Chiaroscuro

Many years ago I had the great good fortune, probably not sufficiently appreciated at the time, certainly not taken adequate advantage of, to live in Florence for nearly a year.  The trouble with living in a fabulous city rich in stories and visually moving in the deepest parts of one's soul is that one may still fall into bad habits brought from home, and I did.
Being a naive 20 year old coming out of a horrendous relationship terminating in a welfare sponsored abortion in a town where I was completely alone and in the hands of some pretty brutal doctors and nurses I got to see how the other side lived.
I say the other side, because though my childhood was one of relative economic privilege, the memories are such  that I am constantly flipping over debris to find good memories to cultivate, to  uncover the reasons behind the others and to approach forgiveness.
In sunny California, I saw that there are many people who have lousy memories without food or social opportunity, some who rise out and lots who never do.  I was living at the time surrounded by people in despair and torment, and had made the childish error of falling in love with one of them.  It might not have been the best time for my parents to send me to Europe alone with little money, no connections and no plan, but that was their way of handling things, and if I had been less homesick and broken hearted I might have been able to make more of it.
So, I learned to speak Italian, to cook food from markets instead of from cans, to appreciate the beauty of a gone world lovingly preserved and to take long walks and bike rides in search of the perfect pastry or gelato emporium.  I must get over my sadness that at the time, I never drank coffee.  I didn't believe I had the right to try to draw or paint, so I didn't, I looked at other people's paintings and read other people's books, played other people's music and thought other people's thoughts.  The loneliness of my time there forced me to begin to grow a person.  It has taken a long time, but I credit Italy with the fertilizer, the right soil and the warm sun.
My first experience of a new concept in how to see was explained to me with the euphonious word 'chiaroscuro'.  There is a reason we use other languages to refer to ideas the English vocabulary doesn't encompass.
"The use of light and dark pigment to create the illusion of solid forms" applies as much to how we manage memory to create stories as to visual art.  The benefit of applying the idea to a memory palette is that not only images are created and strung together, but also deep emotion, motivation, identity.  The fluidity of paint is a satisfying medium, if I don't like the work I've done, I can scrape it off and paint another one.  This brings me to another visual concept: Pentimento.

Prints of Peace

Though I have lived through dozens of Christmases, it crossed my mind this year that I don't remember any of them very well.  When I think of Christmas, I remember the one when I was 4 years old the most clearly, though by now so much of my life feels like a dream,  that the dreamlike quality of that Christmas is not so much a stand alone memory.
The one thing I don't look forward to about dementia is living in the distant past.  If I had experienced a Norman Rockwell childhood, it could be a good way to wind up, but I'm developing a minor horror of spending the end of life thinking I'm back at my beginnings, though I suppose it is possible that there are some good experiences back there that I have selectively forgotten because they didn't fit the narrative I had decided to create to fit how it felt.
That year though, was the last year I had a family, and a home and a sense of those things being real.  My father was a lover of Christmas, my mother couldn't have hated it more if it had included anal rehydration.  Dad got a big tree, and the stairway in that big house wound up and around the tree to the top floor.  There never was such a tree, I couldn't get enough of it, I wanted to sleep under it, and that year I tried to.  It was the last year I was convinced that Santa Claus was a real human person, and though suspicions were gaining on faith, the tree seemed like a good place to wait for him to come and drink the bourbon and eat the cookies we had left for him.  That Christmas is probably the one I have tried to get a piece of again every year since, and it is not just elusive.  It never existed.   Underneath what I remember, was a couple of people who couldn't believe the situation they had chained themselves to, drinking to bury the pain of it and working hard to convince anyone who might be looking that things were fine.
We were Unitarians at that time, and that was the year I asked my mother if the church ever talked about Jesus.  "Only if they're falling down stairs" she replied.
I suppose a 4 year old can't be expected to understand that the way one approaches one's life has an effect or that the decisions made in the face of life have consequences, or that caring about other people or listening to them is more than just getting the hell out of the way and making yourself scarce, but I remember a longing for meaning.
So much of what happens at this time of year strikes me as reaction to unexamined memory instead creating an experience or taking an action based on a response to reality.  The return of more light whether it looks like turning towards summer a few seconds at a time or the idea that there was a human incarnation of consciousness, love, unity, acceptance and forgiveness, it runs like a thread through the ritual of this season.

 The contrast of how the season is represented and how it is experienced is a stark lesson every year of how to deal with the ways in which we are disappointments to ourselves.  We are always at the end, we are always at the beginning, nothing is repeated, no one needs to be held to account, no wishes need to be fulfilled, no scores settled, no certain results.    But it helps if it is possible to notice what is going on, if it isn't possible to be generous, maybe it's possible to be restrained, if it's not possible to give, maybe it's possible to not to take.     

sourdough again

This is how the bread turned out.  I think there's room for improvement, but it's tasty and I consider that a success….

Sourdough

Sometime after the divorce, my mother went from thinking that hotdogs and frozen peas with Uncle Ben's rice was a suitable dinner to feed her kids, to making her own bread, finding things like artichokes, planting her own garden and making her own jelly.
For awhile, she was bringing her whole wheat bread down to Boston to sell at an upscale food market on Boylston St, but her kids were trading lamb sandwiches made with artisan bread and homemade mayonnaise for a PB&J on Wonder bread during recess.
As she got more involved in improving the home food supply, she hit on a bread that we all liked;  sourdough.
I have been making my own bread now for decades, and have dropped off the cliff many of her unbreakable rules.  She measured meticulously, I don't measure at all.  She insisted that 500 strokes of a wooden spoon was essential when mixing the bread, and kneading for 10 minutes.
I found that though that worked for her, I get a very nice doorstop at the end of the process if I follow this path, so I mix it up enough, knead it as little as possible and never, ever punch it down when it is rising.
Mum had a crock of sourdough starter in the fridge for years, I never paid attention to how she started it, but when the local artisan bread vendor was delivering his weekly shipment to the local store I asked him how he did anything without yeast.  He smiled enigmatically and said he had a "relationship" with the yeast in the environment and he invited it in.
A good dodge, but I have been thinking about it.
I decided to start my own sourdough starter bringing yeast along by invitation, I'm not patient enough yet to figure out how to do this with a plain loaf [later, maybe] so I grated a potato and cooked it.  After grating the potato into a bowl there was about 1/2 cup of fluid, so I added that to 3/4 cup of organic flour and put it in a glass bowl, covered with a plate.  I figured that lets air enough in, without subjecting it to the debris that is continual in this house.
Today is day 5 and I am going to make a loaf of bread with it.
I'll let you know how it goes in part 2 tomorrow.

A Very Tender Turkey….

I imagine my sister on the other side of the continent writing this same story, if she hasn't already; it is really her story to tell, but I was there, and became part of the tradition, as all people who attended Thanksgiving at my mother's house for every year afterwards heard the phrase and was told the story, so it's kind of my story too.
My sister married a brilliant computer genius who also had an unfailing eye for foibles, animal and human.  a year or so later, my oldest brother married a very flashy, dramatic woman from the South Shore.  She came from first generation Italian immigrants who had wonderful Italian manners and customs, her father gave me a 5 dollar bill every time he saw me, I didn't know until I had lived in Italy that this was a common occurrence, and struck me as being amazing considering how my own family viewed the topic of cash.  [Something you never discussed or admitted to having or were willing to share].  John Biagi had run a restaurant in the North End of Boston for years, well attended by business men who worked more or less off the grid, he was not one of them [it was said] but knew how to keep his mouth shut.  He also knew whatever there was to know about food and hospitality.
My mother had spent some years learning the cuisine of her heritage, French, and was a confident cook, but a terrified hostess and in general suffered terrible anxiety about having people over for anything that didn't have to do with music.
The first Thanksgiving we all piled into her house to celebrate the increase of family fervor, The Biagis brought the turkey.  A very high quality turkey in the days when what you could get in rural NH was a Butterball, unless you happened to run over one.
Thanksgiving in our house always included a point of critical mass when someone took offense burst into tears or threw some kind of horror show, and mum was working very hard to see that it wasn't her, or anyone who reflected on her, so tension was high by the time we sat down to dinner.
"What a Tender Turkey!" my mother commented after a longer than acceptable silence.
"Oh, no, it was the way you cooked it!" returned Mr. Biagi.
"Oh, but really", mum answered "It was nothing I did, it a very Tender Turkey!"
>>silence<<
>>sounds of chewing<<
"Please pass the gravy?"  from someone
"Oh you don't need any gravy, this turkey is so tender!"
My brother in law began to suppress giggles.
People shifted in their chairs.
My mother wished she was still drinking, or perhaps, could just go to her room and read.
"Where did you find such a Tender Turkey?" she asked.
"Oh, I got from a friend in the North End, but really, it's just a turkey, the way you cooked it is what made it so tender…"  Mr Biagi answered.
"Oh, no!" she argued "This turkey is just SO TENDER!"
Well.
This is how family traditions start.  Thanks to my brother in law for embedding it forever
So on Thanksgiving this year, in memory of my long disappeared, never to be recovered family of origin, I am busily working to see that once again, we can claim to have the tenderest turkey ever.
Happy Thanksgiving to all.

suicide

Last winter was hard.  It was harder than I could have foreseen, and I determined to get some tools together to handle this one, but  there are no tools to forestall the effects of despair on people you love, and are attached to the positive outcomes of their process.  As someone who has danced with depression off and on for all of my life, I feel, that having made it this far, whatever it ends up looking like, I will probably make it the rest of the way.
At 93, my mother killed herself, and though I understand all the reasons she had for doing that, it wasn't the first time she had  gone towards death at her own hand.  When I was about 16 months old, she overdosed and was taken away, not to be seen again for a couple of months, a long time to a toddler with an unsupervised and angry older family orbiting the event.  Again, when I was 11, this time she was gone for longer, and I went to live with a father I didn't know very well, and who had no idea how to handle kids who had experienced trauma other than to insist that we get it together and follow the rules; Victorian rules that he never set aside for any reason.
An old friend, estranged, that my daughter was friends with died this summer, and it was ruled a suicide, though I don't for a moment believe it was, she left behind a toddler and a devastated , family, friends and community.
So to hear someone who is of absolute value to me speak of doing the same is beyond what I am equipped to bear.  I can't help, I can't make the pain go away, I can't solve the problems that cause this at the deepest level and I can't do anything about the transitory stimuli.  How in the face of this do I recognize that all things change, that life can bring astonishing resolutions, that healing can occur when I live in a state of fear that I am not allowed to express, when I have opinions that I cannot voice and when my own feelings which are tearing up my immune system have no place and no time for expression or resolution.
I know how much I have to be grateful for.  I know how tenuous the web is that holds me, that with the loss of a couple of strands I would fall through into a new, unknown and unwelcome reality.  How does anyone make another person see this other than tying them to a chair and forcing them to watch CNN for a few hours?
It is hard to sit with this.
Compared to what is going on in the world, the people who are murdered without being heard, the destruction of the only planet we have to live on [despite the science fiction movies that seem to think we can somehow find another one] the random hatred and violence that has no solution, the corruption of leadership, the poverty of spirit, it could be viewed as small potatoes, first world problems.
In the practice of Maitri, joining to the suffering world, knowing one is not alone in anything that is going on, all works so well when it isn't affecting one's personal "special" relationships.  I am not in the least convinced that I have the consciousness to navigate a lesson this intense.
Here is winter again, and I know that even if I had the money to run away, I could not.  I am standing in the fire.  Wave to me. 

Savour

Last week on FB, I took issue with the lyrics of a song and a friend of a friend asked me [ in a non aggressive manner ] if I was bitter.  I have been thinking about it ever since, because, of course, nobody has the goal of being bitter, or of being caught being bitter.
The issue was a song of Dolly Parton's, a song from a long time ago, a big hit, "Jolene".  When I first heard it in my teens, when I was a very romantic, hopeful girl, I thought it was a whiny song, and missed the point, that if one is in reciprocal love with someone, another female, no matter how alluring can't just swoop in and "take" a person away as though they were an object in a store.  As I have later found, it is possible to interfere with an established relationship by promising novelty, romance or just a bit of strange.  I have also discovered, at least in my experience, and that of my friends, that the loser in these transactions tends to be the woman.  If she's the one who is on the outside, she gets a man who she can never trust.  If she's on the inside, she loses most of their shared friends and community experience when he takes off.  If it's the man who is left, well, I don't see many of them hanging around single for long.
I don't see myself as bitter, but it is a feeling that is there sometimes.
I want to relate it to food, to the receptors on our tongues, the organ of speech, of pleasure, and being able to distinguish food from poison.  Sweet, sour, salt and bitter, but in the U.S. bitter is a flavor we don't seek.  Bitter foods are good for digestion, is it too far to leap to bitter experiences being an aid to understanding?  Too much of any flavor is distressing after hunger or a craving have been satisfied.
Clinging to a preference or an outcome seems to me not that different from having a narrow diet, preferring to salt everything, to bail in the chocolate, to avoid vegetables.
Having thought of this, it is true that I eat too much sugar, and I avoid the anticipation of pain,  I pick radicchio out of my salad and I take to my bed when drained by an unpleasant encounter.  So, yes, probably, bitter sometimes, but not embittered.

Success

On what does the idea of success depend?  First the word depend, meaning to hang off of, not to be built upon, but having come to mean being determined by. So from what does an idea of success depend?  It would seem to be a subjective value, a perceived location, based on an abstract concept, the achievement of an aim or goal, so it might come down to an examination of the source of goals.  The locus of such a source is still not a fixed point.  The laziness of the mind in working this one out is understandable when there are so many small goals that have to be achieved, like getting the laundry done and folded and put away, seeing that there is food in the house, gas in the car, cash for the taxes and other inescapable bills.  How is there time when life is on a runaway train to falling to pieces to consider such a thing as a goal that sits on top of Maslow's pyramid?
I've been wondering if a personal prime directive gets bolted into place so early that it is the work of a life time to figure out where it is, and changing the orientation is another task, and perhaps for me by now, best saved for another life if there is one.  If there isn't, then I'd better get busy making peace with the way things are, to accept what I can and cannot do, what I do and do not want and dig through another level of knowing that I have spent much of my time here trying to appease ghosts.
There is a danger of becoming disconnected from humanity at large by just considering things like not being around groups of people because it makes me feel as though a layer of skin is missing.  It is hazardous to sink into the sweet softness of my life in the woods, taking what insulation I can find in solitude.  It could lead to permanent sweatpants and coffee stains on my shirt.  It could lead to becoming the kind of old woman I viewed with derision and fear in my youth.  Somewhere on the razor's edge between these two realities is a path to peace, but I'm not sure it includes polite dishonesty.  

Hallowe'en, of course

True astrological Samhain is NOT on October 31st, but closer to November 4th when the Sun is equidistant between the solstice and equinox.  I attribute my inability to come up with the perfect costume in time to join everyone else to this calendar inaccuracy.  If people used an ephemeris instead of a calendar, things would make more sense.  We would celebrate energy thresholds at the appropriate times.  But we don't.
The last costume I remember from my childhood was the last one my mother made.  Though most other kids, even then, were getting "store bought" costumes, Mum had a contempt for the idea that made me feel cheap for even wanting something shiny made of crummy polyester that would last long enough for me to get rained on while wearing it.
I was about 8 and we were living at the end of the dirt road that I still live on, but at that time we were the only people out here, camping out in my Grandmother's summer cottage.  I loved the magic of the place, and the sense of safety I felt.  Mum's unhappiness and desperation was always so near the surface, and I think it was worse during that time, but it was a white noise we were all used to tuning out, and living in the woods where the light was so pure, and the stars so numerous, there were benefits  we couldn't have come up with on our own.
That year, Mum decided to get creative and make a costume for me calling it the Spirit of Autumn.  It consisted of leaves that she cut out carefully matching the type of leaf to the color of fabric, and being a self taught botanist, made herself crazy getting it right.  I was a lot less excited about it by the time it was done because so much pain was in each leaf, but it was charming.  she sewed each leaf on to a leotard, and made a bit of headgear to go with it, I could have looked like a brush pile, but I had the sense of looking Shakespearean and was  very proud of it, convinced I'd win the contest at school.  What I didn't know at the time was that there was no chance because the same 2 girls always won, their parents were too big a deal for them to lose.  Sure enough, the one dressed as a Disney Princess won, and mum was annoyed about having put so much time and energy into the costume that it went into the trash soon afterwards.
It must have been painful and hard to be a divorced woman in a small town in NH in 1957, it must have been hard to have a couple of big secrets, and a big history to uphold in the face of it.
At the coming of Samhain, when the veil thins and perhaps I can talk to her more clearly, I want her to know that it took me a long time, but I understand now about the split between what one thinks of oneself in an essential and private way, and the action of karma in the social world.
I know what it is like to live behind a wall of ice made of the finest clear water so that you can see through but nobody can hear you.   I wish she could have known that she wasn't alone.

Old Bag

To follow up on the previous thought, I'm remembering being 16, and other than calling someone fat, the worst thing you could call them was old.  It didn't matter to us if someone was a decent person, they got a pass for being funny, but otherwise, there was a constant vigilance about where on the attractiveness scale each of us were.
I will add, that not only were all of us childhood recipients of unwanted sex, but also came from families where appearance was vastly more important than substance.
We grew up believing that our fuckability was the measure of our value.
The alpha female of that group is now dead, she left the wreckage of her life and a story untold, a brilliant talent suppressed.  She feared aging and at enormous cost, isn't going to be faced with it.
I remember feeling somewhere way underneath the desire to belong to a group of friends, that there was something wrong with the way we were looking at ourselves and evaluating others.  Part of it was an extreme and somewhat rebellious playing out of the messages we were getting, but there was still the pressure to comply, to knuckle under, to be good girls.
None of us had any intention of being good girls.
There was a time of promiscuity, between not knowing how to say "no", not knowing we had the right say "no" and not knowing the consequences to our sense of self by not saying "no".  This coincided with the time of drug use, a convenient way to fit in, to not look too closely at the life we were in and a general fishing expedition for love, attention, safety or direction.
Pretty silly from here, but dangerous toys in the hands of the unconscious.
You don't have to experience childhood sexual abuse to be conditioned to believe yourself to be a commodity, society will help with that.  The only person I know who escaped it was raised a staunch Catholic in a big Catholic family in a big Catholic neighborhood, and sometimes I think she just closed her eyes.
I still can hear the derision in my friend's voice as she called her mother an old bag, a woman who could not escape her circumstances, who could not protect her children, whose only refuge was in making sure that everything looked 'lovely'.
I also will never be able to get rid of the memory of my mother, about a week before one of her suicide attempts, crawling around on the floor one night, sobbing looking for a piece of a tooth that had broken off.  "You have no idea how bad it is to get old" she told me.
Well, now I have an idea of how bad it is.
I also have a great mass of gratitude for how good it is.  Old Bag?  Bring it on.

Vanity

In the OED, it is not until the 3rd choice of definitions that you see the word relating to personal attachment to appearance.
The word means emptiness, coming from a Latin word vanus, giving rise to the word vanitas.
Meaninglessness, fruitlessness also are words used to describe it.  A path that leads nowhere.
The trouble I see now is how emptiness and the value given to it has created society's view of itself.
As girls, tiny girls, we are encouraged to be vain about our looks, more than boys, though boys are inculcated with suggestions as to where they should project their vanity as well.
So, here we are, in a world where if you are talented in an area that requires your personal visibility, and particularly if you are female, looks count.
Good looking women and men are paid more than plain ones.  Or heavy ones.  When I have been criticized about my appearance, particularly my size, I enjoy pointing out that when the critic and I are both dead, we will decompose at the same rate.
Still, the shame about my appearance instilled in me at the breast and beyond makes it hard for me to see a photo of myself.  I mean, inside, I am a magnificent waterfall, fireworks, points of celestial light spinning around a central vortex.  I am supplied with wings and gills, whatever I need - so when I see a photo of a grumpy old woman with bad hair and jowls, it gives me a start.
There used  to be cultures where mirrors were not allowed, it was considered an affront to the tribe to gaze on one's own face instead of noticing the look on other's faces when you were in their presence.  A much better gauge to the kind of person you are.
And of course, there is the story of Narcissus, maybe he was a pretty boy, but I'm not certain the end to his story is enviable.
So, why do we all care so much and why does it hurt so much to call people names based on their appearance?  I personally don't plan to take my appearance with me into the afterlife if there is one, and if there is not I won't be needing it there either.
Why do many of us care so much how we are evaluated by others?   Status ranked by things that are empty, meaningless, fruitless and leading nowhere.

Evening Up the Apple Crisp

Growing up in NH, we ate seasonally and I still think there's something wrong with strawberries and asparagus in the fall, squash in the spring and mangoes anytime.
The town I grew up in had a magnificent apple orchard on the highest hill in town, many acres and at least 125 years old, providing any variety of apple you would need:  Macs for sauce, eating if you got them early enough, Empires, Gravensteins, Paula Reds for pies, Macoun, the best eating apples, and I'm not arguing with you about this, it is gospel truth, and Cortlands for the perfect apple crisp.
As soon as the Cortlands were available, my mother made apple crisp and kept it going through Thanksgiving at least.
By Christmas, we demonstrated the Buddhist idea that all pleasure turns into pain, but in October we still had to restrain ourselves from bailing in the apple crisp in amounts that would frighten a cardiologist.
On Wednesday the crisp was made; no matter how few people were in the house, it was gone in 24 hours.  There could be a ragged 2/3 of a pan before bed, but by morning there would be enough for 2 or 3 servings, and the edges as straight as if cut with a laser.
Over time, I have modified the recipe to justify the consumption of such a treat by adding an ingredient and reducing another one.
I know there are crisp recipes that include oatmeal.  I eschew and repudiate them.  Try this one:
Preheat the oven to 350
Peel and slice in medium sized chunks, 8 Cortland apples and put in a deep dish pie pan
[this is not a pie, let the width of the pieces be 1/2 inch or bigger]
pour 1/3 cup of apple cider and juice of 1/4 of a lemon over the apples
Using your fingers, mix up a stick of butter, 1 C ww flour, 3/8 c almond meal, 2/3 c dark brown sugar,
[or combination of brn and date sugar, but if using date sugar, increase amount a bit]
1/2 t cinnamon
pinch of cardamom, don't over do it.
mix in the butter allowing it to be chunky, mores than with piecrust or biscuits
spread as much as you need over the top, save what you don't for something else, or if you want it really sweet, use it all
bake for 25 minutes.
It'll keep longer than it takes for it to disappear.

Like Magic

When something good happens and you didn't do anything to deserve it or put things in place for it to happen, it feels like magic.  When something undesirable happens and you didn't do anything to deserve it or bring it on, it gets called bad luck.  The briefest of moments that it takes to dismiss responsibility for what is going on all around me leaves me lots of time to ruminate, complain, come up with possible solutions or other ways to see it, when really all that is required is to see whatever it is for whatever it is.  Maybe not so simple, I've gotten through my life without a high success rate on this one, I do really well seeing what it was, though.  Points for that.

Procrastination

A while back a fb friend posted a request for procrastination therapies.  In choosing to put it in my pile of things to mull over, I invoked a few weeks of writer's cramp.
Procrastination is one of the easiest topics to put aside for later.
It's unimportant.
The very idea brings on a flood of creativity in some other direction.
If that doesn't happen, well, the laundry gets done, folded and put away, the dishes and countertops are clean, the car has been vacuumed and bills paid, or at least sorted.
There are people for whom procrastination is not only a way of courting pretend powerlessness in one or two areas, but is a vantage point on the workings of all things.
Moving furniture gives me the feeling that I contribute to transforming an undesirable circumstance, alleviating the pain of a decision or any of the dozens of obvious uncertain outcomes that act out like sloppily programmed alarm clocks.
When I have been sure I knew what was up, I have been wrong.  Wandering blind, I have tripped over wonders that I would have missed if I'd had been all nose-to-the-grindstone.
It's beginning to dawn on me that many of the standards I took for real are chains.  So much effort has been saved through laziness and inconsistency.
Yet, having experienced serendipity, having seen that knowledge is frequently incomplete and surrounded by mirrors, adrenaline still has the power to over-ride, and at least if I move the table over here and the hutch over there, there will be more room for guests.

Sotto Voce

Watching my youngest granddaughter is like time traveling.  As the youngest, shortest and smallest in by any measure, a dysfunctional, family, I had to make a fair amount of noise to be heard.  It was screeching into a void, though, and I have been lucky to live long enough to outlast the expectation, but not the hope, that my voice counts.  This begins early, I see, as I watch a not quite 3 year old work out the ways in which she may make her voice count.
Sidebar:  Because I am still thinking about Joan Rivers, and arguing with people about her right to be the kind of comic she wanted to be, I wonder what kind of a little girl she was?  I have also wondered if she had not been petite, and cute and visually compelling how well her early career would have gone.  She paved the way for Roseanne, but could Roseanne have happened without her?  Could the first huge female talent been a tall woman?  A heavy woman?  As much as I loathe the way women are viewed in the world [poorly, in every culture it seems] I must bow to the forces which shaped me.
I was pretty enough as a young woman, but tall, loud, aggressive, outspoken, bad tempered and insecure.
I am still those things, but now without the looks to excuse me.
The only thing that has been added has been less of a hair trigger, less willingness to do battle over bullshit, more peace with myself and about 40 lbs.
There has never been a time when what I said wasn't reacted to outside of the family.
Inside the family, reaction was binary.   Nuclear meltdown or punishing silence.  My mother had a trick of looking at you and turning her eyes into little points without changing her facial expression at all.  She added to this the effect of retreating inside her self, putting as much distance between herself and the object before her without leaving the room.
Because it took so much to get a response at home, I took most of my life trying to figure out how to modulate that in the outside world.  I never learned for example, not to call a teacher an asshole, or yell "Fuck Off" at someone…… hours of standing in the hall or waiting in the principal's office did not wake me up
For someone who scored well on puzzle solving tests, I displayed the problem solving ability of an inbred, confused, dyslexic lab rat.
These days, I have set myself the task of remembering how much I desire peace.
Peace in my self, peace in my home, peace in my life, peace in my relationships and of course, World Peace.
This means not reacting from the place of being threatened.  It means that when someone frightens me or makes me angry [pretty much the same thing] or impatient or bored that I have to take the time to peel a layer back;  then another, and so on until the place is revealed where that other is more like me than unlike me.
Somewhere underneath all the undesirable, itchy labyrinth of human encounters, there is common ground.
This is the common ground that Mr. Rogers called holy ground, and if we are to have peace, if we are to get along, it is the only ground we have.

crazy ass shit.

I have done some things in my life that I am not proud of.  There are probably things I have done that I should be ashamed of that I don't even know about.
Growing up, watching people around me be incomprehensible, trying to absorb and make sense of it, and adjust, I made a lot of plans for the future.  None of which have materialized, by the way….
For a long time I had the idea that if I was careful, I could manage to avoid making any mistakes that I could not reverse.
I kept the tiny little space inside that was me away from everything, unexposed and unexamined.  I reasoned that if I could keep one corner clean, I could dust off the rest when I had time.
It was a childish plan, not allowing for  how we are all Life's Bonzais.
A secret once exposed feels like an explosion, or on a good day, a hot air balloon, and yet the objective view is that whatever the secret is, within some parameters, there is someone in the room with something so similar as to include you back into the human race.
From "Who has a life that has turned out as expected" to "How in the hell did this happen", there is no escape.
Industries are built out of hiding the visible signs of tragedy, sadness, disappointment and poor choices. There isn't anything that works, no plastic surgery for life, no cosmetic effect, no vitamin, no diet, no makeover that is going to mask the simple truth of being human. It hurts.
Schadenfreude can't really take root if empathy is present.  If I know I am connected to everyone else, that when I meet a sorrowing person, I am connected to their sorrow, and even if I am pleased with my life that day, I may well not be tomorrow, or even in a minute or two.  Anywhere you may go, I may find myself, conversely, if I have found my way through, so can you.
Someday I hope to be able to move through change elegantly, adjust quickly without complaint or fury, to let go of the gone time and step into a now without drama.
I suspect that is as realistic as a hope I had as a child, though.

Sing thee to thy rest

Taking it with you - you can't, you don't, and really, it doesn't get left behind either.
Everything of my mother's broke, deteriorated, disappeared or died shortly after she did.  The family she tried to believe would reconcile and care about one another fell apart.  Her cat ran away, never to be seen again, her clothes went off somewhere, the antiques had been sold, very few of her personal effects held together once she left the planet.  Even her intentions about where her body would wind up were scattered on the breeze.  There was an autopsy which she never would have wanted, there was resistance from the church where she wanted her ashes left to having them left there, even though she had paid for the privilege.
I got a run around that lasted years about planting flowers in a spot and putting her ashes there, they told me I was only going to be allowed to scatter her in the forest behind the church and if I wanted to plant something there, they had to take it before the committee in charge of what got planted where.  I needed to stop carrying the box of ashes around, so I planted bulbs and blueberries with her ashes on the property she lived and died on, some went to a memorial garden I have near my house and the last handful I kept in a pouch thinking I would take it to France where her father was buried but after 7 years I decided it was time.
My daughter and I went out to the back of the church one day when nobody was looking and put the last portion of ashes under a euonymus that had been climbing up the back of the Lady Chapel for decades.  We sprinkled her in a star formation for the pagan ancestors placed a crystal there and said  some things that we needed to say and left.
I don't believe that people hang out after they leave, and that if you go to a graveyard to talk to someone it is just to bring your attention to the encounter, but that really, they are as much everywhere as anywhere.
Still, I found it jarring and another reminder of impermanence when I went there today to talk to her and saw the euonymus gone, the earth all around the church covered with chips, as though they dug everything up to install better drainage.  The place had always been damp.
About 8 feet further back there had been installed 2 raised beds with seasonal flowers and a statue of St. Francis in between them.  I suppose it could have been St. Joseph, I'm not really up on the statuary.  
I remember trying to get the pastor to come up and give her communion the week before she decided to leave and for some reason it was inconvenient and he didn't return my calls.  There was no money to be gotten from this old lady, so why bother to see that she got communion?  Not important to me, but important to her, and watching her pretend she wasn't hurt by it was pain enough.  The church betrayed her in the end, just as many people in her life had done.
In Tibet, there is a sky burial, in which the dead are taken to a mountain, and a priest dismembers the body, hurling it to the vultures who are waiting expectantly to devour it.  I have always thought this was a beautiful idea, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be legal in this country.  Failing that, planting blueberry bushes over cremated remains provided berries for songbirds who took my mother's earthly spirit to the sky where they sing, and lay eggs and raise young who eat more blueberries.  A good way for her music to go on forever, or at least for as long as there are birds.

A Failure of Curiosity

In 2006, one week before my granddaughter's first birthday, My mother killed herself.
She was 93, she was at the end of possibility of living in her home, she had worn me out to the point of collapse, and used up my daughter as well, who was trying to raise a baby without a clue.  She had come to the end of her money, and on her behalf, I had run up debt amounting to about a quarter of a million dollars between our 2 credit cards to keep her at home, to pay for her medication and to keep the household going.
Now, nearly everyone says how brave, how good that she could choose her way to die, and part of me agrees with them.  But there still dwells within me the little girl who watched her being carted away in a straightjacket after a drug overdose, and being gone for the summer.  There is the 11 year old who had to call people to break down the door to her room after she had overdosed, and then went to live with a father she hadn't seen much of for the previous 6 years in another town.
Mum had been "sober" = not drinking, for a lot of years.  She had taken plenty of uppers in the 60's and 70's, switched to pot and hash, and finally, regular prescribed anti-anxiety, antidepressant medication when she had been ripped off by her connection for thousands of dollars, and was too sick to be able to grow her own anymore.
She wrote a note, melted her meds in vodka and went to sleep.
It was what had been recommended by "The Final Exit".
There was plenty of drama in the family after this, I'll save that for another time, but the point of this today is that she ended her life in the manner that had most traumatized us all through our childhoods, and that echo remains.
I have her pistol in my house [hard to get at] and there have been a couple of winters during which I have thought about that every day.  As I move through the cement that likes to form around my feet sometimes, I have the conversation.
When Robin Williams spoke of the evil little voice, the one that says "just one"  or "jump", I know who is doing the talking.  I do not pretend not to hear that voice, because I have found that more dangerous. I ask the voice, how does it think it knows the future?  How can it tell me I am useless, how does it know?  Even if it were true, there is never a reasonable answer to the questions I ask.  So curiosity keeps the cat going, how will the story turn?  What will happen next?  Who will come on to the stage and tell a joke?  Even if I don't care at the moment, I remember that I might care in the shortest time it takes to not do something I can't change.  This is only depression, this is not profound depression.  This is only sadness, maybe grief, even, but it isn't devastation, despair, being sucked down the black center of oblivion.  Circling the drain is not the same as going down the tube.
So, I understand ending it all as a momentary failure of curiosity.  I don't want to imagine what happens to those for whom that's a killer

The Gap

Tonight as I climbed up the ladder to my loft in nearly total darkness I thought of how many times I had climbed up there to sleep.  I thought of the stairway, really more like a ladder, illuminated by the Full Moon, dark in an overcast sky, polished and light in color when new in 1978, company sometimes, many climbs up to the loft in solitude, baptism of cold in winter and all the times I have managed to get a piece of furniture up there, or down from there, that didn't seem as though it would fit.
The images of my years in this house, in this life flickering like film clips gone before I really saw them.
It certainly isn't an original idea that when you are 3 years old, a year is one third of your entire life.
A short time is an entirely different construct than it is as one moves along.  It doesn't hold, though that at 40, a year is 1/40th of your life, or at 60, 1/60th;  moving along the continuum reveals it to not have been a continuum at all, or even a spiral.  It is all happening now.  I'm still that young hopeful girl who insisted it was possible to live here, until eventually it was.  I suspect somewhere in here there is, a lifeless body on the floor, waiting to be found by the smell, betrayed by the uncollected mail, unpaid bills.
In Greek Mythology, Khaos was the great grandmother of time, The goddess of the great darkness from which emerged all created phenomena,  resolving into harmonious order.  She was the original source of all manifestation, a spouseless goddess, the abyss, the gap, and for a moment, the tiniest of temporal slices, I had the curtain of the illusion of separateness, the dance of dualities pulled back, and the experience of the mysterious presented to me.
Eternity, timelessness, no ground, no reference point no picture to hang on to.  In the gap of the great source of all possibility there is an invitation.  No fear.  No thing.  Something I can't know from here but that dances through the fabric of the universe we are designed to be in as long as we have a nervous system.
 I have had a thread laid in my hand that I know will lead me home.  I am a visitor in this life, a traveler and am intimately connected to everything I am, everything I am not and have a simple [but given my habits, perhaps not easy] task of choosing peace over conflict, love over indifference, generosity over aggression, forgiveness over ego.  Today I am sure that this is the only way the world may heal.

Yoga

So, If yoga means union, why has it become a way for people to congratulate themselves on how fabulous they are?  Not everyone, of course, put down the pitchforks and torches, but way too much promo on the topic is focused on results impacting attractiveness.  Why is the heart of the practice in fine print?  Oh, and by the way, you will feel more connected to your life?
Today I did sanding the furniture yoga, cleaning the kitchen yoga, picking burrs out of the cat's fur yoga and having popcorn and a movie yoga.  As soon as I finish posting, I'll be having bicycle yoga, but right now, I'm wondering about why all the things we can do and are doing with our lives do not rise to the level of yoga so that we are forced to go to a yoga class or training.  Seems to me that unity is always available, and it's free.
A little act of attention to where I am,  how I am moving through this molecular cloud I have specialized organs to decipher [a bit…] remembering to breathe, noticing how I get triggered to fly away, and then, coming in for a landing once more.
Why is this not yoga?

Gyno Sapiens on Wheels

In lieu of riding bikes with other people [scheduling and route issues....] I ride alone, happily, slowly, lots of stops to enjoy the non-human wildlife and the occasional snack.  To talk about bike riding, to get information on tools, procedures, etc, I turn to a Facebook Page called The Slow Bicycle Movement.  It is a closed group, I guess they were getting too many ads, and it changes over time from talking about afternoon rides of a meditative nature to people doing long term touring in fabulous places, which they are gracious enough to share stories and pictures of, advise for newcomers, some deeply nerdy conversations for those who are capable and general cheering on and bonhomie.
Every now and then, however, the topic of Babes on Bikes comes up, photos of scantily clad young women, all impossibly pretty, advertising something that doesn't remind me of bike riding, or recreation that I care about.  For every 50 of these posts, there's a photo of a guy on a bike dressed strangely, but no beef cookie shots that I remember.  [ I think I'd remember..... ]
I know I have always been a fully clothed type person, being a Yankee and wanting to not freeze to death or give pints of blood to the flies, but I'm sure I could come up with a few names of guys who would attest that I am not a "prude".  [And some who wouldn't]  I start with this defense, because it seems to be the first place some men want to go with this.  The next place is that they defend it as an aesthetic image.  The third dodge is that they are misunderstood, that they are the nice ones, and that we Gyno-Americans [Or Gyno-Euros] are too sensitive, don't consider cat calls, whistles, pinches or threats a compliment or we are humorless and exaggerating.
In the time of political correctness, it is still ok to mask your intolerance with a bit of snark, superiority and denial.
If we don't start waking up, like, yesterday, as a species, we are done.
As to this particular topic, I am using the rest of my conscious existence to stand up for the obvious.  Women, we need to insist on our right to live safely, to make choices about who gets to stay in our lives, and who has to stay out, to be paid the same wage for the same work, to be entitled to equal protection under the law, and ffs to be able to ride a bicycle without it being an invitation to assault.

The G word.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine was murdered by a stranger for no apparent reason.  She was sitting in her car with a friend whom she was on helping find a place to make a new home in the Southwest.  They were just south of Sedona.
I was too furious to attend her memorial.
She was a happy person, a positive and loving person, and most of her friends were very much glass 1/2 full types, always looking on the bright side, and I knew it would be a celebration I couldn't participate in, bring anything to or derive any comfort from.
That may not have been true, but it felt true.
All I needed to trigger my resistance was hearing of a comment a dear friend and music partner of hers said about her probably being happy to be free of her body and to dance in the light.
I thought of her children and her grandchildren losing a one-of-a-kind grandmother and the community losing a voice and a witness.  I could not square the two ideas, though I really felt, later, remembering her, that wherever she was she didn't harbor regret or rancor.
It is rare to know someone  who is interested in seeing through the hazy smear of the masks people wear, and I miss that about her.
By now I see how little I have noticed of the essence of anything, that life moves too fast to understand more than a surface, a representation or symbol of a narcissistic construct.
I regret this.
I regret that once someone has died, the chance to follow a thread any further is snipped.  I regret how much protection I still seek from feeling.

A friend of my daughter's was found in a pool recently, there's not much being said about it in the news.  First it was being treated as a suspicious death, then the paper announced it was being called a suicide.  I'm not alone in the opinion that it was a suspicious suicide.
Here it is again, though - the idea of a Deity [or not] and why a young woman who has been working hard to straighten out her life, and had made great strides against huge odds is a footnote in the tsunami of global and local bad news.
A friend of mine said " I guarantee you that if it was [insert name of person of income and influence here...] daughter who was found, the cops would be all over it and it would be on the news."
I wish I did not believe this, but I do.
When Carol was murdered, I lost whatever shreds of religion I might have still had hanging around, and I realized how much the white noise of mainstream Christianity had seeped into my belief system, even though I knew it was bullshit. [All Christians freak out here.]
I see that there are some rules that some men concocted to sooth the people they wanted to control, to get their money and their cooperation.  Nice touch to call it the word of God.  Hard to argue with an invisible being, [invisible and non-existent, looking rather a lot alike].  
The Christian Scientists speak of Father-Mother-God, and frame it as a principle of Divine Love, and that is about as close as it gets for me, though I have felt a gag response whenever I have tried to read Mrs. Eddy's work.   Maybe there's some set of dynamics, laws of physics - rules we will never be able to apprehend with our brains which are so clearly designed for things that are simpler, like getting needs met according to Maslow's order of importance.
These days, not too many people seem to get much further than forming communities of friends, and I'm barely up to that myself.
The ideas of intervention, intercession, substitution, or sacrifice make less sense to me than ever.  The questions are the same, the answers are the same, and both are itchy and unsatisfying.  One doesn't have to go very far to see how bad things are for people in huge numbers, everywhere in the world.  But there has to be some real good news, and I don't mean Jesus.
Grief is a wound that changes people. Grief is the Stygian sisters dancing through our lives until the thread is broken.  Whatever is left is a story we tell ourselves.

Sheena

Well,  my neighbor was found, unharmed in the woods near the lake, sometime before midnight, a happy end to a scary drama.
While this was going on a young woman, a mother of a toddler was drowning in a pool in another part of the state.  She was in our house frequently in middle school and high school, a sweet and talented girl, dear friend of my daughter's.
I received a bit of misspelled hate mail for my last post,  and wonder what  is wrong with people as I see the amount of evil minded remarks made on the news website about the unfortunate death of valuable young woman.
It goes beyond schadenfreude, this desire to make things worse, it doesn't really matter that these trogs don't know what happened, it matters that the world is so full of the readiness to be entertained by tragedy.
May all Beings find Peace, May all Beings attain Liberation, May all Beings know truth.

Horse Fly

After a good rest up, and general regaining of vitality, I decided to take a nap today, which lasted until mid afternoon and only stopped because the temperature in the ma'am cave had risen to close to 90.  Sluggishly I crawled to the car where my bike was waiting and drove to my favorite local path to get at least some blood moving and I found that moving blood is just what horseflies like best.
I have said at other times that one cannot outrun a chicken, and on a bike, at least the pace I go at, a horsefly does a good job at keeping up.  All the same, I was treated to the sight of a snapping turtle [who I'm pretty sure is older than I am] dozing in the sun on a big rock in the middle of the river.  It was worth stopping and imagining what it might be like to be a turtle who has seen that river go from pretty clean to flammable, colorful and nearly dead to swimmable, and possibly, drinkable in a pinch.  Shortly after that a young beaver went by a few feet away, conscientiousness etched on his features.  He had the focus of many cyclists who pass me dressed in lycra, unsmiling, intent.
It wasn't a long ride, only an hour, but virtue, even in small doses is of value.
I came home to helicopters, guys in helmets on ATV's riding up and down the road, fire & rescue trucks, Fish & Game and a few police cruisers.  Eventually, they stopped at my house and it seems that one of my neighbors had wandered off.
In the 1700's King George III gave a big chunk of rocky, non-arable useless swamp land with a small mountain and a couple of hills surrounding a nice lake to the Weston family.  I could probably go and look up in Hancock History who the first Weston was to come here and try to make a life out of this difficult patch of NH, but that will have to wait for another time.  The Weston we know of was Ephraim, and there are numerous local stories about him, he was a hard working sheep farmer and a character.  His descendants still have sheep, still have land, though quite a lot less of it, and you can spot them in a crowd.  I went to school with and grew up with some and they are distinctive.  Some of the women beauties, the men all interesting.  Bill Weston, the remaining patriarch has dementia, but lives at home and wandered off today.  Told his daughter he was going for a walk.  He was seen by a member of my household around 11 AM and now there is a task force out hunting for him.
I hope he is found in good condition, I hope he is still able to live as he has lived, this is a selfish hope, I know, because I put myself in his place and imagine an old man, wandering out into woods he knows as well as his own home, I hope he finds his way to a place that is safe and that the guardians of this place are with him, and the horse flies are not.

how much is too much

A series of events, beginning with an uncooperative immune system.
 If I had health insurance, I could pin it down, but let's just say that stress, lack of sleep [like, none] anxiety and getting called out on things about myself that are annoying, but let's face it, at this point in life aren't going to change and being way out of my element brought on a cluster of health reactions that needed to be brought back to NH, so here I am.  Being gone for a week, I learned a few things.  I am not a traveler.  I will never attempt another lengthy road trip, and I won't stay away from my house for longer than 3 days.  The drive back was hard, but the only thing outside me that fought the process was rain, my car was great, nobody I met on the road was weird, the traffic was light and my angels were with me.
Well, this blog isn't called Dharma Queen, it's called Dharma Bitch, and that's no accident.
I am home, bathed and in bed, there is one less chicken in my yard, and I suspect it is the friendly one, being friends with the interior of some predator, I guess.  There are still a few peonies, and I will enjoy them.
At 20 you believe there will always be another opportunity to catch something you missed, but at 60 you face up to the limitations presented by time, by energy, by health and by income.  Somehow, I didn't mind sleeping curled up in the front seat of a tiny car then as I do now.  Of course, the times I rode across the country [many] when I was young, I was usually stoned out of my tree.  Barreling across Texas with a buzz on was more like tripping than traveling.  I come to think that life isn't meant to be only firsts strung out endlessly to the horizon.  There are lasts.  It might be good to notice things that are and file them under both definitions.

Sleepless in Chicago

In spite of the title, this is not a post about romance, missed or encountered, I really haven't been able to sleep.  I figure sooner or later I will, probably about 2 hours after I have gotten on the road again, I'll have to pull over and sleep in a rest area, why that would feel restful to me, I have never quite understood.
There are thunderstorms here and warnings of  tornadoes across the route I had planned to take, so I'm waiting until Monday to head out.
In the meantime, In the 'now",  Chicago continues to be a pleasant place to be.  I'm not sure how pleasant it would be if I weren't in benevolent and entertaining company, and when people say "Stay as long as you like" it's a temptation  to settle in.
There are moments when I am in touch with the dreamlike quality of life; how it is possible to be anchored to some idea and stepping away from it loosens its grip.  This is probably only true when things are going well.  I can see how this tenuous experience of floatiness could easily turn back into homesickness or panic, but I really want to unravel the garments I have been wearing for so long before I go back.  I have always got the fantasy running of tripping over some other life, the life I missed, the life I was supposed to live and didn't know about it.  My home in NH is embedded in me, I have spent so much time there, so much time alone, so much time on the property, not even going out except for supplies, my main contact with the outside world being Facebook, that being away from it has a naked quality.  I know the place is being lived in and that is good, I worry about my cat, and that's probably needless.  Lack of sleep bring up all the weaknesses in my thinking from the basement where I try to ignore them most of the time.  As an astrologer, I know that Mars going through the 12th house stirs up the unconscious in a ruthless and energetic way;  I am feeling it.
The simplicity of what one can carry on a trip puts me in touch with getting things done that I would not be getting around to at home.  I brought with me an old jacket and some bits of silk that I have been meaning to combine, and being here for a week, I got it done, using borrowed needle & thread.  Here's how it came out.

I had forgotten that I enjoyed this kind of project in my quest for order, more technology [sergers] and either less practical things [painting] or more routine [doing the dump runs & vacuuming].

A Day as a Tourist

The nice part about bringing my bike with me is that I don't feel like a tourist.  It also helps that I have been here before and am staying with friends.  I am grateful for that, I would never had gotten to know Chicago even a little without that connection.
I've been hearing about Liz working with clay for a few years now, but she never has shared pictures.  Being here, I'm getting to see what she's been doing, and like too many women who have some real stuff coming out of them, she doesn't see how good it is.  Here's a photo of the bowl I wheedled out of her.

Still not getting enough sleep to recover, so I'm going to stick around Chicago for another day or so, I need to get a full night's sleep.  I'm hoping that a 14 mile bike ride today along the lake will help with that.  It's not a ride you can dream away on,  there are too many people standing around on the bike path, unattended children ( who appear to possibly be in the early stages of being put up for adoption ) hookers looking for trade, tourists and people on bikes who are clearly training for something all vie for space with pedestrian traffic and more runners than I would have guessed.
I know I have been living in NH, and many people are glued to their personal screens there, but there was something unsettling about seeing how many were plugged in to something, or were staring at their iPhones, oblivious to anything going on around them.  Why be outside at all?  Why not have a video of the lake going while working out at a gym?  Certainly not everyone was checked out and those who were not seemed particularly alive.  Is not living in the present like drowning in an inch of water?

It was worth it to visit the Bean, and see what other imaginative projects are going on downtown.  We were trying to figure out what all these people were doing at what looked like a spin class, music blaring, people sitting on spin cycles, not moving, or moving occasionally.  Crowds taking pictures of their reflections in the Cloud Gate [The Bean…] were a sharp contrast to the first time I saw this place the week Obama was elected.  The weather was not so cooperative, and it was easy to get close to the sculpture.  It also was not coated with fingerprints from the ground to as far up as people could reach standing on each other's shoulders.  Public sculpture with the power to excite.  What a concept.




Chicago is huge, and yet manages to feel like a town.  People are relaxed and unguarded, milling around as though they have plenty of time, helpful and free of suspicion when asked questions which one might expect to be ignored in Boston.  This photo is of a pavilion that has chess boards embedded in the concrete.  Most of them were in use.

A view of the city from the bike path.  

CST

The night before I have to do anything, I wake up a lot.  This was followed by fine tuning the astrological auspices of a trip.  Yes, I know that Mercury is Retrograde, but this is a trip I have been trying to take for years, and have gotten part way out several times, so I figure it falls within the area of repeating something, doing something over and returning to an unfinished idea.  Anyhow, I wanted to put happy Leo on the Ascendant instead of mopey Cancer, so I asked my friend from Chicago to put off leaving first thing to mid morning.
I left my house at 10:13 am, but by the time I had picked her up, done a few last minute errands, we got going out of the area entirely at noon.  Including stopping for picnics, road construction, sleeping sitting up for a couple of hours before dawn and touring every highway rest area along the way, we made it to Chicago in well under 24 hours.  I only did about 5 hours of the driving, but I did about 4 hours of the sleeping, and 8 or so of the talking.
Coming up to Buffalo we encountered a dramatic storm, the sky changing her mind every few minutes.  From the West, we were treated to a peach and golden layering that made me wish I had packed desert instead of entirely sensible food, and to the East an angry, boiling bubble bath in Payne's grey and viridian.
I think I have burned through the adrenaline, and am grateful to have a peaceful place to sleep for a couple of nights among friends.
Today after long naps, We rode down to the Lakeshore and enjoyed the sight of happy people fishing, ambitious people hustling, children oblivious to the kind of world this can be and some glorious turquoise water.  I noticed a feeling.  What was that.  Oh.  I felt cheerful.
It seems good to notice the feelings of peace and contentment when they arise precious amid change and uncertainty, they leave an aftertaste of appreciation that helps with the occasional anxieties that share space with them.  Probably less watching the news helps, too.
The convergence of events, people needing a place to be, and me needing a nudge to get moving have gotten me this far.  I'm leaving the door ajar for what keeps me going, not certain what that is yet, but maybe I'll get a clue along the way.

Sundowning Practice

As I settle in for the night in a bed I constructed out of fir 4x4's and a discarded snowboard, the perfume of the roses floating up to my room in the trees, an owl calling, the stars twinkling and the bills paid, it gets harder to go and do what I plan to do.
I have been pining for the sight of the West since I was there last.  It has been a long time.  Decades.  I keep trying to carve out a moment between thinking other people need me, or that I don't dare leave, or I can't drive because my knee hurts, or I don't have any money or my arms are too heavy.  Time does what it does, and the mirror lets you know that it has and now I really have to either go do this or stop fantasizing about it.
In a few hours, I will be meeting up with a friend and driving with her to Chicago where we will eat Chicago-ey things and have a bike ride on the lake, I will see her family who have all become people by now and rest up for the next thing.  Getting to the Mississippi is nothing short of a pain in the ass.  Starting out is ok, Vermont is pretty, but eventually you are spending eternity on the New York Thruway.
By Utica, one begins to question motives.  By Canandaigua, sanity is in doubt.  Knowing my friend has often made the drive in 17 hours is encouraging.  I have never been able to make it in less than 24.
It's helpful to bear in mind that Niagara Falls is on the way, or could be if we decide to go through  Canada.  I have been advised not to sing the Canadian national anthem at the border unless I want to be searched.  Any inside information on this would be gratefully received.
There really are no more excuses.  Last winter, I think many will agree with me was the limit.  I know there are a few of you who were as excited about the snow as a Lab with a stick, but I feel safe stating that you were the exception.
My daughter & her family have had to flee a mold and lead infested rental, so I have house sitters.  They aren't in a particular hurry to do anything beyond catching their breath and making a new plan, so I have some time.
Going to pretend to sleep now so that I can get an early start.
I would like to make the promise of a collection of amusing vignettes when rolling, but you will be the judge of that, I just need to hear myself talk.