Bright Thunder

My coworker's mother was asked to 'name' another of our co-workers with a Chinese name. She gave him two choices: Thunder Person or Bright Thunder. He was wishy washy about it, but I quickly took up Bright Thunder as my own.

Bright Thunder.

I think it fits me quite well. Bright like light, not like smart. Last night, my teacher, probably no more than 5 years older than myself, kicked my ass intellectually (and the asses of most of my fellow classmates, though she pissed off the atheist engineer woman from the ukraine). She rattled off the her MA, MBA and PhD titles, and like a round of firecrackers at Chinese new year, proceeded to pop pop pop through the three hour class.

It is easy to appear brilliant when you know your topic, and perhaps in my favorite arenas of interest I might sound confident and knowledgable. This woman, whoa, I could tell that she pressesd a lot of buttons. No dowdy slack pantsuited professor, rather a dreadlocked caucasian Freda Kahlo wannabe. My critical, perhaps envious self considered labeling her an over achiever. I think she likes 'knowing' something. Who doesn't. She rattles her concepts of transpersonal psychology through class at the speed of speed, and I'm sure I wasn't the only person who was more confused than not. And I've read a lot and done a lot in the transpersonal zone.

I like her energy in that she wants people to be creative, and take risks. But I also think she's a bit of a show-off---chanting sanskrit, then asking us who she was chanting to, then when no one answers, comments, "ah, no sanskrit scholars in the class...." I'm sure she's a card carrying Burning Man participant.

I don't dislike her. She has some smoothing of teaching edges that will make her one day, an inspiring force, rather than simply an intellectual dervish in tattoos, dreds, purple faux snake skin boots.

I have to turn in a proposal for my term paper next week. I am going to write something about dreams and dream exploration as a process of transpersonal psychology. I'll post my drafts here so that the 1.5 of the folks who check in here now and again can read and comment and suggest upon.

This is Bright Thunder, signing off.