Sins and Virtues

As someone posted to me, "It's hard not to know".  This applies everywhere and has been the source of a lot of wasted time on my part, if time can be said to be wasted...
I suppose the waste is repetition of methods that contribute to decay and darkness when those qualities are not called for.  They are highly appropriate when speaking of compost, though the bacteria might protest at this point and say, "Hey, now, wait just a minute, there..."  because as is mentioned in the Old Testament, there is a time for all things, [and most of the people who bother to read my rants are familiar with the lyrics, so I don't need to recite them here].
There is never enough information, and that must be where trust comes in, or the "F" word, Faith, a quality I like the idea of but am suspicious of the born again Christian spin that has been slathered all over it.
It has never seemed to me to have anything to do with blindly following some guy in a pulpit  or even some guy w/a mitre and expensive shoes, but more about deeply knowing that all the information exists, and is known by some knower, and trusting that that knower knows better than I ever will or can.
The brain is a wonderful machine for that which it was designed, but limited in the face of the infinite.
Underneath the leaves and the pavement and the dust of the road is love, a highly durable commodity, but an unpredictable one.
Love is what inflicts pain, if that is what is needed to shift resistance, Love is what turns the light on, and sometimes off.  I suspect in all the occurrences and relationships that arise and subside, there is only one thing that creates them, maintains them and moves them along and that is Love, whatever form it may come in.
I can only live in a created universe that is, at its core, benevolent.
If it isn't, I am content to find out later.

Father's Day

I had two fathers.  One I knew about, and one I did not.
The father I thought I had could not be pleased.  I could blame this on me not being his biological child, and his knowledge of that, but really, he wasn't that nice to any of us, or around much either.  He told my brother he had to choose between making the business go or being on deck as a father, and he chose the business.  I forget the reason why.
My sister was his favorite, named for his mother, and born after grandmother Anne [who liked to be called "Mother Anne" had died, disappointed to see that the first grandchild, of her only child to have children, was a boy.
Annie always knew how to handle Dad, how to be on his good side, how to get his approval.  It appeared to others of us that she never had a fly on her, but I could not figure him out.  He didn't think I was funny, and that was my strongest card.  I was not good at being the right sort of person to fit in with the family, not accomplished, or confident, and being imaginative and sloppy about details was not a feature he wanted manifesting in his family.
Each of our experiences of him were different, but I wish he had shared the talents he had with cars, and machines, and his knowledge of political systems and business that he shared with my brothers.  He had a Victorian view of girls, but the only way in which my view of girls was Victorian was that they should be fighting for equal rights.
Then there was the man who was my father, whom I knew, but not in that context.  He always found me amusing, and listened to my theories of the universe with interest.  He had a wife already, a staunch Catholic, and a daughter, born 24 years ahead of me.  He believed in organic vegetables, and ways of relating to the world that did not include the church.  He had met Ram Dass, and read widely of the coming alternative ways of thinking and being.  He had no patience with narrow minds, whining or people who took themselves too seriously, and I am sorry to have been robbed of knowing that I had a father who loved me, because I believe he did, though everything had to kept quiet, a secret that was not a secret, but that could not be talked about or alluded to.
I am also grateful to my father, who in the reluctant position of being my father, whether to save his face or not,  did better by me than he had cause to, and I have some sweet memories of him when he was in a cheerful mood when he could be charming and an easy presence.
Happy Father's Day, Dads.

2:30

I have been coming across blogs by people younger than I complaining about aging, about an indignity a day and as I have said in a previous post or 2, what do we think the alternative is?  Death may not be something to be feared, but I am increasingly convinced that whatever is going on here is not meaningless.
From the time of invincible youth [another illusion ] to the master class in letting go there is work to be done.
My daughter and her kids are living with me at the moment and I'm being allowed to experience the contrast of different phases, to dream about trajectory, intention and placing value on things that do not last, or become something you don't expect.
Yes, there is physical crumbling, yes there is memory loss, yes there is less desire as well as ability to whisk up and down the local mountain, or stay up all night singing.  The loss there is replaced by being slow enough to hear what songbirds remain singing at dusk.  Waking in the night, staying awake and feeling the dark and the quiet as another quality to existence, enjoyable because one doesn't have to get up at 6 and rush kids off to school, or get to a job.  There is yearning, but not so much for another person to hold onto as to have time to see what is behind the desire, to ask oneself "What did you expect?".
As my mother slowly disappeared behind a needy, querulous, often confused mask, someone asked what is she living for?  What is the point now?  I didn't have an answer to that, but it seemed then, as now, that there is no way to make an evaluation of someone else's path wherever they are on it.
In the last week before my mother killed herself, when she had decided to stop taking the medications, and hadn't yet decided to really do it and dissolve a bunch of pain killers in a glass of vodka, we had time with her that was precious, and full of light.  She cast off the mantle of suffering, of trying to cover up what was happening to her mind, and gave us back, for a short time, the woman we had been losing for years.  It wasn't until that time that I knew how much of her had been driven underground by pain and weakness.  She gave us the gift of seeing that what is essential is not lost as well as how fragile life is, how easily it slips away.
Things being what they are is a subjective idea, somehow there must be room for informative movement, and receptivity to it as well. As physical impediments force a slowdown, the space is made for that.  This is not something to be mourned, but welcomed, kind of like someone you despise giving you a million dollars.

Road Kill

Crow food now.
Whatever kind of mammal it was...
If I were on a bicycle,
I'd be going slowly enough
to identify the remains;
and it would be easier
to stop -
To give this poor animal
a moment of my time.
But someone more impatient than I
is behind me,
I feel their restlessness
echoing in my bones.
A porcupine
I guessed
from  the glimpse of
little naked feet,
soles turned to the sky.
The size of a toddler's.

Having Fun with Home Repair

The honey do list is long, but there is no honey to do it, so I have to wait until the impatient, good with tools and problem solving part of my personality decides to manifest.  Generally after a period of sloth and ennui.
There is a list for every part and system of this old shack I live in; it was built by an itinerant drunk by the name of Luther in 1926.  He built a good fieldstone foundation, incorporating a few of the glacial erratics on the property, and a fireplace in the center.  After that, I believe he lost interest in the rules of engineering concerning load bearing and other structural integrity niceties.  This is all part of a much longer story being worked on off the DB blog, but I offer it as an introduction to why there is a constant need for shit to get done on the place.
If I believed in eternity as a true concept concerning physical reality, or the relative world as some Eastern lines of thought like to call it, I would say that this is an eternal project, but I know better.  Someday, it will be just a pile that someone is going through looking for clues as to how this life form existed on this planet.  They will find some plastic figurines, bits of metal, plenty of nails, screws, tacks, springs and staples.  There will be the remains of a primitive septic system, a failed garden and maybe I should leave them a note to watch out for the raccoons.  I'm pretty sure they will still be living under whatever is left.
So, today I decided to knock a few plumbing tasks off the list.  Everything is made out of plastic now, and so it lasts for about 2 1/2 years.  The kitchen sprayer was the first thing.  I spent a bit of time under the sink with a head lamp trying to decipher a clip that I remember attaching, but could not figure out how to detach it.  [Note to self:  before attaching things, always experiment with detaching them first.] I called a plumbing supply house in Keene and just to be sexist about it, as soon as I heard a woman's voice, I assumed it was a secretary [correct] who knew jack about plumbing [also correct].  She put me through to some guy, who as soon as he heard a woman's voice, might have thought "This bitch is an idiot, why doesn't she just cough up for a plumber?  Do I look like a plumber?".  He did not.  His helpfulness extended to giving me an 800 number, which I called, but my heart wasn't in it.  I got a woman who said she could only help me if she had a serial number, which, of course, my fixtures did not have.  " Thank you so much," I said.  "Have a nice day," she said as I was hanging up.
My mother used to insist that the world of things, appliances and whatnot were problems only because men designed them.  Those pretty faucet handles that are too slippery to turn off once your hands are wet and/or soapy.  Clips that pop on like magic, but are hell to remove.
All the same, I can't believe that things are designed without some kind of plan in mind, and what's the worst that could happen?  I break it and have to call a plumber.
Well, that issue was successfully taken care of and it only took twice as long as it ought, but I didn't have to pay someone $100. to make me feel like an idiot.   I can do that just fine.  No charge.

short

Inexorably, we are drawn toward death
in every choice.
From every song that goes unheard
or is given voice
to each inhale pulled from the well of breath
heart beat in binary
here
not here.
There -
not there.
Noise, silence, advance, retreat.
remembering tears that fell from emotion so hot
augmented being which is
then is not.

Galactic economy

Just a little pressure, just a whisper, just enough to make it move.  It isn't necessary to pour the entire bag of sand on one side of the scale, just start with a grain of sand, then add another one, and keep adding them until the scale balances.
Moving too slowly?  Something is going to come along and push you.  Moving too fast?  Something will be in your way.
Procrastination/Patience, exuberance/reticence, fear/love, all these things will arise in their turn.  The response triggers are somatic by now.  I am pissed off and impatient before I have had a chance to notice it.  As soon as it is visible, audible, tangible,-that tight feeling in the gut, that's a nice time to stand back and say, "Oh, yes, I remember you.  What is it you want?"  It's always something.  Getting there sooner?  just racing to the grave.  That's all the finish line is anyhow; once a goal has been attained, another one appears, once everything seems to be worked out, watch out, because it's a sign of imminent unraveling.
Things are taken away, a few molecules at a time.  Somewhere on the continuum I catch glimpses, I see that I have been walking or driving or sitting in a dream, and thinking it is the real place, but the one that consensus reality designates as the real place tells me a different story.  That place is always waiting with a list of what needs to be done to get the shit together before it's too late.  Pain, then anaesthesia, until the next time I pull the covers down and peek out to see if the world has changed for the [subjective] better.  It hasn't, most of the time.
The moments when it's possible to notice the unregulated beauty of the unforeseen are the juicy delights I look for every day.
Lately, it has occurred to me that I have been viewing death all wrong.  Not that it is something to be sought, but that it may not be something to be feared.  It is either nothing at all, or it is something, but whatever that is is undefinable, I don't care what religious practice gets applied to it.  In some ways, it is irrelevant
As I spin back and forth in the time machine, recalling what I was so desperate for, and never able to find, to this place that Roseanne Barr called the youth of old age, where the things I regret are things I didn't know existed, and would be pointless to hunt down now.  It would be like ignoring the evening bird song because I was too busy grieving for the morning.
In this increasingly difficult physical world, what has been stripped away leaves the undeniable now, where there is richness of a kind I thought fit to overlook.  The gift of being able to walk, of being able to breathe, of reading, of being able to see, to be independent and live in my remote and complicated home.  Absolutely ordinary life, bursting with goodness and light.  How did I miss it? I have plugged my ears and squeezed shut my eyes and yelled "la la la la la!" like a 2 year old.  Life on my terms.  Not this, but that.  Well, I had to get spoken sharply to, I suppose, the light pressure and whispers weren't enough, but at least nobody was sent with airhorns, or trumpets.  Yet.

Familiarity

I have been sinking like a hot piece of metal in a snowbank, buried deeper with each snowfall, each pass of the plow.  It has been hard to think clearly, to go beyond systems management, logistic design and refuse maintenance.  I made a commitment to do a drawing a day, and after 10 days, such a cloud of ennui!  Just to have to look at anything.  Just to have to see.  With the attention span God gave me, it's a wonder I didn't drop out of school by the 3rd grade.  Wait.  I think I did.
DST, now, delivering the illusion of longer days.  The curve of the sun is higher, the light is different, and if I'm still not convinced, my road is softening up enough to make me dream of high clearance and 4wd.
"Bloom Where You're Planted", the refrigerator magnets say, but what was the wind that blew me here?  That is not a complaint, it was an act of Grace that I don't appreciate enough that gave me what I have and have returned to time over time for reasons as simple as economics.
So many times trying to live somewhere else, somewhere alien to my granite to the bone self, and the end of each story has been if I am going to be lonely and struggling, I might as well be doing it in the comfort of familiarity.
The odd thing about familiarity is that it isn't.  An emotional hook to an mirage of solid ground.
If I go through pictures of my house and my land over time, it changes faster than you would believe if I gave you the list of changes.  What is familiar is the freedom I have to be with whatever tide is flowing through my life, and to adapt in relative safety.
Safety.  Another construct with no ground, meaning or staying power.
But today I have the idea that winter will end, is ending, that it might be nice to cut down some forsythia and bring it inside to bloom, to feel a sense of joy and belonging as I hang out in my not too freezing studio and contemplate pointlessness.

Dreaming of Warmer Times

                 

Shivering through another frigid winter, I remember telling myself last year that I wasn't going to do this again, and yet, here I am doing it again.  It is a little different this time, my daughter and her kids are in the house, brightening it up; also, it is a colder and snowier winter than last year though at the time, it didn't seem possible.
In the long cold, I am followed by ghosts, and though I do not believe in ghosts, I believe in photography, and I think that the images we retain of our lives and how we experience them imprint and that imprint remains after the action and emotion has moved on.  In this way, nothing leaves, not the sweetness, nor the unpleasant after taste, even though one often follows the other.
I looked towards inevitable bereavement as a thing to be feared, yet now that it has happened so many times as to be routine, I find myself less alone than anticipated.
Friends are dead, parents are dead, people have drifted off in other directions or moved out of reach, yet they stay with me, and the time that our paths ran parallel affected the trajectory of mine.
From another life I remember love, but remember it now as a dream interrupted by a loud noise.
I was dreaming I was young and pretty and had a man I loved wildly.  We were traveling in winter in his old silver Chevy, sleeping in the back, couch surfing at his friend's houses, and I no longer remember being cold.  I remember the warmth.  Today, I remember that precious time that I could not keep, and no matter how hard I tried, I didn't know how to be the pliant, obedient female he wanted, nor could he be the man who was on my side that I needed.  Though it ended in acrimony, only the sweetness remains.
It is important for me to remember also, the loud noise waking me is my own howl for freedom.

Silence

I keep getting the impression that underneath all that I experience is a deep silence.  There isn't any tinnitus there, no whining, no children fighting, no blaring screen, no sudden upsetting noises.  But is there also no laughter, no music, no breathing of a nearby beloved person or pet?
The silence of the house when my family is out feels like a void, I expand into it, and then, pretty soon look for ways to fill it up, food, music, moving furniture around, messing with bicycles.
Last year, I filled it with worrying, eating carbohydrates at an incredible rate to bury the worry, and as it turns out, I had only been burying myself.
Well, no more of that forever; my body has said it won't take it and is going to propel me into that deep silence before I have had a chance to do a few more things with my life.  Go to Yellowstone again.  See some other parts of the West that I love, and some I haven't seen yet.  Return to Europe with my own bike this time....and time, and time.
I want to wander the roads of Italy where I lived, in what at this point feels like another life, sit quietly somewhere with a picnic lunch, and maybe a friend or 2.
I want to fall in love again, which probably seems absurd and as ridiculous as it has ever been now that I am old and have nothing but laughter to offer anyone.  It disturbs me, though, because I have been in an emotional fetal position for some years now, and it isn't how I want to live my life.  I may not ever be able to shake the sense that there is nothing anyone will see here to love, but I need to know that I can love, whatever it looks like, reciprocated or not, aimed at a human, an event, a house plant.
That silence, the silence inside that looks like loneliness is one of the dangerous sucking voids most of us face, I think.  Poor judgement blooms from it and crawls around like Kudzu, and just about as fast.  Sitting still and experiencing the isolation of resistance will send anyone to the gambling table, the bottle, the needle or the refrigerator.
Our belief in our isolation is what kills us.
Not that we don't die, but dying is not the problem, the state we are in when we do is, and the only solution I can see for that, at least today, is today.

sfumato

To tone down, to evaporate like smoke.  In terms of painting, this is what sfumato means, an Italian word, full of the beauty of that language.
Memory has begun, for me to have the soft edges which blur out like ineffective erasings, and I am unsure of so many things that I was certain were a particular way.  It seems that more and more I argue with myself, tell my internal Rhadamanthus to shut the fuck up, to tell him that I really don't want to be reminded of the thousand things anymore, and that, look, over there is a beautiful flock of turkeys, let's just enjoy them for a minute shall we?
The beauty of the moment, of the person in front of me, of the life I get to live gets smudged by the darkness that rises and must be intentionally dispersed.
I like the verb sfumare, to dissipate like smoke, the technique "sfumato", using breath instead of a brush to blow into the cloud, and watch it swirl away.

Space

There are a few reasons for the name of this blog, one is I was a big fan of the term Dharma Bum. Kerouac's writing never spoke to me, but because I was 16 and supposed to think it was 'far out', I pretended to.
I frequently plan to go back in time as soon as time travel is reliable and stand up for my own tastes against the howling disapproval from all sides, I could have saved myself time, misery, and might have gotten anything done in my life beyond pleasing people who didn't care and are, in increasing numbers, dead.
This is the good thing about outliving people who think they know you, they take their memories, impressions and judgements with them to the great beyond, leaving you free to get on with whatever it was that you were doing.
So, not a Dharma Bum then, but a bitch, doing what is required, moving closer to the center when I remember to, but still complaining about it.  It might be the last thing to go, but here's my attitude about complaining:

It is an unpopular form of expression.
Unexamined, it is a moebius trip.
It is as though the monkey mind and the broken heart tried to merge.

Starting with the first remark, hearing people complain is a reminder of all the little outrages and inconveniences that are a comfortable place to park the ubiquitous discomfort of getting what you don't want, not getting what you want, or, sometimes, getting what you want.
Life is itchy, there is always sand in the shoe, rude cashiers, troublesome relatives, and these are the balm against real tragedy, the kind where you come out on the other side [if you do] with a life so different that you are rebuilding everything.  An inescapable assault to the fragile comforts used for the illusion of escape.  A reminder of the absolute absence of control over what happens.  Complaining makes us feel a variety of things, but none of them fall in the category of entertainment, and entertainment is what we seek.

I still feel a slight sense of panic when I see that b&w drawing of a Moebius strip with and ant crawling on it.  Where the hell is all of this going?  Thich Nhat Han put this best, we are sailing away, out into the middle of the ocean, where the boat sinks.
Nobody wants to be reminded of how things aren't working.
So many of the old Yankees responding with their stock answers; the woman immobilized with osteoporosis, her aged husband killing himself trying to keep her at home, always answered the "How are you" with a big smile and "Never better!"
The old guy who lives alone with his dog answering with "can't complain!"
Yes, you can.

Behind the monkey chatter, and inside the broken heart there is space, and that is the space we breathe, it is the space we came from and the space to which we return.  There is a way to break down the habits enough to let that space be noticed by us, to make it known to us that we are made of it; we are part of it, always, we can't be separated through disappointment or loneliness or tragedy or any kind of circumstance that may arise.  We are connected through it, we share in it, and all these things we create to make separations we make out of the very same material.
Breathing in, breathing out..

Chop Wood, Carry Water

Part of the desire to escape from all the discomfort of life is funneled into things like writing this blog, painting things, breaking and burning things, taking things to the dump and bringing them home, time spent on the phone, whatever it takes to give myself the idea that I am doing something that expresses any meaning.  I know it doesn't, of course, and that on the continuum of meaninglessness, my life is probably somewhere in the middle, but even so, ultimately, there is no continuum either.
Life has kindly shoved a knife in my shell to force my tissues to start separating from it, at least in the sense of clinging to my habits and routines.  Circular thinking is only allowed to take place at the level of going in to a room and standing still, wondering what I went there for in the first place.  What was I doing?  Oh yes.  Laundry and there's no towel to stuff in the window because the laundry outlet pipe has to go out the window without letting the cold air in...... Or was I looking for stamps to pay the bills with?... Hmmmm.  It will come to me eventually.
I went from having almost continual solitude to an hour or so here and there.  I went from staying up for hours at night to flopping down at a reasonable hour and maybe waking up at one as well.  Thought about food a lot.  Not so much time to do that now, seems less important now with my daughter and her 2 kids living here in this small house.
I am bad with transitions.  I like to solve problems quickly and move on to the next project, but I have  a household full of dreamers now,  people who live in the immediate instead of the practical time.
I have begun to suspect, that like any change that happens, birth, death, disease, one comes out of the experience in a different place, it feels, [as I look backwards] like a series of reincarnations.  When my daughter moves out into whatever her next new phase will be, I won't be in the same place as last year, as 6 months ago, as last week.  I won't be going back to spending days on end selfishly absorbed.  It will be time to reincarnate for me too.
For now, life asks that I clean, that I sweep, that I keep the house going and the animals fed, that I take the time I have to myself and not squander it in rudderless drifting.  It is generous of life to give me specific things to do while a transition that I can't see is being made.  It is good to know that it is enough now to chop wood and carry water.