Bonfire within...

Generating one's own fire is another delicate balance. In my twenties, people often told me to be careful, that I was "burning the candle at both ends." Now I'm finally learning to how to control my fire, but it isn't easy.

I have so many things I want to do, places I want to go, and experiences I've yet to imagine. I also have my daily routine life into which I set the future goals for travel, experiences, time to explore/play/race/examine/write. My life has never been about stuff. I'm completely in the camp of experiences over stuff. Except when it come to the accouterments of being able to do stuff: boats, bikes, cars, tents, sporting goods and such. Rather diving fins than diamond rings kinda gal.

I've experienced life bartering, running my own business, being a gopher, working retail, serving food, sorting fish, building boats & furniture, salvage diving, crewing boats, stocking and remaindering bookshelves, editing manuscripts, writing proposals, creating pitch letters, recommendation letters, grant proposals, newspaper articles, book reviews, course proposals, book contracts, intellectual property contracts, author/agent agreements, painted the interior and exterior of houses/apartment buildings, custom-made leather sandals from scratch, led underwater snorkeling tours in the tropics, worked as a Naturalist for Audubon both on a farm and in schools teaching kids, taught at Writer's Conference (too numerous to name), taught at Masters levels at Universities, received a MAT and BA in English, an Advanced Open Water Diving License, Teacher Mentor certificate, RETELL certificate, and sold advertising for my father's beer business. And those are just the jobs/titles I can remember.

It is the fire, tempered by love of water ~ floating, swimming, meditiating ~ that has never allowed me to become too dark. I've lost many bright friends to suicide. Stellar, straight A student's; top drawer artists; a jet-set vet; medical brainiacs; and more. Only they didn't hear the music in the fire or the cool calm waves of the water. They were so bright they didn't ask for help, nor tamp out one of the ends of the candle. I've been lucky to be surrounded by mentors who have appeared at just the right moment. And a family that welcomes me unconditionally. Many of the bright ones I've lost didn't have those opportunities or felt that they didn't.

Now I'm wanting to find the balance to develop a steady, self contained flame that will allow me to be seen by others, not singe myself and sustain me well into old age. A creative flame that will be constructive and not destructive. The balancing act of being a single mom and full-time teacher make adding the third log of writer to the bonfire a tad tricky. But I think I'm finally getting long enough in the tooth and skilled enough with the way wind, water and flames work to make  a go of it.

Good Night, Upward and Onward, G'night!

balancing illness

Late yesterday I succumbed to a stomach bug, which resulted in me spending most of my day reading, sipping or sleeping in bed. I hate staying home from work. I don't ever fully relax; I keep thinking of all the things on my to-do list that aren't done ~ at home *and* at work ~ which means it takes me half the morning just to allow myself the indulgence of staying home to get better and feeling I deserve it.

I make lousy decisions when I'm sick or run down. I think we all do. I tend to feel like I'll never be well again, even if it's just a hit-n-run stomach bug. It takes all the wind out of my carefully scheduled sails, and I feel the time slipping into the wake of my weary day with fear that it won't be recaptured or recovered.

I've always been like this. I'm not sure where it all began. When I was young I sometimes pretended to be sick for the opposite reasons. Life was overwhelming and depressing, and sometimes it was easier to be in bed or watching tv under a blanket than face the day. I think I stopped that practice after I had Mono in Jr. High. I was in bed of a month; so weak, tired and with a growing dread of reentering school with so much academic and social time missed, I vowed never to pretend again.

High School, I don't remember staying home much due to illness. Years later, I didn't miss many days of college either. I think the sickest I ever became at a job was working in NYC. I guess my psyche knew before my conscious mind was aware that my time in the city was over. My body's immune system just took a vacation. I seemed to be chronically sick. It took a while to realize that my inner life and outer life were out of balance and that was why I was so susceptible to any virus on the subway...

The other times that my body knew first that my spirit was sick, was when I decided to leave the boat and when I decided to leave my marriage. Those times I was feverish, but very clear, like my body and spirit were warring and I couldn't ignore it any longer.

Last night my kids made dinner, did dishes and batches of laundry. Today they continued the chores and my mother brought a bunch of groceries, and then played taxi for me. Those were the moments I felt guilt free and happy....I could let go and heal.

But usually, when I'm in balance, my health is in balance. Right now, I guess I'm a little overwhelmed with balancing all my work and home responsibilities. Seems there is never much down time, I could always be doing something. If I allow myself down time, I still have the checklist tapping away in the periphery of my sight lines while I'm watching something stupid on the tv.


I'm rambling, as I'm still a little warm and not fully fueled, but it is interesting to track illness to the balance of inner and outer energies. Enough, as I'm pretty sleepy again. Back to my book and sipping ginger-ale!

Good Night, G'night.

Holy Sunday...

Tonight I watched HBO's Documentary Going Clear, based on the book of the same name by Lawrence Wright. L. Ron Hubbard's Birthday is 18 March, so perhaps Scientology celebrates some sort of holiday around his birth in March and this would be an added attack to air it now.

Watching the film was like watching a bus-accident; you knew that what your were about to see was going to be horrific, painful and senseless, but you were powerless to change the outcome. How so many people could allow themselves to be sucked into such a cult and give some much of their time, dignity, and finances to such an establishment is beyond me. How they could be deemed a region by the IRS is also bizarre. What dirt, or, ironically, "auditing" did they have on top IRS representatives to keep them not recognizing Scientology as a religion?

As I was watching, I remembered that it's Palm Sunday. Yesterday was the Hindu's day of Ramanavami, ending a holy week of Ramayana which began on the 21st. The 21st was also the New Year (Naw Ruz) for the Baha'i,  (Norooz) Persians (Zoroastrian) and the Hindu. A week from yesterday, Passover will begin, as will the Therevadin New Year (for Buddhists). And in a week, Easter Sunday, although it will Palm Sunday for my Orthodox Christian friends, with them Easter (Pascha) will be on the 12th. New Year (Baisakhi) for the Sikh's on the 14th.

So the time to reflect on religion and renewal is upon us. With the advent of Spring, the Pagan's celebrated the Equinox on the 20th (Ostara, in the Northern Hemisphere; Mabon, in the Southern Hemisphere) we see nature's rebirth and ancient humans built mirrored rituals around this earthly right of passage.

All of the above religions have books that are sacred to them; accept the Pagans and Scientologists. So many of the original groups of Pagan's rites and rituals were usurped by the Christians and Catholic Church, that it's hard to know where and when, exactly they were folded into the organized religions. These are ancient acts of humans trying to make sense of the world around them and minding the order of nature by honoring it. Creation myths from the Old Testament are the foundation for the Jewish, Islamic and Christian religions. They all share the Golden Rule.

 Scientology is the opposite. It is a crass, commercial and capitalistic enterprise with the no connection to the living world. Their Creation Myth involves aliens, aircraft, and man-as-scientists creating the order of the Universe. There is no Golden Rule. Only an Iron Fist and fear.

I didn't grow up in a household where any organized religion was routinized into our family structure. We did observe Christmas and Easter, but not with any religious attachments placed upon them. I took courses in Comparative Religions in college, attended churches, mosques and temples of various orders over the course of my life and have attended Pagan and Native ceremonies, too. I enjoy experiencing the spiritual life of those I care for and for who I have a curiosity.

Scientology has no spirit, soul or sense to it. It's not a religion, it appears to be a cult, and a dangerous one; destructive to it's members, to it's special fears (big backing for Prop 8) and so on.

I'm tired, as I was sick this afternoon and lost a lot of steam because of it. But I just had to gripe here for a tetch before going to sleep. Spring is upon us, time to take new and positive steps forward and away from the cold and cruel darkness! Bravo, HBO, Bravo!

Good night, Sacred and Secular, G'night!

Saturday Night Special

Haiku #3

Saturday Special:
Pizza with Good Friends and Son;
Dessert with Daughter!


Good Night, friends and family-near and far, G'night


(I'm fighting off a virus that's left me tired and foggy headed or this would be much longer)

Hoods..

Watched Boyhood with my boy tonight. First time for him, second for me. He'd been asking to watch it for a while. The first time, I'd seen it too recently. The second time, I wasn't sure I could emotionally maneuver it while watching it together. But tonight the the tenor of our moods, the homemade spaghetti and meatballs, followed by a fundraiser chocolate bar, put us in the perfect place for viewing it together. Plus my girl was tired and did not have to be factored into the mix.

The second time around I found it more elegant than the first. My boy seemed to absorb it; all of it. The family dynamics and divorce, the questioning of magic as a youth and the existential angst of the teens, the randomness and determination that is required to grow up organically. I identified more with the mother this time around. Last time, I guess it was too painful to see how similar our lives were. This time, it was okay, and I'm not worried about my own mortality or being alone with myself ostensibly 5 years from now in an empty nest.

Roots & Wings. That's what every parent hopes to give their child. A foundation to ground themselves in and the strong & flexible flight feathers to go out and explore the world so one day they can find a tree of their own to claim. My own childhood had kind a cracked foundation in terms of divorce and several moves. My kids have the divorce, but have spent almost 13 years in this house, a clear majority of their lives in this house. SF was so far removed from my son's consciousness that I took him to see the city of his birth last April, as it bothered him that he couldn't really remember it. However, until three years ago, like the plot line of the film before we join the narrative, my wasband and I fought frequently with thick tension filling the house. That creates it's own cracks in a childhood.

Unlike the mother and boy in the film; neither of us have moved onto having boyfriend (me) or girlfriend (him). My boy is 14 and will be in High School this September. I've been single for almost three years and have yet to be really dating anyone. The father in the film took a while to emotionally let go of his wife, start dating and then start a new family. The mother started dating quickly, married and divorced several times in the span of the boys 1-12grades, and ends up alone at close of the film.

I'm sure my boy will date when he's ready. I'm sure I'll date when the fates and Fortune decide to smile on me, or I get myself out and about enough to be "found".

But this film is really about feeling, listening, watching and reflecting. All things that we do too little of as our lives keep moving forward. My son wants me to recollect my stories. I want to spend as much time with both my kids before they flap out of the nest. Taking trips with them, playing taxi, helping them present themselves to the world and getting their footing is my role now. And I'm savoring it.

As I finish this both dogs are barking. They're barking because the local Owls are having a conversation that has grown louder as they've flown out of the Arboretum and closer to my house. I wonder, are they teaching their babies to hunt, or are they hunting for their little ones still? It's spring and it's supposed to snow up to 3" in the next 24 hours. Maybe they're just stocking up on some squirrels to keep the owlets warm and full while their flight feather grow flexible and strong?!

Good Night, to boyhood/girlhood/parenthood, G'night.

Openers 101

I knew I wasn't in America anymore, as I burst into a loud rendition of Billie Holiday's Summertime, followed by Vlad throwing me down on the cobblestoned street saying, "They'll arrest you for drugs singing this loudly late at night in Beograd. You'll have no lawyer and they'll take your passport. You have the wrong last name!"

The octopus looked deep in my eyes, while I stood in hip deep water in Christiansted Harbor trying to remove it from the New York woman it thought was me, and I knew it was scared to death. It came to me slowly and I took it back to the empty engine block it called home, where we first met. I never saw it again; I like to think it moved farther out the channel to a lobstery grotto, but I'm afraid it succumbed to extreme emotional shock.

Some people see Scotties on their decks, or pirates coming over the transom. Me? I saw tankers on the tops of the mountainous waves as we rode over them hove-to for days and nights on end.

Crossing the Knife Edge was a right of passage; I first climbed Katahdin in PF Flyers when I was 6, but didn't make it across the Knife Edge until I was 12, and the last time I crossed it I was 28.

I was born one of two, later became one of eight and lastly one of fourteen; The Brady Bunch had nothing on me.

We were racing down the cellar stairs, we both coveted the last green popsicle, so I gave my sister a nudge to pass her, but instead she started to fall and then fly to the bottom of stairs landing on glass bottles full of ammonia which broke and produced large, long lasting scars on her knee for which I still feel guilty almost half a century later.

That look. Before the elevator door closed she bit her lip as her smile slid into a worried glance. The doors shut. I asked my father, why she bit her lip and looked down, as I'd be seeing my grandmother again in just six weeks. He replied, "Perhaps she's afraid she'll never see you again."
Three weeks later she permed her hair, as she thought her hair looked best three weeks after the process. Two weeks after the perm she insisted that my father know that she intended to give me a certain sum of money for my honeymoon. You see the big deal surrounding my next visit was she'd meet my fiancé. My grandmother and I were very close. She called my father again to say the amount and it was for the honeymoon. My father assured her he hadn't forgotten. My grandfather, who I also adored, had died a few years earlier, and my father as the only child fielded all such requests. The next night my grandmother had a stroke in the middle of the night, made it half way across her bedroom, where she was found and taken to the hospital, where she remained in a coma. My sister and her boyfriend, myself and my fiancé flew from SF to Maine to see her. My fiancé said hello to her in a coma. I said good-bye to her in a coma. She'd always made her wishes very clear; no heroic measures if she was going to be revived and not be herself. After she died, I had to stop mid-dial oodles of time, when I wanted to call her; to share, rant, confess or just talk. But I'll never forget that look.

I dreamt of my Nana in the hospital the night before she died.  In my dream, I kept asking the Doctors if they were sure she wasn't still alive. My dream did not include my mother, but it should have. Nana had gone in for a routine procedure. Post-op she was having some lunch, soup, in her hospital bed while my mother visited with her. Nana started to choke, Mom  went to get a nurse, they medical staff raced into Nana's room and kept Mom out. When they opened the door again, they told Mom that Nana had died. One minute she was eating soup and catching up with Mom and the next minute she was dead. No warning, no premonition; except my dream.


Now I must dream......these were just a few openers I thought I'd give a spin around the x's and o's.


Good Night, Hook/line/sinkers, G'night!

Tip of the iceberg...

I'm not a huge fan of Freud's Tip of the Iceberg theory, and I know it's been the fodder for many a literary thesis and marketing meeting PowerPoint, but I do feel that as a writer I've only shown you the tip of the iceberg what will end up being a memoir.

You see it takes awhile to let emotion be your ally. Logic, reason, narrative are all safe strands to show in a linear fashion and to have them exposed without damage or care. Emotions are the things that really drive us, our choices and ultimately even how we tell a story. I've heard so many authors say, "I couldn't write the book until I had time to process the experience." That is where thought and emotion meet and get woven into something useful, for both writer and reader.

I recently read a Harvard study on cognitive skills. We've been sold the idea that our mind ages, as a whole entity, and it looses valuable elements as we grow older. Well, it turns out, that isn't so. The mind remains plastic until we die and now they are proving something Mortimer Adler said to me in my early twenties; We don't really learn how to synthesize much of life's experiences, or how to think, until we're in our 50's!

This is the graphic that accompanied the article. When we're young our sponge like brain continues to  soak up names, dates, data, and other short term memory facts. As we grow older, middle-age, we come into our powers of making sense of all we've learned and experienced. And as we grow even older we ripen into vessels of knowledge primed to share our wisdom.

The trick is allowing myself to expose the piece of myself that would align with Freud's hunk of ice.

To access below the epidermis of one's life is a tricky feat. One must be fearless, in that deep blue water, where light plays tricks on your mind and emotions distort with being relived. It's hard to manufacture, even with journals and pictures, all of certain eras of ones life. They say if an experience makes you laugh you'll remember it forever. In my experience, when I've been hurt or scared, I've forgotten whole chunks of my childhood and marriage. My sister and I say we took turns remembering various parts of our childhood and together we have a reasonable facsimile of it. 

How much does our preverbal self inform our verbal self? How much does our processing speed affect our social understanding of others and ourselves? How much of each is really a composite of what we want to be, what we're comfortable being and what we know we are? Do we ever, really know? I think this is why old friends, siblings and written artifacts are the true treasure in ones life. There is a shared history over time that one can dive into, deep into, if you're lucky and take a solid, often scary and occasionally satisfying look at ourselves. 

Unfortunately, I've lost many touch stone friends from different eras of my life. They've primary died of AIDS, Cancer,  or Suicide. My generation, as I touched on two nights ago, was the first and last to freely and openly get into drugs and sex prior to all the consequences being known. We also were the last generation that needed to self-medicate for Depression, as anti-depressants became standardly available in our young adulthood. No longer were folks drinking like fish to numb the pain, only to wake up feeling like crap and repeating the process all over again. If we were lucky, we found help and medicine. If we weren't, we lost many people in their 20's & 30's  ('80's- 90's) to mental disease. 

Now I'm, again, rewiring and splicing my intellectual, emotional and spiritual self. It's not going to be   light and airy. There will be deep dark and well preserved sides to myself that may surprise many of you. For example, unless you've been reading this religiously, I never thought I'd live beyond 20. Given my penchant for adventure, my inability to feel content, forget about happy, for any sustained period of time and desperately wanting a love that would last forever (all divorce kids either want that or put up big walls to keep love away, so they won't get hurt), it didn't seem that I'd make it unscathed to my 20th birthday. Yet somehow, miraculously, after sailing through hurricanes, driving cars at 110mph, jumping off cliffs into unknown depths of water, taking hallucinogens of varying types, having too many one-night-stands, running in shanty towns at night,  and scuba diving before I'd ever had a lesson; I lived. Then I knew I had to start living like I was going to get OLD. And I have. 

Now to share some of how that organically (emotional self speaking to reasonable self) came to pass. 

Good Night, Unsinkable Storytellers, G'night!