Last Post from the UK; Memories as Resets

...Or at least, I strongly suspect I won't post here again until I'm back either in or en route to Alaska. I've been trying to make the most of the people I'm with here for the time I still have. I'm also doing some of the Holiday goodies preparations I do every year--nice to be able to do it for my family this time. Lots of cacao butter melting, etc...

Trying to internalize some of the lessons being offered me from nearest and dearest--heaven knows there are always lessons to learn.
My dad offered me an interesting perspective on memory as a conduit to a "system restore" for the state of being. He said that if one can return to one's earliest memories, if they are true memories, then one can return to the experience of the state one was in before any of it got overlaid with all the crap that gets laid down as one moves through life. This offers the possibility of freedom--a fresh start, even--a whole new perspective or lease on life.

So many ways we think of memory. A wax tablet that records impressions and then gets overlaid with other impressions, preserving some of them faithfully, blurring others over.
Will I remember real elephants when I think of Petra years from now?

A filing cabinet in which thoughts and experiences and details get stuffed away, sometimes with an orderly retrieval system, sometimes to be buried in further mounds of paperwork.
A central processing unit with spinning drive that selects from impressions stored hither and thither associated with different parts of the body in which they were experienced.
Sometimes memories are on the tip of conscious retrieval, like a clearing at the end of a slot canyon with a prize edifice filling its vista, elusive and splendid.

Memories can be spatial. Sometimes I walk into a room and don't know what I came in for, but when I return to where I came from, the memory returns. I think that happens to everyone.

Food holds so many memories, and bodies remember food in significant ways. Teach me lessons about memory. The flavor or aroma that takes you back instantly to the first place you encountered it. Something that made you sick as a little kid that you can never stand the taste of again. (My brother still won't eat apples after such an experience when he was maybe four years old.)
Sometimes you can put something in your mouth and spit it out before it's an actual experience. Some things you put in your mouth melt before you can spit them out, and the experience has already become a part of you. The instant you put it in your mouth was a choice, and you can't take it back.

source: http://www.123rf.com/photo_11424837_bunch-of-dates-is-hanging-from-the-palm.html

Do I remember everything I put in my mouth that melted into me before I was aware of how it was creating me?

Dates...dates are always good. Memories of California, Hawaii, Israel always Israel all the way back...Even though there were a couple years I wouldn't let myself eat them, my body remembers them and is grateful.

Right now, my body remembers coconut milk and gets snotty the moment it gets any, since I guess anything you eat almost exclusively for a long period of time your body develops some intolerance for. 

Let me remember this and not spoil dates for myself, or whatever the next thing is.

Are food allergies themselves a form of memory? What if we could remember before we were born, and be able to rewind all the baggage with which we came into this life, start afresh?

Whichever way it is, a memory is a bridge--but between then and now, or between now and now?

So much of these past two months I've spent in the UK and Israel have flown away like water under a bridge (another bridge, or the same bridge?), so many words and movements I'll never remember. I want to make sure to take some true memories with me, godspeed toward dawning of certainty of what my next step should be.

I feel privileged to be so well loved and supported as I negotiate whether I'm passing under a bridge or crossing over it.

Or what the bridge is, or how much I need to know about where it's leading...