So much work to do in the next few years, and it’s not about organizing or taking back the country. Taking it back from whom, from what? I can’t identify the enemy, the target. As always, I’ll look to discrete acts, situations and callings to make my move, do what’s right in my own estimation. Others’ fears and interpretations are not my own. Yes, it’s bad. And yes, it’s good. But as my father wisely said as he looked me dead in the eyes, “What difference does it make to your life? Will you change the way you live?”
I don’t know if his words are true, right, wrong or indifferent. It doesn’t matter. The compulsion behind his words was/is desire–to see me healed, less worried, less angry, what he would characterize as “back to normal.” Normal for me looks like balanced anger, kindness, and apathy. Normal. But his urgency snapped the alarm off, shut. The blaring horns insistently blowing, ah, ah, ah, ah!, clicked off. I could not stop hating everyone and everything. My trigger-shot temper could not safety lock. I wanted to gun things down, shoot up the world.
Ironically, that’s what my father threatened to do not three months before, when his world and cancerous body turned in on him, making daily waking like a whack upside the head. He couldn’t take it one day. His cruel temper, the one I inherited, could not be culled from the near mostly normal he maintained.
So, in a way, there’s the same to do as there ever was, even before the world turned riotously dark, sinister-clownish, and despairingly downfallen. Finding my own way never was more than what I was always doing. Being part of the world was always a part time gig anyhow. Not that I didn’t march, protest or speak up. I have. I do. But I don’t have to lose my mind in doing so. That’s the way it has always been. That’s been my normal.
Happy New Year Love: Painting Trees Passion
December 31, 2016
“Write for one reader.” I heard that in a movie. Have a face, a personality, a height, even, but only one, so you can craft your story with a voice directed to someone with a voice too, in a conversation about what you two shared–or never shared.
So here goes:
I couldn’t write about a pure love. There have been many loves. All special loves. I think he insisted I watch this movie (plugged in the headphones, handed them to me, and loaded the movie to the rectangular screen inserted into the back of the seat in front of me) because there are loves that beam a hole in your brain and others in your heart. There is love of the right thing, doing the right thing, even if it is wrong for a part of you, wrong for some wild, abandoned adventure that you’ll never take. The purity lies in never going there. That love is an idea.
Ideas are clean, laser light, perfect, not messy like hunger, sex or anguish. Love as idea. Those abandoned are the purest because they are never lived. Those less glamorous, the responsible kind, the right kind, have their own line of righteous good, a purity of sorts, but not like a diamond (more a ruby). Those are reserved for the love so sublime but impossible.
If I write to you, will you understand? I think we both know how cut-painful words read starkly on a page. But it will bleed us pure. And that’s what you mean when you say you’ll love me to the day you die, visions that will run through your great fantasy-loving, movie mind when you’re rocking grey-silent inside, peering absently through a dirty window obscuring the winter dance of dusk-lit, flaming trees.
And it’s sacred and raw because it’s not messy, not calloused in boredom, sadness, anger, irritation and hate. Fragile love with a tough hide. We carry each other in a deeper pocket. I know you believe. I believe too.
The question never answered, I believe that too. Suspension, free floating purity, I can’t write that.
Where it’s at: ten for today
December 28, 2016
We missed Paris, but we saw Barcelona. Well, we didn’t see much of Paris, arriving late in the evening, just enough time to grab a bite and walk the edges of the Latin Quarter a mite. But Barcelona, we saw its night and day. And though we opted out of the nightlife bar scene, we did tour el centro de la ciudad, walked a good swath of the city from Barcelona cathedral to Sangria de familia cathedral, and spent hours admiring Picasso’s seemingly endless transformational creativity at el museo de Picasso.
We rest heavily, sinking into the cushions of our bullet train seats to nap, write, tune out and glance out the window to see the pastels of fading light cast over the Pyrenees. Over eating, over walking and over sightseeing depletes us like the satiety of a sumptuous meal oh too much. We smile in our pain. That sums up the entire trip so far for me.
It occurred to me upon taking a certain step down an unknown curb on a forgotten street in the center of a city recently eye-soaked that there’s nothing wrong with me. It’s my life. Had I encountered half the snafu’s we did on this trip back home, my blood pressure would have ripped my skull open in a gusher of anger and frustration. I’m thin triggered. Not always, but too often. And nothing truly ruffled me this trip, despite jet lag, sleeplessness, homelessness and digestion disasters.
Maybe I’m finally there–finally. I’ve reached the center of where it’s at and glimpsed what it could be.
Rounding the Bend: 10 for today
December 27, 2016
The year wanes, eroded like my patience today. How many times can you be reminded to take your passport, tag your bags, get to the train station on time, get up by 8 or you’ll miss all to see in the city and eat your spinach, all in three waking hours?
Yes, she means well. She needs antidepressants. Or I do. Life gives us both anxiety, but she panics unceasingly whereas I do less often. Her fear outpaces mine by leagues. “Can we breathe more in 2017?” I asked her son that moments ago.
The daughters plugged in and tuned out almost immediately upon finding our seats, an ordeal of considerable magnitude as we had to walk over the seatless encampment of refugees between cars, the one we circled going up and down levels, forward and back aisles, squeezing through the narrow corridors of human passage to find our way through the maze.
How hard could it be? Cabin number and seat number. It took ten minutes of mind boggling math and engineering to finally land at the last quad of seats in back of coche 15.
A child’s English words catch my attention. The adults respond in French. Flocks of birds circle sporadic homes peppering the rural landscape whizzing by. The TGV doesn’t bullet the way it usually does, like when we flashed by kilometers from Paris to Narbonne 15 years ago. Perhaps after our stop in Perpignan, the train will pick up speed, dashing us to Barcelona.
Mother, you had me.
What mother hasn’t asked herself what it is to be a mother? Cradling fragile life in the palms of your heart, ever on your mind, on your breast, in your nose, wearing them like perfume, you ask yourself how you could possibly keep yourself from hurting them. You ask yourself how you ever lived without them, as if that time before them barely existed. At least I wondered how.
And even now as their floating circumference widens, their sights set on spaces and places far from the core (and corps)–deliberately so–I question my hand, the child crafter’s touch. Did I spoil them too much, under-prepare them for a world I could not have conceived let alone predicted? Have I taught them healthy respect for life, theirs and others’, as well as their fellow planetary inhabitants? If I built their core properly, they will stand.
I’ve learned in yoga that a strong core lies behind every movement, every asana. Such is life. I think of that time a mommy just like me commented that my two-year old seemed to have a strong core. I recall few complimentary words about my mothering worth noting. That one I remember.
My own mother stands symbolically now, like a white alabaster Greek statue, only emaciated rather than plump-full eternally life. Death could not come slower. But she stands (still, sometimes) rickety and frail, tremulous, palsied, but awake somehow–a matriarchal stance to life. Just.don’t.give.up. Your children live for, through, by and despite you. Even after-breath.
We’ve done our part, passing on the genetic code, dicing up human destiny somehow. We’ll rest soon and long.
Happy birthday Mom. I’ll never give you up.
Finally Finals: Ten for Today (and Tomorrow)
Click, click, tap, tap, ping…the room is a jitter with typing and timers. It’s final exam day, the last day of the semester, school year and year, almost. It is all three for me. Tomorrow I jet off to another land until next year.
The tension in the room agitates me, always does, hearing the sighs and coughs, seeing the head scratches and screen light bounce off the wide pupils of mad typists-thinkers. They’re exhausted. And so am I. I’ve stayed up late and gotten up early to finish grading their term papers, the culminating work in this writing course.
I hope I’ve taught them something. I always wish that–some affect I might have.
But some of them, I will have barely touched the shell of their minds. There’s a young man in my class who stares at me and smiles the entire class. He attends almost every class and looks engrossed in my lectures, detours, tangents and lessons. He watches attentively as I scribble dry erase marker slashes and dashes and dots on the white board. His eyes absorb the light of the projected screen filled with words and pictures.
But his work is crazy, of a parallel existence. He’s a photographer. He loves art.
He’ll smile and tell me that he’s got this essay down. But then he’ll hand in some garbled, riffing, hip-hopping, slap-dash jive bullshit about…frankly, I don’t know what. I read, trying to find the thread of his pieced together logic, the color of his world, or sliver of his memory filtering through disjointed fragments slithering between whole sentences and never-ending, like a river meandering down the shallow incline along a stony road, sun-blazed along red rocks, not a ripple, trickled to a narrow rivulet…and dry. Done.
I won’t reach him in time. It’s not his semester to catch on. That’s okay. I know it. I think he does too. He wrote a few final papers, two of them incomprehensible, but the third one…it’s practically logical, relevant and convincing.
I whisper during the final exam to him with a stone cold face: “You pulled it off.” He smiles. Of course, he does. It’s a breakthrough, but too little too late.
And on the way out, he says, ” See you next semester.” Yeah, he knows. I hope to see his smiling face in January, the new year, new semester and new beginning.
Image: touch-tap: pixabay
Judge not: Ten for Today
“I love your cute, little ass,” he always says, and every time he does, I guffaw, snort or giggle just a little. Not a tee hee, coy, embarrassed or flattered giggle either. It’s more disbelieving and cynical than that–way more.
Both parents at one time or another measured asses in the family. “Poor Pam. She has no ass,” I’ve heard my father say on more than one occasion. “Not like her sisters.” Nope, I’d silently always confirm the criticism because I’ve heard my mother respond to his remark with, “She has my ass, and I got my mother’s flat ass.”
I used to joke to people (still do) that I come from a long line of flat asses. I’d see body type illustrations, animated or real life, of the body labels “pear shape” or “spoon” in Cosmo or some other rag. Spoon, definitely spoon. Spoon has a long torso and convex posture–with a flat ass. Yep, spoon.
In my youth and young adulthood (the time when they could get away with that kind of crap), people would comment on my height. “Oh, she’s tall,” they’d say to my mom. “Yes, she takes after her 6’4″ father.” And the first time I met my mother in law at her suburban flat in Garches, just outside Paris, the first words she spoke upon seeing me were, “Elle est grande!” (She’s tall). France is short.
I’m 5’8″. I look up to meet the eyes of my 5’11” daughter. She’s tall, relative to other American women. I’m tall relative to the French. And all of this parceling of parts into categories to somehow order ourselves, well, I discouraged it raising my own children.
I explained to them how labeling others by body shape, color or size objectified people (in terms they could understand, of course). The brainwashing took, and now they berate my father, who habitually points to people’s fat, skinny, ugly, hairy, bow-legged, shapely, old, young, black, white, “oriental” (and more) selves.
More than PC, the de-labeling gives people a chance. It’s lazy and disinterested to sum people up by their parts. You can make snap judgments if you know their “type.” “Oh, she’s insecure and doesn’t date because she’s taller than most guys her age,” I’ve heard tell of my own daughter. And I still carry scars from those who–a la Trump–rated my body parts, a profiling which I swallowed as fact.
I know better now. The force-fed, culturally-created body ideals against which others (and I) measured myself bullshitted me for too long. My ass may be flat, cute, small, just right to onlookers. Bottom line (yep, I did that), I couldn’t s(h)it without it. Judge that.
Credit: spoon-silverware: pixabay
Gifting: Ten for Today
A day of gift giving, my family gathered to celebrate the holidays early. As usual, I was the master distributor of the 75-odd gifts (or more) to the anticipating gift-ees. The small children lent a hand.
My two adult children (or near) stared into their phones but were grateful and gracious, for the most part. They liked what I surprised them with this year–Totoro themed shirts and tiny ceramic hedgehog planters from the gift store at the Japanese market–the small gifts as appetizers to the main dish, the blue and white wrapped cash wad.
Some years I’m not as successful. I’m not good at giving or receiving gifts. I mean, I’m thankful in just the right degree, I’m sure, when given presents. But gifts trigger slight anxiety in me, a discomfort with the offering.
First, I don’t want for anything, and especially material things. Second, the offeror anticipates my response. All givers want to know they chose well, or already know they haven’t but hope to be surprised, or just want to get past the whole ordeal.
It’s excruciating the subtle yet deeply cutting undertones, nuances and inflections inherent in gift exchanges. Always lurking behind the handing over is “Will he/she like it?” And the risk is “No, he/she has that overly thankful, forced corners way up smile with nothing behind the eyes.” Nope. Rejection.
Honestly, the best gifts I’ve ever received, I can’t even remember. My husband gifted me lovely, thoughtful treasures through the years, from fashion wear to Shiraz to diamonds, but my most treasured gifts were bestowed upon me un-offered.
I inherited a good sense of humor, and so many people happenstance’d into my days with a laugh and an irony for smirks. My mother’s logophilia seeped into my bones too, and I can’t measure that reward, that unearned prize.
I have long legs and patience, capacious passion and anger, boundless love and delicate touch, all ignited at the thrust of that last push and first inhale–at birth. My DNA, what a gift! And those who’ve spent their time with me, enjoyed my story, shit on me, broke my heart, and prayed for me, all presents: bow-less, ribbon-less and priceless clay-of-me potters.
I remember those gifts by name.
Getting Shit Done: Ten for Today
I used to be addicted to productivity. My life worth was measured against what I accomplished during the day. And it wasn’t that I checked off a great big to-do list every night to inventory, but I did have a huge list of to-do’s. I wasn’t tallying my doings; I was just doing.
My life was about doing this and that, getting things done: work, school, parenting, family, community, and even strangers absorbed my time. I went from morning til night getting shit done. Empowering energy drove me through brick walls to get to the other side.
But now, I don’t get as much done. I don’t have as much energy, though no less drive. I am determined but larger forces than my willpower overtake me most days. I don’t like to cook any more, me, who ground meat and vegetables to make my own baby food, who cooked and served 9 course meals to friends every New Years and Christmas Eve and other non-holiday days, and who still cooks Thanksgiving dinner for 30 each year. But the daily supper, I’ve lost my will to do so.
It started when the kids’ school and sports schedules became impossible. I was driving one down south 30 miles twice a week and the other 25 miles north another 2 days a week. No one was home at the same time, so we did a lot of ready-mades from TJ’s and grab and go food. I only cooked on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. And then, as the kids got older and preferred eating out or with friends and soccer practices got later, I just gave it up altogether. I can live on hummus and pita chips. They could all fend for themselves.
I don’t cook, and I don’t clean as much any more either. I have limited energy reserves, and with a house with all adults, mostly, I keep my work space, bedroom and kitchen clean only. The rest I farm out to hired help and 15 minute team clean ups once a week, prompted by my yelling.
So now, my productivity includes three, four or five paying jobs–still–but not the non-paid house upkeep, cleaning, cooking, shopping and dozens of other administrative and domestic chores. I’ve downsized.
So today’s burst of getting shit done struck me nostalgic. I wrote (paid) for five hours, attended a virtual meeting, shopped for whatever I couldn’t cover through Amazon for holiday gifts, food shopped, prepared my contribution for tomorrow’s pot luck dinner, exercised the Husky pup and cleaned the kitchen and my room. That’s a lot for me. Felt like old times.
Image: busy bees: pixabay
My head’s in headstand: Ten for today
I’m not quite obsessed but surely determined to do headstand. The accomplishment of this pose drives me each yoga session for the last year or so, the time I started believing I might be strong enough. The end of 2015?
I practice at home almost exclusively. Every once in a while, I’ll do a class a week at my local Yoga Shakti to infuse my practice with new ideas. The go-to poses and routines I rely on daily were stolen from my original yoga teacher, back in 2009, and an influential two-disk box set from Shiva Rhea. The mix and match poses to build your own feature along with set routines for beginners through advanced helped me tons.
I’m 56. Slowly, gravity has taught me what I can and cannot do. The lessons through the decades have stuck. I respect gravity–and my body. Now, I am not ready to call in the cane or “stick to gardening” as one chiropractor recommended. But I don’t crave handstands, cartwheels and flips like I used to even up through my 30s. I’ve enjoyed a right side up world.
So why the craving to turn the world on my head? I’ve thought about it often, in fact, each time I joy in the 4 or 5 seconds I can get both feet up in the air, my arms negotiating weight, blood, balance and universe. Why the joy? Simple accomplishment? Why does it make my day, almost?
I recall my rough pregnancy with my second child. Not real rough. I was grouchy. My first birth was bliss down the trail of new firsts every minute. I waddled the treadmill up to the 36 hours of labor and delivery, practically. But the second pregnancy three years later felt sluggish, loose and irritable. I felt gravity and hormone ravaged. I had heartburn.
While the mood helped me collect outstanding receivables from my law practice clients, it was not suitable for handling the rest of life, namely, a three year old, work and husband. So, I somehow instinctively ended up in a Yoga studio signing up for prenatal Yoga classes. It worked.
A class a week helped relieve growing pressure all over my body. I gained more weight with the second pregnancy, only 4 more pounds but felt like more, so my body needed relief from gravity. The class revolved around safe inversions using straps, blocks and other helpful props. The inversions brought a little bliss back in my body, even as I slightly feared the instability of my blobby, lopsided figure.
Perhaps, the memory of those classes prompted this new fascination with the promise of headstand, a powerful inversion–one I can feel just attempting it. My body reacts vigorously, the need to breathe through it indisputable. Though I doubt it’s the promise of bliss I seek. It’s something more and less.
Perhaps the world is too much with me these days with horrifying unraveling everywhere I turn: chaos and fear. Crazy elections and surprise referenda results merely symptoms of the underlying dissolution in flux, the resolution way on the horizon. Emergence.
But politics are always local and personal. Emerging order from chaotic transitions of my own predate or coincide with the world’s. My life vision, career and family have changed, transitioned to the next phase–whatever that may turn out to be–and so, the world feels turned upside down. It isn’t, but the disorienting loss of a 30 year career, future of marriage and children, and parents who promised to always be there–well, it feels like what I imagined as a child digging a hole to China might feel like coming out the other side, eventually.
So perhaps mastering uprightness on my head, naturally evolved from long-procured balance and strength–a lifetime’s worth–is the only way for a new vision and path to emerge clearly. Do I have to see that vision, that path for me to have it, be on it? No. But I figure I’ll know that by the time I’m able to breathe steadily, calmly, on my head for longer than 5 seconds.
Credit: headstand: Pixabay
In the gaze of the other 