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.

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.