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.