I ask them (usually along the lines of "And so where in the hell have you been for the last three months??")

Oh, and re: shell's other question in a different entry--confirm, but truly it's no big deal.

Comments

[katallison.livejournal.com]

Untroubled? Does my life seem to you *untroubled*? With the Gathering coming on, and listen, do you have any idea how hard it is to get decent beer in Antarctica, and--

Oh, all right, it's a reasonable question, I suppose, and deserves an answer. The key point one must never lose sight of is the difference between connection and attachment. The former is unavoidable, as long as one's in this life, and is what makes life possible. The latter's a deathtrap.

Imagine one's self caught in a flood, for example. (And let me just tell you, from experience: un-fun.) You're connected all right, to the water, the shiftings in the current, the debris that comes barrelling down on you. You survive by being utterly attentive to those connections. If you're lucky you connect with a tree, perhaps, which has branches higher than the water level. You don't spend the rest of your life in that tree, but connecting it to it at that moment is critical.

If you're one of those attached people, however--if you sit in your house and say, "I'm not moving, this is *my* house and nothing shall shift me out of it"--then when the flood comes down, you die. If you attach to a tree spar that's not high enough, and refuse to detach and let yourself be moved on downstream when a great chunk of debris is about to hit you, you die as well.

All right, this isn't my greatest metaphor, I'll grant you. But really, that flood is life. And I'm there in the drink with everyone else; except I've a bit more buoyancy than most, I've learned how to stay afloat and simply let the water carry me onward. I am intimately familiar with, connected with, the force of the current at any moment, and the bits of debris in my immediate vicinity. And I am absolutely ready to let them all float on, in whatever direction they're carried.

MacLeod hasn't quite gotten the knack; he takes a terrible buffeting at times, and gets a lungful of water, and sometimes I think he's gone down for good. But he's a strong swimmer, and I have hopes of him.

What will happen when the current brings us to the grand whirlpool of the Gathering--that I can't tell you, sorry, prefer not to think about it, if it's all the same.

[umbo.livejournal.com]

Heh. Methos is a Buddha!

[katallison.livejournal.com]

*g* I actually almost added a paragraph to this in which Methos elaborately disavows any pretension to Buddhism ... but the fact is, the longer this guy hangs around in my head and the more I think about him, I keep finding him shifting toward a stance that's essentially Zen Buddhist. This isn't grounded at all in canon, and I hope it doesn't just reflect my own biases; but awareness and non-attachment seem to me the only feasible way that anyone could live for hundreds or thousands of years and not go freakin' insane.

[tracy-rowan.livejournal.com]

This makes me sad.