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Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Ghost Cat

My cat Sadie is missing, has been for four days now.  I see her everywhere and no where at all.  I check the porch everytime I walk into the kitchen. Every morning I expect her yowl at the back door. I don't even have a picture of her.  I probably 'see' her more now than I did when she was here.  I so hope she is traveling the woods in a cat pack.  I can't think anything else, really, no matter how it might behove me to make friends with that/those thoughts.  I told the boys she was missing this afternoon... we went on a walk to see if we could find her.  C6 cried.  E3 threw sticks.  I never said 'hurt' or 'dead', just wondered where she could be, who she might be with... She is a lovely cat, like they almost all are.  I never gave her enough attention and she never held it against me.  Not even once did she ask me why I don't spend the time to try to seduce her. Not even once.
:)
Oh, animals.

One of the things of many that came from the writing workshop was a phrase of Patti Digh's which sticks to the ribs.  'Make strong offers'.  Make your offering to the world a strong one, one which you yourself relish, which speaks to the strength you have, which makes your offering an actual 'offering' and not a 'tradeoff' or a 'sacrifice'.  Make a strong offering to the world. 

(I hadn't meant to offer Sadie.  But she was a strong one. and I probably can't call her mine...)

And I am improving the quality of my time here, on the interwebs, slowly, certainly (at least) taking more time. pausing before publishing and the like.  I will probably not create formed essays at any point, but do look forward to subjects of meaty-ness pushing their way to the fore. I suppose I have done that in the past, but I am getting close to 500 posts soon, and I find that remarkable and also, weighty... giving me pause to consider what exactly it is that I am 'making' here and is it, in fact, a strong offer?  I need to do some re-reading, some self-checking for satisfaction.  And if I am not satisfied?  well. no idea.  I guess I'll just plan on being satisfied, and see what I can learn...

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Yeah yah ya. the times, the times. . .

=This weekend I had my writing class, which is not so much the name for what it was... conference? workshop? hm. not so much. but whateve it was, I had one exercise in which I was to write for an hour. an HOUR. no prompt given just have at it... and I was surprised when the time was up.  I wrote for an hour. dude. The workshop-for lack of a better word- was full of funny women and that is always a crackup, I do freaking love the laughing! why don't I remember that more often?   There were 2 men there, but the majority of what was discussed was overwhelmingly female...what are your fears? What do you long for? What is stopping you? Sit the hell down and right. middlings:  I am not good enough, smart enough blahblah, i will be exposed, if i was a good writer, i'd already be writing... if i could just get to the brilliant idea on the tip of my tongue, all would be well, etc.etc. Damn middlings. Its sometimes enlightening and sometimes disheartening to hear the same fears so so often and strong in a group of women. Why and what for do we engage in all this ?  Setting goals that we will fail and berate ourselves for? WHAT?! what're we doing that for? I quit that, just so you know.
There were writing exercises, icebreakers, sandwiches, water bottles.  Sometimes I wonder about all these fancy 'nonwaterbottle' bottles out there.. Are they really so much better than the old plastic bottle?  Don't they all look awfully new to you? How many are being produced? How many do you have? It seems so excessive.  Is yours metal? Where'd the metal come from ? Do you like how that tastes? Do you reuse your actual plastic bottles? whut? huh?  When do we just get to carry our mugs around and drink tapwater wherever we are?
The three women were Patti Digh, Susan Piver, and Jennifer Louden.  They were some of this... southern drawling, misplaced cali cheerleader, meditation practitioner/teacher, graceful faller, grieving daughter, profane, menopausal, grieving mother, support system, wizened warrior writers, genuine, empathetic, excited, sweaty... and there was more and some of it will spill out here in time.... I sort of fell in love with a couple of those women and would have gone to live in their kitchens if they'd invited me.

=This morning I took my family to a Quaker Meeting.  It was a first time for all of us, although we had been on the premises several times for various booksales and concerts and the like.  It was pretty great, once the kids were gone- a lovely and maternal thing to say, yes?  But the kids were in meeting ehem "quiet" for 15 minutes before they left for 'first day school' ... they left and parents stayed and it was pretty great... I got to sit quietly for 45 minutes. that would be, forty five minutes. did you hear the non-deafening silence of that? really.  I studied the other people in the area, winked at a baby, studied the trees out the window nearby. got down with my bad self, without interruption.  This is evidently the normal 'unprogrammed' meeting, there are others with a more scheduled service... but, boy, I liked my alone time with me and my Guy...

=Today I chose to take a bath and be alone and make myself some tea, rather than go kayaking with another family.  I am sure that it is a bit rude.  But here I am, bath achieved, waiting for the tea, and the rudeness is somewhere other than here.   I have goals for this week, I do... I will meditate twice, for at least ten minutes apiece... and I will write, either here or in a journal in three different periods this week, for at least ten minutes as well.  These are goals I can achieve.  And won't that make me feel good about myself? And won't that be a nice change?

freaky, that.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

The Cleanse*

A 10 Day Cleanse.  No wheat, no sugar, no caffeine, no dairy.  10 days. What to say about it?  It was good, makes me feel good, I learned to cook again, use the food in my fridge, feed my kids something besides pretzels after school .  Ate great meat.
Lost my mind, found it again.  Felt hungry, fed myself  healthy snacks. Love the almonds. Realized the reasons I've never been on a real diet are that I am really fairly stubborn.  Probably didn't lose any weight but got back into yoga which is something akin to finding your favorite sweater on the first chilly morning in the fall.  Ate a little bit slower, ate some really good tasting stuff.  Got into smoothies, with kale in them.  I know. I know.  Turns out when they're all zipped up, they're just green... even the kids drank the green smoothie. so good. Learned how damn sweet bananas really are. Took responsibility for my own food, because it matters what I put into my body, because my body matters, because I do.
Figured out how much better brown rice is for you. shocking. also, that China makes 95% of the world's supply of rice.  hm.
Felt calmer, less run down, more able to keep my peace when the children were losing theirs.  Even one day of that would have been worth it, but I had several.  It is always good to feel good. and it should be an everyday thing.

Drank a lot of water... sometimes with a slice of lemon, which served to make me feel dainty and privileged every morning.  Drank a lot of tea, with a lot of honey.  really liked it.

On Day Eleven. could have made me a pot of gloriously hot coffee to eat with the bagel slathered in cream cheese. Didn't.  Stuck with my lemon water daintiness and my tea.  Got some coffee this afternoon but it has made me tired, is making my mouth taste yuck and I think I will not finish it.  huh. May make some more tea.
Ate a bunch of chickpeas for lunch and dipped some bread in it.  I think that I will eat much less of the wheat, I'm not feeling all freshlike with it in my belly.  No bagels, no bread.  I'll be allright.
(But boyo, tonights pasta will be covered with cheese and paired with cheese and please keep your fingers crossed that my one true love will love me back.  )

good. it was good.



*The cleanse was 'led' by Ms. Hannah Marcotti and you can find her here:  Hannah's Harvest

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

There is kinky, and then there is kinky.

I have a kink in my neck. One of the kids kicked me early this morning and my reaction to the kick caused the kink. eh. it is a slight annoyance but again, amazingly, it brings up Fear and its awesome ineffable power.  The reason i don't have full swing of my head is that a certain point in the roundabout brings a 'hurt' and so I stop.  The fear is that it will hurt more if the head keeps stretching, bending, etc. and so, i just stop.

     I have a feeling and a knowing that there is a much larger story there, and I know you can track it down on your own, because it is as simple as this:  how much fear does it take to stop us in our tracks?  how much fear is based upon make-believe? how much make-believe does it take to stop us in our tracks? 
sort of different, yes?
Do you remember in the Madeleine L'engle books, at one point there is a questioning series of ... I think it is Charles ?  and the questions are both absurd and pointed and asking him to make weighted the values of different people and to choose lifelimbdeathlife for living creatures of all sorts... I clearly cannot remember the specifics but I sure do remember the generalities. 

It is all so absurd and pointed and geared to make us all look at ourselves again and again... all of it. . . all of this.
I remember Charles ? arguing that the questions were absurd and that he couldn't do it, it wasn't making sense.  I also remember loving him a bunch. so lovely.
There can be much love amidst the roar of Fear, and perhaps that is what we are supposed to see when we do all this self-reflection/investigation.  aye?

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Introvert? Extrovert? Radical Follower of Islam?

well. maybe. but it doesn't really matter except in how I am going about the understanding of my self-identity.  Not a Muslim, only occasionally a radical and that has to do primarily with an old-school new england backtotheland movement in my heart and in my compost bucket. Can be an extrovert when it comes to flirtation. Men are my playthings, or were, when I was playing that game.
     I've always considered myself an introvert, plus a shy girl.  Its hard for me to break out of my 'space' and talk to strangers, for instance, having a great deal of difficulty going into a store to ask for help, being shy of the worker...
 I CAN do it, I certainly have and having kids has made my skin a whole lot tougher in terms of doing what is necessary to get around in the world.  I don't really want them to have this sort of shyness.  I know it, totally crazed.
but true, nonetheless. I really and truly don't like it, the whole talking to strangers thing.  I'm not generally insecure about myself but I just make a LOT of assumptions about the greater worth of other people, their time, their pathway, their lives, etc. and so I move aside to let them be their greater worth.  dig?

Anywho. the reason for bringing it up is ChakraCarol.  !*!  She questioned me about that aspect of my self-identity, saying something like:  If you are such an introvert, why are you so lonely?

oh.
well.

and what it has caused me to reassess is not actually that I might be an extrovert, but that I might not really be that lonely.  go figure. Of course, I would love to know lots of dynamic woman friends and I'd even take a few men to my side in a pinch :) but I wouldn't want them all at once and I certainly don't want to be part of a crowd anytime soon.  SO there is that.

And I'm also reassessing my need/desire for feedback all the time.  I like to be challenged to think in a new way, to add a new facet to the complexity ... but it doesn't need to undo me to be comment-free (here) or introverted (also, here, but different.)  Its like word choice, the weight is in the voice, the meaning in the vibrations of the larynx ... and so, wanting the challenge of conversation is not the desparate loneliness that I had identified, the meaning is in the thinking, the process, the 'connection' with another.

AND, as I get older and older, I have to reinvestigate why and where I decided to move aside all the time for the 'greater worth' of everyone else.  Its a sort of highschool -junior high mentality that I just never fully shook, the popular kids now encompassing the entire world, instead of just the few in school.  I have a lot of belief system which tells me bigger truths about people, about equality and oneness and grace and the wild spread of humanity that there is, so why in my moments of weakness is it always this that I slip back to?

so, i'm not saying i've decided i'm not lonely or that I don't need friends or that the ones I have are where I'm stopping or that I'm never going to get directions at a gas station, because I haven't 'decided' anything. I'm just plucking away at my strings here. 
sort of banjo-y at the moment. 
heh.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Clean-er?

     Sunday was the first day of the cleanse, no wheat, no dairy, no sugar, no caffeine.  I had cut out the coffee last week and switched over to tea, but went cold turkey...and uh, Spent the Entire afternoon from 3-8 roughly, in my bed with a whopper headache.  It was sort of trippy.  I couldn't sleep as I'd taken a cup of coffee to try to get the headache to go away, so I spent five hours lying down, breathing through the hammering and thinking.  It was like a five hour retreat, seriously.  I re-examined my feeelings about september 11th, where I am now as opposed to where I was then, single to married, childless to old-hat motha, happy and fulfilled in my work to less than that, but working on it. I'm 37 years old, an entire world of days has passed in the past ten years. an entire world. two children exist who did not .  bikes are ridden in my yard, faces are made at the dinner table... I thought again about the teaching lesson demo/interview I botched when I was eight months pregnant.  It was awful, an epic fail. I thought about the times when marriage has been awful. 
It was an impressive five hours.  I can't remember the last time that I was uninterrupted, and had only my head as company, the only distraction being where my brain would go next.  I have a lot of curiousity about its purpose.

And now, I've got a pot of brown rice on the stove, something I think I had pretty much relegated to the deepest days of history when I had to eat at my parent's hippy friends houses... and I am SO looking forward to scarfing it down with an avocado at lunch... SO.

What is all this? Why would I share it? I don't have any idea.  I don't know why my brain tripped through so many things during that headache and I don't know where it will go, or whether it will all come back again later... I don't know.

I do go see Chakra Carol tomorrow afternoon, so there is that!  and that is always a refresher. always.

Friday, September 9, 2011

I did not win powerball.

Shocker.

I'm deciding not to write today about the fear and loneliness that I am about to feel putting my babylicious one in preschool for the first time here this afternoon.  fear. loneliness.
I'm not going to write about it.

I'm going to try a 'cleanse' this coming week, abstaining from dairy, wheat, caffeine ! owfucking hell caffeine! , and sugar.  I'm supposed to feel fantastic and chipper and all that.  hold your breath, babes, hold it tight. 
I've also signed up for a night/day writing workshop at the end of the month to get my ass to accept that [-at the very least, and i mean this literally-THE VERY LEAST-]  sometimes i like to write.
there you have it, assertiveness 101. 
I am trying trying. I think it is the fall and the desire to bundle up and lie down in a blanket pile that is making me a bit nervous to be alone with my bad self all winter.  have to get a focus, a 'thing' to do... things to be proud of, the inner motivation to get myself back into doing yoga... probably the extra layers of bodyfat have something to do with the desire to lie down in that blanket pile/nest. I've heard it said that stating your intentions aloud actually helps increase your chances of going through with the actions necessary... in type, and in voice I say:  I intend to be healthier. I intend to stop eating when I am not hungry.  I intend to exercise all by myself!
rah.
I WILL buy lottery tickets, because I see them as tangible pieces of HOPE. 

Thursday, September 8, 2011

The Sun Also Rises...*

*in honor of my three year old who learned (from his precious cousin Francis) that waving your naked bum in the air is a form of dance.  to the moon!

and it has been raining here for the entire week, and I am OUT of ideas for how to get my lovechild six year old to decompress after school.  He has about an hour afterschool in which he is just lovely, chatty, eating snacky.. and then all goes to hell.  he's a tantrum-er, has been since he was a head-banging toddler. loud, mean, prone to throwing.  supah. if i drank, it would be heavily from 4-7 pm every night. every. night.  he's lost his portable video game thing forever, although he doesn't know that he isn't allowed it on school nights anyhow, and he gets a show if he doesn't tantrum before its time for one.... have i said, SUPAH?! and this is only the third night of school .   i understand his deep exhaustion, i do.  i just wish he would shut the hell up and get a job, already.
heh.
any ideas out there? if it weren't raining for all the heavens abursting, i would send him outside until it got dark.  really, i would. but it is... so what?
ideas?

Monday, September 5, 2011

She swings.... she misses... she will swing again. . .

I've got a pretty strong center, I think. (most of the time) . and in the parentheticals lies todays feeling and all the days of a rut... I'm good, I'm fine...as I get older I think the 'cycles' are getting stronger so that what used to be a bit of pms is now a full on  'watch out' timeperiod every month., and I can't seem to recognize it for what it is until someone else mentions the possibility and then wahooey. of course. head slapping and some curses too. . .  doesn't seem to help, to recognize it, but at least I know it'll have an end.

...the big kid is going off to first grade on the bus tomorrow morning and I'm so excited for him and for me... new town, new kids, new new new.... and then whoosh. waaaves of sadness (or something i can't identify which fills me with mourning and tears...and a desire for sobs..) ... and I wonder about how much I resist change and how much I resist acknowledging vulnerability (deep, deep DEEP resistance.)  Vulnerability makes me really pissed off.  really. like, a lot.  take my word for it. 
I do know that most of what angers me is related to fear. I can't seem to hold onto that emotion at all without yelling about it, so that is something to know, to look for... why am i so mad? what am I afraid of?  ...and I think, for me,  fear has most of its foundation in resistance.... a thing we are trying to control has left our grasp...
like my kid.
ah, have we done the right thing? will life be joyful for him? will he love freely? will he play ball? will he feel safe? will he be loved?
Its a matter of faith, to get through the day sometimes, to forgive myself for all the anger, to look to giving up on the fear, to just allow life to unfold as it will .
faith.

Friday, September 2, 2011

All hail the rut is back! ALL HAIL!

we all missed it, you know we did. the painful delusion-creating/fostering rut of mediocrity and complaint which fosters a quickness of wit and a cutting sarcasm. we love it, we hate it, we know it well.
we, being the all and the inclusion of you in the me, which of course is slightly problematic.
the past say, three days, i have been on the computer non-stop.  and when I say non-stop I mean to say so often that the screensaver doesn't always come up, that the log off that happens after fifteen minutes so that the kids can only get pbskids.org with their little fingers does not come up. no. and I've started laundry and 'watched children' and hung laundry on the line and made lunch and given haircuts and so on and so forth.
I'm going to blame the short power outage of the hurricane for sapping me of my will to actually 'live' a quality life.  The big energy shift that occurs with a giant-sized wind? huh. I got a whole lot of 'blow it up your ass' for you. 
(um, not really, in a deep way, but shitcakes ... i am fuming at something that I cannot identify ... and so, blow it up your ass.)

and i ask you this:  what the hell is worth being here all this time for? have i, literally, emptied myself of my resources so much that I cannot even read a book or entertain my mind and/or body with anything that doesn't have qwerty involved? where is the magic potion? where is the fabulously funny? where is it? why am i so damn bored, with all the world at my fingertips and an amazing ability to completely ignore these kids.  (who, by the way, during the formation of this current rut, have been absolute PIGS)  yes, i know, i know, the connection is not exactly lurking in a darkened hallway.  they have been ignored, they have lived like the lord of the flies, i keep expecting to find new totems when i finally pull myself away.

I've made myself a list of things to do that I love so that I can stop stuffing my face with dingdongs here .  but i haven't been accessing the list. And the Bible is sitting on the floor right behind me where i have been ignoring it all day. not even that can pull me away from this laundry lint that i am jokingly referring to as my daily "life".
wtf. LOL. (I HATE these abbreviations with a damn passion. how many people do you think are typing LOL while completely straightfaced? insidious!)  have i already said this? my god, come and get me, i have abandoned all spark of life.

(ehem. and i'm not getting that many comments here either...so i have to resort to facebook and the times. see where i have been living?! it is dark here, dark. )

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Ennui...or maybe menopause? menstruation? mid-life existential dilemmas?

Such a strange looking word, that one. ennui. 
Say it often and it becomes a sort of chant.  ennui, ennnnnnnnnuiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii...... plus, it looks vaguely threatening with all the dots it contains. or, conversely, sort of partylike in its confetti. i choose partylike, today.
and its not truly a boredom with which or by which I am waylaid, but it is truly a restlessness, an inability to focus, a difficulty finding that or those who give me/afford me solace, restfulness. Its a bad cycle, a bad spot, or at least the one I find myself in, and I don't like it.
examples:
*we had salmon last night and i can't get away from the smell. and can't seem to be bothered to scrub - just get repeatedly annoyed by the waft. I don't like salmon, at all, in any wayshapeform. so sue me. i am unhip.
*My kid is starting school and I'm so happy, but I haven't done anything to prepare and I'm vaguely annoyed at the wild mechanisms of the shopping guides that are arriving daily which all tell me to go buy him a lot of stuff, and so i'm just playing mathgames with him and giving him tons of timeouts because he is a punk from hell these days. I don't want him to go back to school, and I do.
*my hubsJ complains that I don't have any laughing these days. and I don't.
garumph.

wanna fight? no, me neither.