Pushing fifty...gently...if I can find my glasses.

I've just been done by a song.

2011-09-12T22:39:00.000-04:00

Done as in ... out from the undertow and spat ashore. Sweet relief! I just sat and heard Paul Simon's "Love and Hard Times" about twelve times over ... There's nothing like a lucid, loving and occasionally ludicrous songwriter, aged nearly 70 (!! -- Paul Simon -- seventy!!), singing Thank God I found you in time in a way that makes you think Yes -- thank God I found you in time -- in this time, in our time nearly a decade ago, in this life.

I heard the song over and over and I bawled, deep from the gut. A good, steady, cleansing cry. It's been just over a year now. One full cycle of seasons, anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, memories, undoings ...

Thank God I found you ... I can't yet thank God or Life or The Great Whatever for having lost you, and I doubt I ever will. I can't see myself feeling grateful for this particular near-death, late-middle-age FGO (Fucking Growth Experience) ...

We are forever admonished to let go of the past ... but does the past let go of us? Can it? There's no letting go of certain attachments, certain bonds that have hoven into the blood, the nerves, the marrow. Despite how it expired, our bond as it was when we were wedded remains, one of the realities that paradoxically sustains me because it was for a time ... We created this bond and we destroyed it. I blame no one, ultimately; I blame nothing. Shit happens is up there with death and taxes -- guaranteed. Shit happens ... and so does grace. As Drew says to Quincy in Meet Joe Black: "That's just life, Quinc."

Sometimes life brings us caritas, kairos, tendresse ... grace. Sometimes life shits on us. Always, at the end, we die. Always, at the beginning, we are born. So it goes.

So you go. So I go. So we go on, broken in this way.

And then along comes Paul Simon.

Dear unhusband, should you ever read this, "Love and Hard Times" is our song. The 'wedded we' is broken, and love is gone.

thank god i found you
in time

Somehow, there he is, this man called Jesus

2011-08-13T14:17:00.000-04:00

Rejected by just about everyone, and nearly myself, and

Jesus, somehow, is there, inside the ragged circle of those who throw stones.

He who may or may not have existed, who was tempted by the devils of his day,

as we all are. The desert wanders through us, sets up shop, leaves us duned.

Here are the devils, after all, marching us barefoot

through fire, and here is this enigma

named Jesus,

Photo: Sarah Casey

and here: our blood-bound relations, humanity's tribes.

They dog us, surround us, insist that they love us, punish us

for their sins. The evidence of them

is us, and everywhere, even and especially on the farthest moon of our soul,

where we thought we would never be found.

Caustic, they thrive there; they make us survive there, canaries in mines.

They work us,

work through us, the ones in our blood, the sand in our bones,

the sand in the hourglass of our bones, grinding us down grain by infinite grain, while that

one man stands alongside us, showing us how it's done.

The real work.

With the one we're not sure exists. We've never seen him.

He opens his mouth to our ear, and speaks:

I supercede all deeds, all devils, all demented histories, all the lies that derange you.

Mirage or not to your eye, I sustain you. I run deeper than blood and despair, softer

than sand, longer than time.

Forget all you believe, and what you believe about me. Forget it all. Tabula rasa.

Now, let me sustain you.

What is the colour of the ... ?

2011-08-05T23:44:00.000-04:00

Perhaps you wish to visit

or the

If your destination is

You might find yourself in fields of

nourished by a

that reminds you of

and leaves a

for your eyes to

as you are

and

by the

The Color Of ... is your next destination!

Help me out here, friends ... There's a man involved.

2011-08-02T14:16:00.000-04:00

There's always a man, isn't there? Fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, grandfathers. Former flames and flame-outs; Cupid's-arrow strikes or Pan-sparks flaming your nether regions. The ones who got away and the ones who wouldn't leave; the ones you wouldn't leave and the ones you got away from ... but I digress.

There's a man, there's one man I find myself a little in love with. We were briefly acquainted years ago and there was something ...

Recently we were in touch again, quite by coincidence. And then not by coincidence. I was still in the babbling, bawling and boundless phase of divorce aftermath, incoherently clinging to every kind and soothing presence that spoke through the phone or came into my house. We spoke once or twice, and he listened.

I phoned him this evening on a whim. In my address book, his name is above the number of someone whose call I was returning. I called the person, left a message, and looked at my phone book again. His name, his number.

Reader, I called him.

I'm in a different place now since our last conversation a few months ago. I no longer stammer, sob and stagger around my home when one of my trusted ones calls. I'm happy to hear from them, rather than desperate. There's much more than a loss of identity in divorce -- there's a loss of a whole way of existing with another person; so many little couple-habits and rituals that you did in dances of routine that were yours alone. If you really allow the 'one soul in two bodies' resonance that can pervade you in a deep bond, a lovely symmetry of changes and small, fluid adaptations reshape you ... and in the sweetest of marriages comes a flow to certain routines that make them feel holy ... like the way my husband would give his final yawn on the couch after we'd watched a movie, the colossal yawn that sent him to his feet with a stretch. He was like a little boy when sleepiness took him -- suddenly cross-eyed with fatigue and instantly cranky if he couldn't start his going-to-bed rituals right now. I'd lay out the bathmat, his towel, his toothbrush and paste, and eject any and all cats who might be lurking in the bathtub. He'd undress, hang up his pants and shirt, pitch undies and socks into the hamper, grab something to read. I'd be waiting in the hall, and when he approached me, I'd pull up my pyjama top and we'd embrace, chest to chest, still and soft, then swinging gently from side to side and eventually scratching each other's backs. Then I'd lean down and inhale the scent in the center of his chest, where the little sternum-hollow is. I'd say, "I love the smell of you" or some such, give his chest hair a nuzzle and some more snuffles, kiss his musky spot ... then off he would go for his shower.

All of those little rituals -- gone. No wonder we say, "I don't know which end is up" after a loss that rips every familiarity away; I don't think we're ever more lost ... a certain self is dying.

And we're left alone with this me-person, this suddenly sole person, who isn't the person she or he was before a years-long cornucopia of everyday familiars filled up to overflowing during the nesting intimacies of a long marriage. Suddenly, in a stroke, the cup is empty.

... So yes. I didn't know who the hell I was for months. I'm beginning to discern who's emerging now, nearly a year after my marital KABOOM, so I can carry on a coherent conversation with my friends ;-)

... I called my former acquaintance who twigged my heart way back then. We shared a quiet, occasionally halting conversation, 'cause it had been a while. Both of us still feeling (and having acknowledged to one another) that something. We're a lot alike, I think, in sweet ways and in gravid habitual ways. I've got a thousand voices in my head, each clamouring or whispering her thoughts about this allure that I feel, that he feels --

"Are you nuts?!" ~ "Go for it ... why not?" ~ "He's gentle at heart, you know that ... and he seems to have bunkered his heart away too ..." ~ "I just want to be with him for a little while, no Krazy-Glue attached; just be with him and sense how we might be together..." ~ "Oh God, I'm too tired to even consider it..." ~ "I don't want to waste any more time being alone when there's someone in the world I share this certain feeling and potential with..." ~ "I just want to lie down and spoon with him, and hold him (He's been through a couple of life-altering events very recently) ..." ~ "I want to sit down with him and converse and listen for hours ... I want to learn him..." ~ "Eyes wide open! Eyes wide open!" ~ "We'd both be treading carefully, that's for sure ... and I don't want to live with someone yet and I sure don't want to commit my still-wobbly, emerging, changed-and-yet-not-changed self to the depths of enquiry and intimacy that I know I will want eventually..." ~ and so on ...

I do feel something for this man that is deep, quiet, and lovely ... and of course, alarm bells are going off because that's what alarms do when this kind of interest for another person arises ... and oh, there's this softness of heart towards him that I've felt only a few times in my whole life and I don't want to waste any time. I also don't want to do anything irretrievably stupid! (Hah! Don't we tell ourselves that, every single time?)

I'm teetering here! I hold myself back, and so does he. We're both on the introverted side of personhood; both quiet, homebody creatures; both more likely not to reach out. Both more likely to let this low-lying but potent resonance pass than to enter it and let it enter us.

Anne Popperwell, "Calla Lillies"

What to do? What do do? Bloggy friends, ask me some questions; give me your sense of what I've written here; help me understand how to move with this ambivalence and attraction. I'm still in the 'Who am I becoming now?' limbo-time of post-divorce and I don't want to have any flings, one-night-stands, disasters, or even dates. I want another dear one, eventually ... and I want to share some time with this one man with none of the expectations I once would have had. I just imagine a few gentle days together for two people who recently have had the wind knocked out of them and I, being surprisingly old-fashioned, want him to make the first move toward me.

We had a phone conversation a while ago ... It wasn't long after our quirky, coincidental first encounter online, and yes, I was still in the babbling, bawling stage. I'd written him a letter after an earlier conversation, explaining myself as I seem to do every time I express an authentic surge of emotion toward another. (That's a very interesting habit I've just now clued in to ... a belief that I have to explain an emotional expression to one I've expressed it with. It's almost like I'm trying to make sense of it after the fact ...) I blathered in the letter about how I'd blathered over the phone; made a double fool of myself, I think ...

He phoned me after he'd received the letter. I don't have any kind of 'caller ID' on my phone, so I had no idea to whom I was picking up:

Me: "Hello?"

Him: "You couldn't be more wrong."

Me: (** ?? **)

Him: "It's me, C."

Me: "Yes ... hi ... I know ..."

Him: "Hi ..."

Me: "... What couldn't I be more wrong about?"

Him: "You."

Me: "... Me."

[pause]

Me: "Wrong about me. Me wrong about me. Yes?"

Him: "Mm hmm. So very, very wrong."

... Well, this man has a voice that when he says, Mm hmm, I surrender. Or my soft heart inside her shell surrenders. This doesn't happen very often. It happened with my husband and I did surrender to him because my whole body, self and soul felt themselves cherished. I look back on the great loves of my life (there are very few) and what made them great, for however long they lasted, was the pure sensory trust we fell into. Cherishment allowed us to roll off our last ridges of defense and into a state of bliss, at least once. Everything in us relinquished its hold -- we gave over, gave in, gave up in the most heroic way that a person can -- with both the primal trust of a beloved babe in arms and the awareness of an adult whose will has made a choice to fling open the whole heart.

It's happened with me and four other people. Surrender and submission to the surrender. Volition opens like a night-flower to the moon and says, Take me ...

Photo: Johannes Nugroho

So with this one man, the potential for cherishment made itself known to us both, I believe, in one long-ago kiss, shared in a car. It was the most gentle kiss I've ever received from a man, and I lost my ability to hold myself up in my seat. A sound emerged like a zephyr from my throat -- I couldn't imitate it now -- it was a once-in-a-lifetime sound, totally spontaneous, from where I don't know -- it was a sound of surrender ... The whole of me, including my mind, fell back; I lost all volition for an instant and sank, feeling like an animal instantly tamed -- whispered -- by a kiss. Total bodily trust.

So there it is. This sense. With him, still, after all these years. The memory of a moment that my body recalls with pervasive and perfect recall: a cascading radiance from the center of my chest, and a soft fall into trust.

He has a sweet soul, I know that. No wonder that when I begin, so tentatively, to imagine even the possibility of allowing someone close, I want nothing to do with dating sites or bars or speed-dating or hooking up or "singles' events" or whatever's being hawked these days as a way to snatch a man. I have to make a confession here: in the first desperate months after my husband left, I made a list of men I knew / had known with whom I'd felt even a fleeting but pervasive attraction sometime in the past (my adult past, that is). All seemed, from what I sensed of them, decent, kind, good men. All alluring to me, no matter how brief the contact. All men about whom I had this thought: "If he and I were both unattached at the same time ..."

I actually ran into one of them a few days after I'd written up my list. This man was in my top three -- he's just an all-round lovely human being. He's robustly content with his life; gentle; a joy to talk with; gracious and friendly. He'd definitely be my buddy as well as my mate. (What better combination is there, eh?) Well, he's still happily married to his buddy and mate -- I thought that'd be the case, since his character's so true. We caught up for ten minutes or so, and then he had to be off. It was pure delight to encounter him. It's unlikely that we'll meet again, and it's been a joy to know him a little.

But what a hoot! One of my ones who got away, one of my could-have-beens, one of my flames who flickered briefly but with deep resonance -- here he was, three days after I'd composed and tossed up my list to the Mysteries that may or may not arrange an encounter or two.

So ... C was on that list, and we've met up again. I really don't know what to do, even though my feeling of what to do is sure. I don't even know if I'm best to do it, or let it be -- oh boy, I'm ambivalent about any close engagement right now, even among people I love, and with my cats. I still feel, bodily, that whacked. Emotionally, I've got my whole heart to give -- I'm at a point where I know my heart's been broken ... broken ... broken right open. Where love with one as my beloved is concerned, I have nothing left to lose and everything good to give and receive, just from daring to cherish and be cherished.

So here I am, having stayed up all night with these thoughts, after speaking with him on the phone about nine hours ago. Feeling in my heart the urge that means This one is sweet-souled, no matter what else -- I sensed that in my husband -- and it might be time to take a next step.

I don't know what the next step is ... or perhaps the next step's already been taken -- I just passed nine hours in making a step by composing this post ... musing, pondering, wondering ... not sure of anything except that I'm writing my way through some questions, that the sun is quickly rising, and there's a man in this world I share a tender, tenacious, somewhat enigmatic allurement with ... an attraction from the heart.

Worth your follow ... worth your read!

2011-07-24T15:05:00.000-04:00

Yay! The heat today is slightly less than sizzling, so my brain wants to play! In the past few days I've found lots of great articles and links -- Bookmarked them all, too fried to read at the time. No more! -- We've got two or three days of tolerable heat coming on ... and Pushing fifty has some goodies for you ...

First off, there's James Altucher -- a man of snapping-good thoughts. I found his site via The Browser's quotations page -- which offers up-to-the-minute quotes from pieces its editors find all over the web. Here's Jimmy Page, on nutrition: "I'm not into solid foods very much. I prefer to eat liquid food, something like a banana daiquiri."

While you're enjoying your liquid refreshment, here's James Altucher's advice on how to meet failure -- tip #6 is to watch funny movies. Best movies to watch: funny movies about failure. My first choice would be Arthur -- the 1981 original that stars Dudley Moore. You cannot hear that man laugh without cracking up yourself! In the eyes of the upper-crusties around him, Arthur is an abject failure ... and he's in love ...

Speaking of failure ... Here's a doozy. How about a failure to be civil and fiscally responsible? -- Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Dish mirrors my thoughts about the impasse in US debt talks ... and from everything I've read about this crisis, I can't help but wonder if at the root of certain quarters' refusal to engage intelligently is an unspoken revulsion that the president has -- wait for it -- brown skin. At least one prominent, very pale Republican is on the record as saying he wants to destroy Barack Obama's presidency -- though this man doesn't seem to say why. Meanwhile, people of all skin tones are suffering ...

Speaking of men ... The Good Men Project is a gem, and David Perez writes of his experience with major depression after a lifelong battle with what he calls "the monster inside me." He arrives at an imperative understanding of himself and his monster: "We are brothers with the same memories, scars, and triumphs."

Dorian Gray would have done well to arrive at a similar understanding ... especially in light of Better Book Titles' spoofed cover of Oscar Wilde's creepy classic:

Wordplay with Ovid

2011-07-13T02:17:00.000-04:00

Love yields to business. If you seek a way out of love, be busy; you'll be safe, then.

Ovid, Remedia Amoris

Wordplay:

Love yields to love. If you seek a way into love, be loving; you'll be safe, then.

Coming

2011-07-10T22:33:00.000-04:00

upon a decade-younger

photo of my flushing,

sated face and chest, soused

with mammal bliss, and him so

languid in his chair, spread flesh and

fledgling love

aloft in grains

of scent and sweat, one skin

on two, and now

I tear apart

the lie, the lie

that once he claimed

was truth

Sarah Palin, an SUV, and a perfect quote!

2011-06-23T11:16:00.000-04:00

They were corrupt, empty, selfish, self-absorbed, capable only of seeing themselves in the reflection from the tinted glass in their fancy cars.

~Rawi Hage, Cockroach

Challenging a headline: "Men Will Always Cheat"

2011-06-18T16:40:00.000-04:00

Kay Hymowitz, via The Daily Beast, headlines her article about male (most currently: Anthony Weiner's) infidelity with a screaming generalization: MEN WILL ALWAYS CHEAT.

No, they won't. I've known cheaters, and I've known men -- and women -- who choose fidelity. We humans have a hard time accepting that we're not an inherently monogamous species. To cherish one person as your mate, to intend sexual and relational fidelity to that one person for a lifetime -- is a tall order, and one that's not to be lightly avowed. The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions, sometimes with marriage vows ... and with constant change and the intrusion of circumstance (like twitter-pics and getting caught). Yes, some humans seem to be skeezy in character from the get-go ... Some are power-mad, and the power-pumpers who have a penis ... Well, it's just one more weapon in the arsenal. The power-mad are takers, pure and simple, and male takers tend to take with their handiest tool. No pun intended.

"Our long national nightmare is over," Hymowitz writes in the wake of The Weiner's resignation from Congress. All the more freedom now, in combination with the fact of his pregnant wife, for him to tweet his burgeoning boxers even more. Female takers will rise (ahem) to the bait.

(Some of the alleged Weiner-women.)

A man who can't keep his peter in his pants, and gets caught flashing his privates in public, is not a "national nightmare." He's a cheater exposed. It's certainly a nightmare for whomever he's cheated on. No -- it's a daymare ... a lifemare. The penis isn't the problem -- the man's character is. He's lied, cheated, deceived, betrayed. He's taken a torch to his own home. He's ruined his family, fouled his own nest.

It's said that when an animal fouls its own nest, it's either mortally ill or injured, or it's gone insane. Who among us hasn't gone bonkers with lust for another -- for the wrong person at the wrong time? I have ... and the "going bonkers" is, when you're not slavering over someone who's either married or hot for you regardless of your own relational status, a process that overrides doubt, fear, reasoning, and whatever else conspires to keep us away from another human we're hankering for. We can be supremely stupid when we're first "in love." It's not love -- it's lust. Usually, we want into another's pants before we want into their heart. Mating isn't marriage ... at least, not at first.

"... the fact is, men have never been reliably monogamous." Neither have women, though we're more likely to curtail our wandering eye when we're bonding ourselves to a beloved. Hymowitz briefly compares American and French culture as factors in how permissible and punishable infidelity is, and while culture and other historically devised mores can strongly influence how an adult human can and will act within marital relations, biology does trump all.

Being caught in the act is a bummer for the cheater, and a huge drag for a cheater whose working life is highly public. Too bad that so many public servants end up being pubic self-servers.

On the other hand, there are the rare gems who maintain their home-fires with genuine integrity. Barack Obama is one, I think. During the 2008 election, what struck me with constant force was how affectionate and playful he was with his wife and daughters, and they with him. Affection -- that's the ticket. You can't fake mammalian play. To my eye, it's one of the most reliable indicators of relational sanctuary, safety, and fidelity. We only play -- with no thought of gain, prestige, fame or fortune -- with those we know in our bones we're relationally safe with, and no man who has earned, and honours, the trust of his family will wag his 'tail' in a destructive direction.

(Barack Obama with his eldest daughter, Malia.)

It's the willingness to betray those we supposedly hold most dear that makes us unfit for mature relation ... or public office. Monogamy -- and faithfulness to bonded relation in general -- is a choice, and we make and break our vows based on whatever choice we make.

Some aphorisms I invented, I think ... and some "overheards"

2011-06-18T00:57:00.000-04:00

Every once in a while, in order not to drown in paper, piles of paper, piles of files, binders, bookies and banker boxes stuffed with wretched poems I composed when I was nineteen and drunkenly besotted with the first major love of my life, I sort. Essentially, I re-pile and refile. Today, though, I got two things accomplished: I tossed into the recycle bin six pieces of paper!, and I set aside five more that had some redeemable thoughts written on them. I guess they're my own thoughts, since they're not attributed to anyone ... and a few are in quotation marks, so I might have over-/heard them in conversation. When did I jot these epiphanies down? Wow! I said what!? ...

I doubt everything except my own doubt!

"Aquatic technician = dish washer = me"

My cats know that I'm a good person, even when I don't.

Poetry is music set to words.

Cancer might be DNA's way of telling us, "You mess with me and I'll mess with you!"

Everything comes to those who wait ... especially the leftovers of those who hustle.

Time lags ... then runs out.

I'd better get back to those piles, eh? I'm so proud of myself -- five fewer scraps of paper to stash away for another decade or so! I'm on a roll! And look -- even more! ...

I finally have enviously reedy ankles, and no one to show them off to.

You will know what matters most by losing nearly all.

'Working stiff' is not an oxymoron.

Childhood: when every day was a storm of light from dawn to dusk, and every night a sheet of stars.

Of course we live to eat. It's how we stay alive.

The power-mad don't want to lead; they want to take.

After the Weiner scandal -- Two sectors, it seems: public service and pubic service.

When we say, "I'm losing it," what is the "it" we are losing?

My cat saves my life -- how? She captures my attention.

Never assume intimacy with another person -- especially your spouse.

"She's not one of the prettiest women I know ... but she is the most beautiful."

Pay attention, or pay with your life.

"I didn't leave my marriage; I was taken from it."

I don't seem to have much left in this life but the pen I rode in on.

Actions speak louder than words ... and handwriting, loudest of all.

Raison d'être: hypnotic bass guitar riffs

2011-05-29T13:31:00.000-04:00

Sheryl Crow: "No One Said It Would Be Easy."

Amen, sister.

David Ricketts' bass work is hypnotic ... It underscores the sometimes plodding and monotonous pattern of habit in relation ... and there's a comfort there, too, that reminds me of a heartbeat ...

I can't get this song out of my head; nor do I want to.

This is a good song to sing to your own soul ... The coda is so affirming:

No one said it would be easy

No one thought we'd come this far

Look -- we've come this far

Amen again!

Raison d'être: stewed rhubarb

2011-05-28T21:16:00.000-04:00

Late May: rhubarb. Stewed slowly with honey, vanilla, a dash of orange juice, a titch of cinnamon. Sublime.

Loss ... and the gorgeous words that we pound into paper

2011-05-19T13:09:00.000-04:00

Michael Kimball. Absorb the name, and let the man's words absorb you:

I went back inside through the back door and walked back to what used to be our bedroom. I was going to take my funeral clothes off, but it felt too difficult to untie my tie or my shoes. It felt too difficult to unbutton my shirt or my pants. I couldn’t take my suit jacket off. It fit a little tight around my shoulders and it felt as if my wife had her arms around me.

My funeral clothes were all that were holding me together then. I was afraid that I would start to forget my wife if I took any of them off.

Kurt Anderson, "Bereft"

That's as far as I read -- my eyes are suddenly closed and straining against an aqua terrycloth robe, a dressing gown that belonged to my mother, who was nine weeks in the ground by then. Mom. Mom.

I want her, I want one right now. Mom. In a bathrobe, swelling like sea and the sun to lap over your nestling child, the one who trembles ... with joy.

So that's what it feels like. Quivers within and breathing so deep. Softened; serene. Surface, meet surface ... and sink; you are safe.

*sinsenor, "Mother Love"

Safe and bereft in her mother's closet, snuffling her softest, favourite bathrobe. A feral orphan claws at the final scent, suckles the last cells of skin, strands leftover hair into her scalp. Stranding; stranded. Nobody's fault but she shakes -- and where is the breast that sustained her? She pulls the dead fur down and falls into the must --

... "My funeral clothes were all that were holding me together then." -- For me, it's my bed, my blankies, my bath and my cats ... and my own arms. Not long ago, a Great Dane whose family I was visiting for the weekend slept with me on a king-sized bed. I awoke at one point (of many) to find my right leg dangling at the knee and my nose about to collide with the edge of the bedside table. The big galoot had me shoved halfway to the floor -- there was no moving the beloved beast (believe me, I tried), so I scooched myself into a form approximating the dog's, and chuckled myself to sleep. I've been craving a big, warm body to nestle with at night ... For the first time in many, many months, I got my wish!

So that's where the moustache comes from!

2011-04-26T21:04:00.000-04:00

I've just read, in Susun Weed's Menopausal Years, that the production of two pituitary hormones, lutenizing hormone (LH) and follicle stimulating hormone (FSH), increases by as much as 1300% during menopause (pg. 84).

Ah-hah! I think, The maddening mystery of my steel-wool facial hair is solved! But then: I recall that I've had the moustache since I was sixteen.

Gulp ... and uh-uh!

2011-04-21T03:55:00.000-04:00

Artist: Lucas Zoltowski

... Thinking about a study I recently came upon (and forgot to save!) that highlighted the whopping percentage of women over 50 (I'm over 50 so to my eye, any percentage over zero is "whopping"!) who are felled by heart disease in the first six months after their mates leave them or die suddenly. Two thoughts:

Holy shit ...

and

I won't be one of them.

Artist: Jamie Price

Haiku: April

2011-04-11T15:43:00.000-04:00

spring day, bittersweet.

returning birds hear chainsaws

amputating homes

No (need for) comment.

2011-01-24T13:10:00.000-05:00

Wingnuts and Donuts

2010-12-13T01:23:00.000-05:00

Ruinous discourtesy. That's the kindest thing I can say about how some congregants of a certain church recently paid their respects to a woman of high public standing outside her funeral.

God, if there is one, doesn't hate anything. After all, if God is the Creator and God created everything and God is infallible, what's there for God to hate?

And if God does hate something that God has created, does that mean that God can make a mistake? Does God get pissed off at what God thinks is a mistake; does God have temper tantrums? Does God make a sign that says GOD HATES MOSQUITOES and butt into the rituals of people who don't hate mosquitoes or don't really care one way or the other about mosquitoes so long as they're not being bitten by one right now? What about people who enjoy doughnuts? Would God heft a sign that says GOD HATES DOUGHNUTS and stand outside, say, a Tim Hortons, harassing customers who are moseying out of the store, chomping down on that first nummy bite of a squishy-warm honey-glazed? Would someone else come along who objects to the spelling of DOUGHNUTS on God's sign and heft his own sign that says GOD HATES DONUTS, YOU IDIOT ... and might a third person come along who's taken offence at the casual spelling of DOUGHNUTS on the second protester's sign ... and might that third person send another signal to the skies that says GOD HATES THE BASTARDIZATION OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE BY PEOPLE WHO CAN'T SPELL, and might a fourth person join the ruckus with GOD HATES PEOPLE WHO GET BETWEEN ME AND MY TIMMY'S SO GET OUTTA MY WAY! and a fifth with GOD HATES CANADIAN DONUTS, YOU DIMWIT! and a sixth with NO WAY, HOSEHEAD! GOD LOVES CANADIAN DONUTS, SO TAKE OFF, EH? and so on, ad infinitum ... ?

Who are we to presume that if there's a God, we have a clue about what God feels? -- It would appear that the young man in the photo whose sign says GOD HATES SIGNS understands this; his sign offers comic, ironic relief ... I wonder what church a person with his sensibilities might attend ... The Church Of The Subtle Tee Hee, perhaps ...

As for the child in the bright red pants who is holding the sign that says GOD HATES FAGS, Hell hath no fury like a child who's been programmed to hate. It might take a few years or decades of festering, but the fury will come. Hell also hath no fury like mine at the choice of an adult to put a sign like GOD HATES FAGS into a child's hands -- and the rot of willful ignorance into his soul.

The most despicable shrink in the cosmos: Dr. Abner Krank (snort!)

2010-11-30T19:22:00.000-05:00

Now, before anybody gets fired up, Dr. Abner Krank is a fictitional character; a weedy, sinister sort of man. He'll make your skin crawl from the moment he opens his mouth.

Dr. Krank, a 29-year-old chief resident of psychiatry (Twenty-nine? -- He's a child!) in a massive psych hospital in mid-1970s Toronto, is a key player in Nicholas Ruddock's The Parabolist, a mordantly madcap tale. I loved it.

Since the story's set in Toronto (which is a character in itself), everybody talks about the weather. Even though Toronto's micro-climate seems to be getting ever more monotonous and dreary (all those towers; all that concrete; all those metastasizing suburbs; bye-bye, green land and fresh air), it's still a Canadian city, so everyone talks about the weather, eh? (How can we not, really, no matter where we live -- especially now?)

But I digress. Dr. Krank is a character you will love to hate. He is utterly, irretrievably, an asshole. Poor bastard; with a name like Abner Krank, what can you do? You become a pompous ass. Scene:

Dr. Krank skewers an affable security guard whom he briefly encounters in a hospital lobby during a rainstorm. The guard compares the current weather -- a steaming, tropical downpour -- to Madagascar; Krank replies (typical shrink!) with a question:

Oh, you've been to Madagascar?

No, no, the friendly, hapless guard says; just a figure of speech. You know, Doctor, hot and wet.

Then that's all you should say, hot and wet. Madagascar means nothing to me. It's not helpful to say Madagascar. Madagascar could be on the moon.

You say so, Doc, sorry.

... Yech! What a creep! Valerie Anderson, a medical student, also has a first encounter with the illustrious Dr. Krank and later remarks,

How do people like that ever do anything for anybody? You know, there was a study of psychiatrists and it was found that eighty per cent chose their speciality because of vague inner turmoil, unhappiness, dissatisfaction. They're patients themselves, when it comes down to it.

GOOD ANSWER, VAL! I once was a therapist myself ... What matters down the line -- and is a bottom line for me -- is whether the practitioner keeps on doing his/her own inner work in supervision, no matter how long in practice. I don't care if your name is Freud or Jung, or if you're one of the masters' direct descendants -- If you're doing this work, you've got to be doing your work too. Here's why, in a nutshell (Take "nutshell" any way you please):

DR. ABNER KRANK'S PHILOSOPHY OF CARE, IN A NUTSHELL

When he first started [to administer psychotropic drugs to patients], he always went with the lowest dose, to be careful. Now, fuck it, wham, just get it done. Go back to sleep.

Fortunately, the wicked Dr. Krank is eventually challenged ... and that's all I'm going to say. The Parabolist struck me as a fast read -- but an intelligent one. It's a lush story of intersections, collisions, schemes and synchronicities.

A most erotic and timely anatomy lesson, beginning with an instep, awaits you, reader! So does a bemused older gentleman who becomes sweetly -- then staunchily -- infatuated with a family of squirrels who are nesting somewhere in his roof. So does a revolutionary -- and ravishing -- poet who is not who he seems ... His presence as a teacher of poetry to medical students needing a quick elective credit is shape-shifting ...

There's someone in the story who's considered a failure. We all know where that one goes ... and here, it goes with deep grace and full-circle fun.

The story is full-circle humane ... It's so refreshing to read a novel that isn't overwrought with cynicism ... Oh, and by the way? Poetry rocks.

A couple of blurbs that nicely sum up The Parabolist:

A comic mystery, literary CSI, old-fashioned sex romp or CanLit tease -- you needn't be able to say what Nicholas Ruddock's The Parabolist is, because it speaks so entertainingly for itself.

(Andrew Pyper)

Packed with smarts, wit, and the spirit of Roberto Bolano, The Parabolist envisions Toronto as an antic place full of characters willing to go to the brink for good sex, good love, or a good poem. This big-brained, warm-hearted debut is a joy to read right up to its bold conclusion.

(Kyo Maclear)

Orange-oatmeal chocolate-chip muffin recipe!

2010-11-25T22:15:00.000-05:00

I figured that it might have been tormenting for some of you to read my last post about those scandalously delicious muffins I baked ... and then not be treated to the recipe! So, without further ado ...

Oven: 350F, middle rack

Prep: greased muffin tin, or loaf pan

Prep: soak 1 cup of full-grain oats in 1/2 c. orange juice and 1/2 c. boiling water for 15 minutes.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter (one stick; softened)
1/2 cup (generous) brown or yellow sugar
2 eggs, beaten
1 c. all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla

Optional: 1/2 tsp. orange extract; 1 c. chocolate chips (or raisins, walnuts, etc.)

While oats are soaking, cream butter and sugar in large bowl.

Beat in eggs.

Stir in oat mixture; add salt and vanilla; stir in [chocolate chips, etc.]

Add flour, baking soda / powder until batter is mixed. Texture should be quite light / buoyant (Don't stir too much).

Fill muffin cups ... loaf pan ... Bake at 350F for approx. 20 min. (muffins) and approx. 40 min. (loaf)

These amounts will yield about 16 small muffins or 2-3 small loaves.

The muffins don't have huge caps on them ... they're more like little cupcakes. YUM!

Another four-hanky song

2010-11-25T01:27:00.000-05:00

I can't help myself ... but this too shall pass. I must be very kind to myself and remember that it's only been 11 days since my unhusband left. Music helps to sustain me ... and right now it's jazz. Oh God, it is jazz ... my first musical love ...

He and I used to delve into 70s prog- / arena / symphonic / classic rock ... and I find myself moving away from it. For the moment, I can't bear to hear it ... Hurts too much. My sternum -- my breastbone -- has ... how can I put this ... crunkled a half-dozen times or so during these 11 days ... It's like a crack shearing open in the mantle of the Earth ... under the crust, stiffening soil and freezing trees in their tracks. Tremoring beneath the sea, curtailing for now a thrust from the deeps that I fear will shatter the bone ...

This is a depth of heartbreak I've not experienced before. It's also surreal ... A big part of me is still in a suspended state of shock. I felt this way after my mother died; on the thirteenth day postmortem, I was at work (I was an administrative assistant at the time), coming to an awareness that I was sitting in my chair in front of my computer, holding a file folder in my hand. I think it was blue. I looked down at this blue thing, turning it over, opening and closing it, not knowing what it was or what I was to do with it. A file folder. Nothing seemed real -- intact, whole, stable. Everything seemed to be something else ... or nothing at all: nonsense; meaningless.

I'm going through most of the motions right now. Making sure my home is at least nominally clean. The cats are always fed and tended. The dishes get washed; the floor gets swept. I baked a batch of muffins tonight and I've eaten four. I had to. They're my favourite: oatmeal orange chocolate-chip. Urgent comfort food.

I'm cocooning; in retreat. My home is my center right now. My two kittones keep me grounded ... and I keep an eye on them. The stress of their loss is showing in aggression, barfing, constipation, wandering and yowling. They've lost their daddy. My unhusband and I brought them home (both rescued and fostered) when they were kittens ... They've been ours all along and are now into their fourth year. Some of their primary comforts, and their other primary human bond, are gone; they can't understand it ... They only know the absence.

... About that word crunkled, I didn't look it up; perhaps I invented it. It sounds right and it feels right. Take that, Sarah Palin and the Oxford American Dictionary, which chose her permutation of repudiate -- "refudiate" -- as its word of the year -- Hey! My spell-checker has underlined refudiate in red -- and we all know what that means!

The Oxford English Dictionary wouldn't dream of including such a word in its lexicon. All hail the OED!

... which reminds me: I was once in love with someone whose glove box contained a pocket-sized OED ... If that wasn't a sign, what was, eh ...

Oh no -- getting morose!

So there, Sarah Palin -- I can make up words too, eh! And I know my North Korea from my South!

Speaking of Sarah Palin ... Does anyone know what kind of music she listens to? -- Nothing that I've read about her gives even a hint.

Any guesses?

One of those songs: Diana Krall's Paris cover of "A Case of You"

2010-11-21T19:06:00.000-05:00

... with a tiny tweaking of the lyrics by me:

Oh you're in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and you taste so sweet
I did drink a case of you
And I'm still here on my feet
I'm still here ... on my feet

... YES!

Waking to a slivered day

2010-11-14T14:22:00.004-05:00

I found a poem, Shane Neilson's "Marriage Counselling", while nosing through The American Scholar's site a few weeks ago; how could I resist the title, given my current situation ... I read the poem, then read it again, and again ... and slowly ... line by line ... and I spoke it aloud, playing with emphasis, tone and phrasing ... with emotion and voice ... I read the poem from several imagined perspectives ... This poem, even as I struggle to make sense of it, meshes perfectly with the state of my psyche right now ... If there's a Poetry Oracle, it's dropped a perfect puzzle into my lap ...

Marriage Counselling

I woke. I spoke the words to myself:
love is not enough. The hard lesson
came with the day: the bitter self-
hood the separating space, the lessen-
ing distance between love and hate.

I wake and wake and took and took
and now, O my eternal somewhat,
I turn my back and walk away. Look:
I'm walking towards. And when I hold
in my hand the flesh that used to shock,
that boundary-crossed, that beheld
the mistake we are here, that joke
of luck that is slivered day: O my partial, my
darling fraction, the lesson paves the way
from wedlock to goodbye sigh: O my once,
I woke to why.

~ Shane Neilson

Waking this morning -- and then again this afternoon during a brief jolt of thought: "I'm alone; it's Sunday; why bother" -- I felt like my existence had been poured through with cement during the night -- every small loci of purpose and meaning, routine and ritual suffocated.

He moved out yesterday afternoon, leaving me with an amputated life. I don't know what to do with this wrenched-from-relation person I have become, this carcass of lover, mate and wife ...

Not long ago, I found a quotation:

Hell hath no fury like a noncombatant.

Those words stuck to my mind during Remembrance / Veteran's Day ... I thought of all those who have no choice but to endure and survive wars that others have started ... War and peace begin and end with I and Thou, I say to myself; I believe this with all my being ... and for the noncombatant, I also believe, the best revenge is no revenge ...

Abandonment is hell for the ones left behind ... and I have been abandoned while ill and working to restore my health. I feel like I've been preyed upon ... punished for being (temporarily) weak and useless in the world of gainful employment ... punished for not being "fixable", for all that I did not choose: for the injuries inflicted on me and for their effects ... for having failed some proof of worthiness that was declared but never revealed to me ... for becoming, in my unhusband's eyes, an object worthy of contempt rather than a person worthy of care. That he treats me as such is proof to me of his own anguish. It's said that depression is contagious ... Here, in this ruined home, depression -- unrelenting existential anguish -- has corroded a bond that we both believed was unassailable. Only death would be the axe to this love; I was sure, for the first time in my life, of another person, and I believed he was sure of me. We couldn't have predicted the continual stresses and injuries that eroded first my health, then his. Simply put: too much for too long -- on both of us. Our own original families are both broken beyond repair; our circle of relatives is very small, and our friends, many of whom have unrelenting stress in their own lives, are far-flung and busy in the way that we all have to be in order to survive. We live in a world where relational values are subsumed to the terrible pressures of outside obsessions and powers; we are pounded by demands of need and want ...

I will go on; I must. I have worked for decades to restore my will to live, even as late last night I stood in my kitchen with a whole bottle's worth of sleeping pills warming in my palm, wondering if my best option was to simply toss the blue tabs to the back of my throat and chase them down with a big glass of water. Pills down in an instant, me dead in an hour: problem solved. I stood in the dimming enclave of possibility and pondered: Do I have the volition and strength to live into what I must bear now?

This afternoon, I don't know. But I'm here; I'm writing these words, and I have two cats who soon will be mewling and bunting my legs for their dinner. Sometime during the night, after I had laid myself down in the absence, little Aja jumped on top of my chest and melted into me ... He purred, kneaded, softly touched my nose with his. For the first time ever, he remained on my chest after kneading ... He lay on me and purred ...

... and I heard these words inside me:

Be bigger than the wound; you be the force that heals it.

You be the why to live.

I found the exquisite top image at this blog ... I don't know who created this piece, but thank you ...

Shock waves: he's gone

2010-11-13T18:26:00.000-05:00

Pulling a blanket

over the once

love-stained bed

I shroud

my dead

marriage

More Shakespearean salad from Sarah Palin ... and me!

2010-11-10T16:02:00.000-05:00

I've just seen a hilarious Dr. Seussian creation by s. douglas over at Black Magpie Theory. After I stopped laughing, I concocted a ditty of my own ...

Oh Sarah, Miss Sarah,
you are such a tease.
You come and you go
just as you please.

Oh Sarah, you leave us

stumped at the knees

You make rich old white men

stagger and wheeze!

Keep winking and flirting --

You'll make 'em unfreeze!

And off to the woods with ya --

into the trees!

Oh the critters you'll slaughter!

and the triggers you'll squeeze!

Will ya be taking that burger

with a wee bit o' cheese?

So Sarah, Miss Sarah,

It's time to appease

the voters who refudiate

your Shakespeareaneze!

So off to the woods with ya,

into the trees!

We've had it -- You betcha!

Begone! Geez Louise!

Noooo!

~ amazing photographic mashup by s. douglas ~

The Boss saves my ass and my mind again

2010-11-04T16:29:00.000-04:00

Today's song that's playing on endless loop in my head is Bruce Springsteen's "Human Touch" ... Today that song is, I tell you, a lifesaver.

A few months ago I created a stream of Springsteen's more introspective songs ... That stream goes with me everywhere; the man's music is medicine -- tonic and steadying ... pure wise rock and roll. What better combination could there be: music that makes you move and think. Music that makes your monkey-mind stop in its rutted old tracks and listen.

And Bruce, of course, is luminous. He's one of the most vital men on the planet. Yes, OK, I admit it: Crush!

WARNING: The following live version of "Human Touch" will have you grabbing for your lover, or pining for one. Not just any old, you know ... hook-up. I mean the fundamental rhythm of two people who are one in a conscious, co-creative and contagious way ... Oh God, I'm blathering -- you'll know why by the end of the vid ...

~ Thank you to mechanicalromance at YouTube! ~

I can't quite get my head around this ...

2010-11-01T15:17:00.000-04:00

... but since it comes from the mind of Ralph Waldo Emerson, it will make sense somehow ... Readers, what do you think?

Dear to us are those who love us... but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~

I found this quotation at a gorgeous site called Beautiful Illustrated Quotations ... The header photo alone is worth the visit ... and the site is loaded with word-gems ...

Annunciation

2010-10-31T10:39:00.001-04:00

We break like morning

sirens of light

convecting

for storms

for the bolt

release

from these rags

we wear into

for buds

to break

concrete

at noon

to roil

like ocean

over

hatchling

eggs

breaking

over

breaking over

this

bread --

unleavened --

breaking

bread --

here

is my body; take

it and

break like a bell

at dawn

These exquisite photos are from Dancing Light

Now comes the naughting of our mother tongue

2010-10-23T14:35:00.000-04:00

Evasive, you

called me

when I needed

to tend

to details

such as those after

a death. I needed

food. You needed

to call me

a name. Not mine.

Evasive, you turn

to your screen, away

from the carnage

of our mother

tongue: love

Reading, as always, keeps me sane and bowled over by beauty

2010-10-19T14:07:00.000-04:00

I'm visiting a dear friend this week, someone I've known a long time. She's offered me a retreat space in her home, which includes a deep bathtub ... which means I am reading, reading, reading (when I'm not sleeping, sleeping, sleeping). I'm reading one book at a time. This is a challenging discipline, given that the home I visit has got bookies in every room ... and Pure Pisces (as I'll call my friend) shares many literary tastes with me. Well. I brought Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall to lose myself in while bathing ... I haven't actually had a bath yet, because I can't tear myself off Pure Pisces' couch to turn on the faucet.

The Mistake is coming to stay for a while.

... How's that for a first line that grabs your psyche by the throat?

The Mistake is Rebecca Harris' younger brother, baby of the family, the one they call "Mizzy" ... pet name for the late-conceived child who, "satyrlike, so unembarrassed", declares his here-and-now presence to Rebecca's husband, Peter, on page 40.

Mizzy, at 23, is a catalytic agent, a lit fuse to every psyche and secret around him.

... I was irretrievably hooked by that first line ... and then I read this on page 8:

What marriage doesn't involve uncountable accretions, a language of gestures, a sense of recognition sharp as a toothache? Unhappy, sure. What couple isn't unhappy, at least part of the time? But how can the divorce rate be, as they say, skyrocketing? How miserable would you have to get to be able to bear the actual separation, to go off and live your life so utterly unrecognized?

... Again, the ice pick in the chest. Someone who worries over you, tends to you, and for whom you do the same ... Don't couples live longer than single people, because they're better cared for? Didn't somebody do a study?

(p. 129)

What I'm telling myself ... Sometimes a "broken record" is good!

2010-10-11T13:27:00.000-04:00

I've started to read Susan Piver's new book, The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: An Uncommon Guide to Healing, Insight, and Love. Actually, I've been clinging to this book. Susan, a graduate of a Buddhist seminary, writes from the perspective of someone who's been through the crash 'n' burn of a broken primary bond ... and with the wisdom and smarts of someone who's done a lot of inner work.

The book is interesting ... a mix of down-in-the-dirt dharma ("Taming the mind of heartbreak is just like taming a wild animal. First you have to just hang around it in order to demonstrate your lack of fear and aggression. Only then will this wild creature begin to trust you, and you can approach it to initiate a relationship"), splendid smarts and vivid descriptions of what we experience in heartbreak ("... I took the trash down to the sidewalk. I stood on the curb with the garbage cans and found myself wondering if I could pretend to be trash so the garbage man would throw me away, too"), and occasional lapses into what I call pop-psych pap ("When you feel icky..." and other throwaway phrases like "low self-esteem" that sit side-by-side with flaming phrases like this one: "...unlike a destroyed home that once was there and now is not, the person you lost still walks -- intact, visible, perhaps only a desk or an email away"). All told, the book's a worthy one, and I'm grateful to have found it at my local library ...

Susan, early on in the book, invites readers to list what we think are the most important things to tell ourselves when we're just staggering up from the rubble and finding that we're still alive and intact. Here's my list:

I AM SO MUCH STRONGER THAN I THOUGHT.

I AM NOT ALONE.

I HAVE MY HOME AND MY BABIES (my two kittones!).

I WILL KNOW WHO MY TRUE FRIENDS ARE THROUGH THIS. (Already there have been several surprises ... Some people have roared into the foreground and are staunch stand-right-beside-me companions who are making sure that I eat, driving me to medical appointments, and lending me their music, power wands, and homes for sanctuary ... Others whom I thought would come forward with open hearts have disappeared ... So it goes ...)

http://zanauardian.deviantart.com/art/I-will-survive-84246354

I WILL BE WELL AGAIN!

I WILL WRITE BLISTERING, BEAUTIFUL WORDS FROM THIS.

I AM NOT A LOSER!

THIS IS NOT MY FAULT!

I AM SAFE.

I WILL GET THROUGH THE WINTER.

I WILL NOT LET THIS WRECK AND RUIN ME.

I WILL SURGE OUT OF THIS DEVASTATION WITH MY MIND, HEART, AND HEALTH INTACT!

I WILL SURVIVE!

Post-rupture, Day 31 -- Thanksgiving Day in Canada

2010-10-10T17:47:00.000-04:00

... or maybe it's tomorrow -- the big statutory holiday, the last one before Christmas, a day of feasting and family ... of gratitude for what we've been given and what we receive; for love, for our kin ... Gobble-gobble!

This image, right now, is breaking my heart:

http://www.alpinemeadowyarns.com/Alpine_Meadow_Fibers.html

What do you see? Soften your eye, let yourself gaze ...

Immediately, my eye sees a couple nestled in bed ... and each other. Very specifically, a man and a woman, nestled in bed ... a wife and a husband, embracing and safe ... softened and gentled and tamed, at rest ...

Me and my husband, whose marriage went KABOOM 31 days ago.

I am losing so much ... and so is he, and so are many other people who have known us as a couple, as well as individuals, for nearly a decade.

No more nestling.

I often have to lay my right palm over my sternum and across my ribs, over my heart, and hold ...

I'm responding to my body's urge for containment, safety, belonging -- the chaos, the shrapnel of divorce is second only to the death of a spouse in the damage that it does to an adult.

My primary source of touch -- of nestling -- has left my body bereft. I no longer belong to my mate.

"Canada Bereft"
itmpa, via Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/itmpa/3660805024/lightbox/

I ponder the question, 'What is Hell?' I maintain it is the suffering of being unable to love.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Because loving is a reciprocal physiologic influence, it entails a deeper and more literal connection than most realize. Limbic regulation affords lovers the ability to modulate each other's emotions, neurophysiology, hormonal status, immune function, sleep rhythms, and stability. If one leaves on a trip, the other may suffer insomnia, a delayed menstrual cycle, a cold that would have been fought off in the fortified state of togetherness.

~ Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon,

A General Theory of Love

And if one leaves, period --

Divorce is not inevitable, but the consequences of intentionally broken relation are. I know that my husband is in agony, because he's my mate. He knows the same about me, whether he affirms or denies the knowledge.

And if we remain alive through the breaking, we go on.

I go on today, on this day specifically -- Thanksgiving Day (Canada) 2010 -- by quaffing lots of cocoa-laced, honeyed chai ... by writing these words ... by layering on the sweaters and socks as the day wanes to eve ... by responding to my cats' elegant, belligerent cries that It's time to eat Now and by making myself another cup of chai. I'm going to bathe later, and I've been running my hands under the hot-water tap whenever I'm in the kitchen or bathroom so my body stays warm. (The other day, while I was with my doctor, I asked him why my hands, feet and nose are so often icy cold; he said, "When you're under such massive stress, your body diverts energy and heat to the organs that keep you alive ...")

Today's one of those Big Days -- a national holiday, a day lush and potentially explosive with familial gatherings and memories. A day of traditions, generations, and feasting; a circling day -- everyone 'round the table, gorging on turkey, pie, and whatever expressions of love are doled out and taken in by a family's members along with the food.

My husband -- he still is that: the centre of my relational life, even as I have begun (paradoxically, for my survival) to sever my own ties with him -- has been gone for over four hours ... I don't know where he is, whom he's with, or when he'll be back ...

http://www.growingthehomegarden.com/2009/11/reflecting-on-end-of-line.html

-- I've just received a scent of somebody's dinner -- turkey, of course -- through the open window above my desk ... Mmm ... I need my bath now ... I need to hold something close, even water; I need to be contained ...

Tweaking a quotation by Elie Wiesel

2010-10-03T15:37:00.000-04:00

We are each other's hope.

He would know; he, as a human of Jewish heritage, survived the Nazis.

I wonder who his "hopes" have been ...

Mine have been -- and remain so, as still-alive hopes or as ancestors: all the cats I have been loved by ... several wonder-dogs who gentled my terror of canines ... my Baka, Poppa, Nana, and Poppy ... certain friends -- anam caras -- great souls who were and are living proof of survival, sanity, sweetness and the sillies (the word silly shares common roots with the word blessed). They're often disguised as cleaning ladies, dancers, mothers, warriors, physicians, clowns and freaks ... People of fierce character and unrelenting love at all times, no matter what, even so ... These are the ones who have touched me. I bow to them.

People who, on occasion, have smacked me upside my soul when my idiocy and ignorance needed adjusting. People whose souls I've smacked too.

People with whom I've always returned to embrace ... to laughter, forgiveness, presence and witness. We are one another's sentinels in all the ways that we experience night ... and we are one another's quieting, cooling tree-shade when light scorches and scars ...

Imagine Elie Wiesel subjected to the vile light of torture ... Imagine yourself there ... Who is within you, holding your mind and your soul intact? Someone is there, and they keep your presence alive.

Yes, these loves are our hopes. Our truest hopes. Those very few Lovers, the ones who cherish. The ones who insist on your presence, your life, your capabilities and gifts; they pull the love out of you like salt-water (blood, sweat and tears) taffy ... your fellow broken-into, broken down, broken-open souls who still churn out mercy: gentle-ferocious, butter-yellow mercy. The ones who teach you to love. The French, in their gorgeous tones, have a word for this way of being: Tendresse -- "a thousand tendernesses ..."

... and today, I cannot resist adding to Elie's words.

We are each other's hope ... and each other's despair.

My husband is both to me now.

... and Vida circles my lap while I type, bunting and kneading for a perfect nestle-spot.

Hope is a purr ... sonic, sensory proof of mammalian love.

Hold fast, dear ones ...

2010-10-02T13:07:00.000-04:00

The moment we cease to hold each other,

the moment we break faith with one another,

the sea engulfs us and the lights go out.

~ James Baldwin

"Eat, Pray, Love" -- my version for the Newly Divorced

2010-09-30T16:24:00.001-04:00

Shock, Rage, Retaliate.

Explode, Give Up, Give In.

http://www.insicknessinhealth.blogspot.com/2009/12/caregivers-and-suicide.html

Starve, Despair, FUCKITALL.

Force Soup Down Throat, Grit Teeth, Do What Must Be Done.

Self-Medicate, Rage, Spew.

Decide To Die, Give It A Try, Fail And Rail Why?!

Barf, Curse, Mourn.

Sleep, Don't Sleep, Stay Sane.

Eat Whatever You Can Afford, Work Like Dog, Survive As Working Poor.

Stuff Face With Offered Chocolate, Hear Stories Of Survival And Sanity From Fellow Veterans Of Marital War, Feel Nascent, Strange Fondness For Maybe Your Baby Toe.

Eat From A Can, Keep Roof Over Your Head, Sleep Over With Friends Who Loan You Teddy Bears, Dogs, And Cats.

Eat Real Food That You Made Yourself From Recipes For One, Peek Out At World With Grudging Gratitude, Bow To The Fact That You're Still Alive.

Eat Thanksgiving Dinner With The Ones Who Love You No Matter What, Wish On A Star With All Your Maimed, Miraculous Might, Love And Rebuild Your Existence From The Broken Ground On Up.

Make Peace, Keep Peace, Give Peace To Self And Other Veterans.

(We're all Veterans of some kind of relational rupture ... We're all in this together.)

"Patches of love..."

2010-09-25T10:03:00.000-04:00

Wordsworth on Huron

Feet whisper splinters:
milk from the wood
I fathom the secrets
of rock

I see, here and there,
patches of love
strewn on the bones of the beach

Grasping, the sea
is reminded of me
She furls
Atlantean hands

My mystic companion
kneels by the tide
to pepper the sea
with her skin

I follow behind her,
blending, bemused
She stirs through the pebbles
she knows

I feel, here and there,
patches of love
strewn on the beach of my bones

... My beloved friends and kin are my patches of love ... so are this morning's scudding, natty clouds; they're scrubbing away yesterday's fever-boiling heat. Birds, beginning to flock, are flinging and being flung ... and so am I. A new day has dawned.

Thank you for being there, my patches of love ...

A poem that my husband composed nearly a year ago ...

2010-09-24T02:16:00.000-04:00

He called it "Timbre" ... and he wrote it for me. I found it tonight while reading through his blog, sifting for clues to his heart ... There is so much here that he wrote of that I sense and experience now ...

I feel the connection ... shifting,
as if the bonds/fibres that hold me
here were somehow fraying.

I really can't explain it totally,
it used to be so easy to
write it, but of late ... what?

It's as if the fabric of my
existence is being torn from me ...
like a blanket used to swaddle is
torn off leaving you cold ... remote.

It started when you left,
I have never felt so all alone ...
so bereft of connection
this was the beginning.

Then, I started to think ...
always my worst time; time
to think and feeling alone.

And then the cloud descends,
do you still know I love you,
can you feel the bond, the always
soul-tether that has always
joined us.

Will you still love, feel, know me
as always, or will that change ...
be replaced by -- what?

The timbre of us, the we of us ...
will we survive, I have enough doubts
of me ... to start doubting we
is unfathomable, and yet ... there.

You seem so small now, frail
now, I fear breaking you
somehow, and it drives me
deeper and away.

I as always want to be the strength
I have always been ... but now
don't feel, help me, regain me please,
for I feel I have lost my way ...
and your light is what I need,
so please shine.

I have been feeling my light ascend gradually from my own veiled soul this summer ... It's taken over two years for enough inner light to coalesce and gain radiance -- enough for another to perceive ... My beloved's fear has driven him away during this time, and I mourn, for I sense that he did not reach out for me to regain him. He may have lost himself, huge heart that he is, in my pain, and then in his own ...

I still feel the bond, "the always soul-tether that has always joined us" ... and that is the agony that shreds me now.

Perhaps my beloved does not know that the flip-side of doubt is faith ...

I am shining again, my sweet man ... it may be that you are not able to see and receive my light because your own is so shrouded ...

You haven't lost me ... I haven't lost the we ... and if you have, I pray that you find it again ... It's right in front of you ... It's me.

A gentle reminder

2010-09-24T01:31:00.000-04:00

A remarriage vow I long to give

2010-09-22T20:36:00.000-04:00

I want the man

I know you are

and I'll give you

the woman

I know

I am coming to be.

Seen in the Internet's mirror

2010-09-22T17:25:00.000-04:00

Friends, you know how it is. You turn on your machine, sit yourself down, and start to cruise. You see a link on a page that fascinates ... You click and begin to read ... and the state of your soul is laid bare:

... I can only assume that most utopian visions (like that which I held about my marriage) fail from apathy due to a lack of the consistent self-discipline necessary to embody the vision and "become the change we want to see in the world." Any full-blown spiritual event ... can naturally expose the futility and the illusion of ego. In a naive attempt to preserve spiritual revelation, many ego-trashing dogmas have been created. Taken to heart, any anti-ego hippie belief can easily lead to a "why bother?" apathy masked by a "just mellow out and go with the flow" fatalism. As it turns out, a strong, flexible ego is necessary to manifest our innermost dreams in the external world at large. Any attempt to hold onto a dream, without the self-work to embody it, keeps that dream alive in the mind alone.

~ Anterro Alli, in his new book, The Eight-Circuit Brain.

(Italics mine)

Now that the wreckage of my primary relation has also been laid bare, it is time to sift through the smoulders for clues. It's been thirteen days now since the explosion of illusion and awareness ...

Fatalism. I won't give in to it.

Fatalism is one of the awful hallmarks of chronic depression ... and is evident in the aftermath of shock, when all that's familiar and life-sustaining has been ripped away.

I won't give in.

(P.S. I still can't post links or upload images to this blog ... Anyone who uses Blogger: have you figured out the changes to posting that they've made? Can you help me out in any way?)

No more chocolate ganache cake, at least for now

2010-09-21T12:00:00.000-04:00

As much as I love my cocoa-fresh-from-the-oven chocolate ganache cakes, I can't stomach them right now. I can stomach tea, chicken noodle soup, water, and buttery toast.

My kittones are snuggling close to me at every opportunity ... I'm reading Jonathan Franzen's Freedom whenever I can focus on a page ... bathing a lot ... sleeping like a stone. I've contracted an awful chest cold ... and must keep myself as potent as possible.

The sky is wild and warm today -- storms building up. My own storm has passed ... I'm too exhausted to cast even a breeze ... but this too shall pass.

Virgil wrote:

Death twitches my ear. "Live," he says; "I am coming."

I write:

Life twitches my heart. "Live," she says; "I am here."

Robert Johnson (a Jungian sage):

All sickness is homesickness.

Oh, God ... I am homesick.

Various and sundry thoughts on my first night alone-alone

2010-09-18T20:42:00.002-04:00

I am comforting myself with molten chocolate ganache cake, my beloved kittones, candles, chai and the ballads of George Michael.

Today is day R+9. T-plus nine days since the rupture of my marriage.

I've got a song lyric in mind ... The title? "Alone Again, Unnaturally."

I haven't passed a night alone-alone since February 2002.

Having a room of one's own can be terrifying. That's liberation for you ... whether you're ready for it or not.

This is the life!

... in a way ... in a way. Moderation in all things, including fear and angry bliss.

How does one conduct a mindful divorce?

Bloggins, bless you. I sense your embraces of empathy.

Oh chocolate: you are indeed sweet opium for a ravaged heart.

I can't get George Michaels' song "Father Figure" out of my mind. Ditto "One More Try" and "Praying For Time" (These are the days of the empty hand / Oh you hold on to what you can). I also can't post a video, photo or anything else 'cause the Blogger powers-that-be have made changes to posting know-how that I can't figure out. So for a while, my blog will look Plain-Janeish. Nothing but words.

Here is a poem that I wrote in early 1995 after a man who was friend and colleague died suddenly ... It feels apropos again today:

After you died

I found myself

staring

at today's

list

Stuff to buy:

candles

milk

vinegar

kleenex

I added

your name,

then crumpled

the list

and my toes

against an unrelenting

floor

Friends, please send me thoughts of safety and a fearless, restful sleep tonight ...

"Love yourself into change"

2010-09-17T13:40:00.004-04:00

Those of you who know Maithri (his blog, The Soaring Impulse, is in the sidebar ... Blogger's made some changes to posting processes and I cannot yet figure them out, dammit!) also know that his sign-off blessing is often "Love the world into change." I've adapted it for myself, for the wee "world" of me. (Maithri, bless you.)

Eight days ago, my marriage imploded. It is over. What occurred, in short, was a cumulation of stress, trauma, illness, depletion and exhaustion ... then a rupture of habit; a tearing away of illusion; a frigid snap of seeing.

I want to repair and restore my marriage ... My husband does not.

I feel shattered. We've both been whittled down to the bone and I will love and cherish him until the end of my days.

I must love myself into change ... and I will ... What's a more ferocious word for "pray"? ... I will [ ____!!!____ ] that he too will love himself into change. I have a feeling that he will.

I'm freezing cold and must take a bath. My metabolism is that of a stone with a hummingbird heart ... I'm so scared it might burst. (Anyone who's seen Sir Anthony Hopkins in the film Meet Joe Black will understand the import of the word Yes ... ) Being disavowed by the truest love of your life is a grave injury. Deciding to disavow the truest love of your life (Was I?) is no less a shock ...

I wish him well ... I wish him well ... I wish him well ...

Please, friends, do the same for us both ...

Wendell Berry and George Michael -- Who'd have thunk it?

2010-08-30T20:49:00.020-04:00

This is what I love about the internet: one thought occurs and leads to links, links, and more links! Tonight I visited Alive On All Channels and voila: Wendell Berry ...

Each one who speaks speaks
as a convocation. We live as councils
of ghosts. It is not “human genius”
that makes us human, but an old love,
an old intelligence of the heart
we gather to us from the world,
from the creatures, from the angels
of inspiration, from the dead —
an intelligence merely nonexistent
to those who do not have it, but
to those who have it more dear than life.

... councils of ghosts ... All day long, there's been an itch in my brain: Last night, before I fell asleep, I had a great thought and told myself to get up and write it out. Guess what I did? I nodded off. So today, all day, I've been scratching that itch and not receiving a clue. I'd just about given up when along came Wendell Berry's poem ("Some Further Words"), and this passage I've quoted.

We live as councils of ghosts ...

Click! -- Ghosts! ... haunted! We are haunted!

... That's about all I remember; the content of the thought is gone. But there's something in that old love, that old intelligence of the heart ... the memory of love, which is what finally remains with us no matter what ... more dear than life.

Who knows how I got from Wendell Berry to George Michael, but I suddenly had to hear "Freedom 90". I can never resist this song ... and the most drop-dead gorgeous woman ever (IMHO, hee hee), Linda Evangelista, is one of the video's stars. If I could look like Linda for a day ... move like she does and know that every plane of my face is magnificent from every angle and in every light ... Well, there'd be an item off my Bucket List.

(Linda Evangelista, 2009)

(Linda Evangelista, 1989)

I'm long past an age where I'd have even a smidgen of a chance to look anything like La Linda. I am of an age that I can appreciate beauty and gorgeousness in all their forms, including men and women whose visages knock my knees, poems that remind my soul of her dreams, and music that makes me burst into animal joy.

Whatever heals us is what Reals us ...

(This yummy wall decal is available here ...)

Headline Retort: Uranium Smuggling

2010-08-24T18:08:00.009-04:00

I've just encountered this headline that alleges a huge uranium-smuggling bust. "Huge" as in .... four pounds. Christ above, this scares me.

What weighs four pounds?

A nine-week-old Clouded Leopard cub.

A tent.

A Morkie (Yorkie + Maltese) named Tommy.

A Hula Hoop.

Cheese. Never mind what kind. Just ... cheese. Madame Fromage is making me drool!

... But I digress ... and I really don't want to speculate on what four pounds of enriched, yellow cake uranium could be made to do. What I will speculate on is a "first thought" I had immediately upon seeing the headline. I'd been thinking on an old friend who had a degenerative neuromuscular disease, and a certain spinach dish she ate when she was in terrible pain and her muscles were in a state of uncontrolled spasticity. I'd also been musing on the idiocy of certain attitudes, beliefs and laws in relation to pain relief ... and then the thought arose:

Which is more harmful, really ... Four pounds of yellow cake uranium or four pounds of cannabis?

Photo found here ...

ONTARIO PEACHES!!

2010-08-05T01:11:00.009-04:00

There's no taste like home, I say, and in August, home tastes like peaches! I live near farmland where the most luscious peaches on the planet are grown. Yes, I'm biased; Ontario peaches are a lifelong love ... and if you know the sweetness of an Ontario peach, you're drooling by now, eh?

August ... Peaches. Summer's winding down, or so the calendars say. Here comes the harvest ... and the day each year when I slurp my first peach is a holy day; one tender bite and all that I love about deep summer comes flooding back ...

... The lassitude of days on a cottage dock, angling around with the sun, dropping off the dock into the blue when we got too hot. Running around in a bathing suit all day; barefoot, always barefoot, and never ever as dirty as we got in the city. At the end of a day, our skin was scented with whatever elements had had their way with us; we smelled like rain ... like pine ... like North winds, like sun. Like stone; ancient stone ... stone that fed back the heat of the day. There was nothing like lying facedown on a rock bed, taking one huge, spacious breath and surrendering. Giving your belly to stone; moulding to it. Being a kid and being that free ... that juicy and loose ... that serene.

It all floods back this eve, as I sit with my sweet man and one of our chosen daughters, Jolie, on our balcony. We each cup a peach in our hands; we sit alert, leaning into the lure of the fruit -- oh! I feel a Scriptural allegory starting to happen ... Here we sit over our succulent spoils, and oh yes we want to eat of them! Dear peach: fruit of the tree of knowledge, I want to know you now! I've waited a year for your taste on my tongue! I'm 51 years old and *wink wink*, I've tasted you on one or two fellow tongues with whom I've shared both fruit and kisses at dusk ... I've been 18 years old and declaring, with the rest of my family, that my sister makes a peach pie with an ear to the angels. We start banging our dessert forks on the kitchen table for Lucy's pie, which is tormenting us from inside the oven, releasing puffs of nirvana as juice bubbles up through the latticed crust ...

I am drooling now, which means I need another peach. I arrived home with a dozen peaches; now there are four. Of course, we had to send Jolie home with a couple, and we all ate who knows how many ... doesn't matter ... You know, there is for everyone, one fruit. One very specific fruit, from a revered land, at a certain time of year. True, luscious love.

... So: Catalon, Jolie, and me, hunkering over our peaches. The dive in was so sweet ... Juice splorted out the sides of our mouths and slibbered down our chins ... and we giggled. We chomped and nummed and slobbered; we grinned as if drunk. Indeed we were ... on sweetest light, taken by mouth.

Oh, peaches. Remembering my Nana, who canned gazillions of peaches in wax-topped Mason jars every August. Nana wore sensible, elegant pumps while canning, her matching dress topped with a chef's apron. She didn't, as far as I know, pass her peach recipe to anyone before she died one April not long ago ... and when that August rolled around, my father sat bereft in his captain's chair at the head of the dining room table, waiting for his first bowl of his mother's sweet, syrupy peaches ...

I don't know much about peaches except that I adore them, and (I learned this today) they're from the rose family. Is it any surprise? ... and come to think of it, some roses do smell fruity, and the fruit is peachy!

I'm giddy; lush of peaches, wanting more.

Here's something for you, dear drooling reader whose salivary glands are about to fire all engines: a recipe! How does Oatmeal peach bread sound? Nummm ... I nosed around online and thought, "I'll post the first recipe I find that gets me drooling." Here it is, courtesy Kevin, who lives in Toronto and cooks in a closet-size kitchen!

An ethos of relation and fidelity

2010-07-31T14:23:00.001-04:00

I once conversed with a wise and formidable friend, Nadine* (pseudonym), about what we commonly call "affairs." We were both deeply, urgently fascinated with homo sapiens' propensity to muck about on our mates. We couldn't think of anyone we knew who had not experienced one or more of the following:

~ had been in an affair, was currently in one, or was considering the possibility
~ knew someone who was having an affair
~ was a "keeper of the secret" for a close friend who was having an affair
~ was living in quiet desperation and had honed his or her eye on someone to escape with ... but hadn't (yet) taken action
~ been the one "affaired on"; the one betrayed
~ had been invited to engage in an affair and had refused
~ had witnessed, lived through or knew of affairs within their family
~ was in the fallout zone after the big KABOOM
~ had personally known or been acquainted with other families ruptured by affairs.

Nadine and I glossed over the froth of celebrity affairs -- old news; perpetual noise. We were speaking of our lives; our loves; our families and friends ... our actions of, and reactions to, marital and relational betrayal.

... We couldn't think of anyone -- including ourselves -- who hadn't been somehow snared by the siren-song of a runaway id; it was like trying to locate a person whose life had never been marked by alcoholism or cancer. As I write now, I'm reminded of the quip, "You're either infected or affected."

And then Nadine and I both thought, at the same time, of another mutual acquaintance: Katey* (pseudonym). A friend who was grey, through and through ... who was watching and waiting for a moment to make as quicksilver and gracious a disengagement as possible from a brutal-behind-closed-doors marriage.

I was less familiar with our mutual greying friend than Nadine was, so I was astonished to be informed, in confidence, that Katey was also, on occasion, very pink. Very in the pink, wink, wink.

Katey was having an affair.

... You know those moments when you learn that someone you respect has done something you were sure that they, of all people, would never do? A certain person, whose values and ethics have earned your trust? Someone whose influence guides you to integrity? ... I hadn't known Katey for long ... but I'd sensed in her a character of sterling quality and a gentle, pervasive reverence for relationship that staggered me.

My brain and guts flared into nerve-wrack. "Of all people ... Why ...?"

"It's saving her life."

Nadine's eyes were grey, I remember ... How they crackled, steely on my own ...

She told me that in some situations, what we call "an affair" is actually a life buoy; a raft of recognition, presence, touch ... a desperately concocted haven. We are relational creatures, my friend stated; we need to be in some kind of intimate, immediate relation.

Nadine leaned into the space between us, directing me to the force of her eyes and her words.

She said,

This man in her life is keeping her sane.

She is so ashamed ... so afraid.

I'm afraid she is dying, even though

she has this man who makes her

pink every once in a while,

and then she goes on. This is how

she endures. She and this man: they cling --

no, they cleave

to each other. They are rapturous

and mournful together.

They can't bear

to be together

like this, yet they somehow

live

for one another ...

like soldiers do in a trench,

aiming

for home. They are keeping

each other alive; can you

understand that?

... All this said to me through a gaze of ice -- Heed what I say! -- shot through with heat.

Then she winked, and a smile -- one that had settled with a truth and tasted many tears -- flared softly across her face.

"Besides," she said, "humans aren't inherently monogamous to begin with."

I came to understand, over the years, how "an affair" can paradoxically save a life. Sometimes "an affair" really is a deep, astounding bond -- and a sanctuary -- for its participants ... even as most affairs strike down and leave senseless those in its path and its wake.

Sometimes, we pave a road to hell by attempting to flee it ... and sometimes heaven comes in a seemingly ill-timed rush that can't be waylaid, explained or understood (until later ... much later). Sometimes we even perceive heaven as hell -- like I do on certain grubby, steamy summer days when my home suffers my exhausted neglect and I look around, thinking only: This place is a pigsty.

... And then one of my cats moseys into my visual field and Mmm, there it is: Beauty, embodied.

I don't have any agony-auntie answers for the question of sexual infidelity ... other than I really, really urge you to do your best not muck about on your mate. The fairy-tale ending does not happen, except in a Grimm sort of way. Capito? Katey's story is a rare one. Hearts were broken ... and two hearts were broken ... open.

... And even though we homo sapiens are not an intrinsically monogamous animal -- even so -- most of us choose monogamous conduct ... especially if we've ever been singed with infidelity's fallout.

We choose and we choose -- sometimes by the skin of our teeth, when everything in us says Go for it! We choose to be faithful for our own reasons, and sometimes they change. Some of us have simply forever closed the way to a sexual tryst -- sensory trust means so much more. We choose trust because we have come to know a certain source of trust as home.

My beloved, we say. My mate ... my wife ... my man ... my sweet one ... my soulmate ... my husband ... my heart ... my dove ... my lady ... my home.

And home is a place we are born into (in a marital sense, re-born into -- a whole new personhood is emerging within couplehood); home is where we live and grow to our various maturities, where we learn the ways, habits and wisdom of relation and response; where we hope to be always welcome and nestled in for the night. Home, for better and for worse, is the others we live with (both inside and outside ourselves); those we stay alive and sheltered with; those we share (and sometimes compete for) sustenance with. Home is as much a quality -- a sense of resting in place -- as much as it is an actual place ... and betrayal of trust is the battering ram that breaches the heart of a home and all of the ways that betrayer and betrayed have been home for one another.

Betrayal through sexual infidelity is one of the most blatant examples ... and blatantly, daily, we are enticed to betray.

And yet ... and yet. There is that woman whose very life force was grey. She and I became closer friends over the years, and I asked her, one day:

"What does it mean to you -- that your relationship with this man saved your life?"

"He did ... just that. He kept me alive. He kept me sane." (I was aware, by then, of some of the marital and familial agonies -- including this woman's insistent, mournful and merciful love for her mate through it all ... and after.)

I knew her well enough to know that she spoke in truth.

I never knew the man she spoke of; never met him; she wouldn't name him.

I cherish his kindness to her; his tender regard for her pain; his presence and friendship to her ... even as I know of the damage done. I stand in awareness and acceptance of both, many years after the fact ... What's been done is done.

Perhaps we are most monogamous with (faithful to) our own inherent instinct simply to be that close to someone ... and to anyone during desperate, disjointed times ...

The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.

(Norman Cousins)

... Perhaps our first fidelity,
the one kneaded into how
we live and move and have our being,
is to
being

in relation.

OMG! Where am I going to shop now?! (ASS of the day: Plastificated people)

2010-07-28T02:07:00.023-04:00

... This seems to be the prime concern of certain humans for whom stuff comes first, and if you're a good Pavlovian consumer whose mega-mall, boutique and box-store loyalties are carved in credit-card chits, then who cares? -- you'll find another gigantic dome of stuff very, very soon. Yes, if shopping is your occupation, your compulsion, your way of trying to plug your existential black hole, your raison d'être, the marrow of your days, then you will only need the keys to your SUV, some time on the road, and Hallelujah, there's another mall!

(Photo found at onegoodmove)

You see, I've come across a flurry of writings in the last few days that claim, deny, or otherwise opine that the CEO of Target (a chain of department stores in the U.S.) has donated a positively porcine amount of money to the campaign coffers of Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.).

Now, I haven't been following Rep. Bachmann's governance very closely, because there doesn't seem to be much governance to cover. What I do see a lot of is Bachmann frothing up tea-party crowds, making unfathomable, bug-eyed proclamations, and getting a frantic mojo on for the next election. Forgive me, anyone who sees a more, um, sensible (and sensical) side to the woman, because I'm reminded of Anita Bryant on heartily enhanced orange juice ...

... and the thought of a Good Company Man -- and God forbid, his wife! -- heaving sacks of cold, hard cash at a politician?

Well, I never ... !

What got me linking consumers with Target and Michelle Bachmann? -- a blog-snippet that I came upon in my rambles tonight. I won't name the person or the blog; I'm quoting the snippet to highlight an attitude that is tragically pervasive and relationally ruinous. It's no coincidence that the powers-that-be want us to perceive ourselves as consumers and shoppers rather than as citizens. If a corporation is a person -- and is legally proclaimed so, in the United States -- then what is a person; a singular human being?

If we're thinking in terms of corporations and consumers -- which might end up being the only two socioeconomic classes that humans are divided into -- an individual human might be defined as "an unbuilder ... demolisher ... waster ... user ... annihilator." A human's function, as a consumer, would be to "separate things virulently into their constituent parts [and] to break up the structure and organic existence of [name your life form]." In essence, to destroy.

Consumer. Is that what you call yourself? Is that what you want to be? Were you really born to shop?

Here's the snippet:

"... this article indicates that the CEO of Target and his wife each gave the maximum contribution allowable by FEC law to none other than Congresswoman Michele Bachmann.

Do what you will with this information. I haven’t decided yet.

Great. Now where the hell am I supposed to shop?"

(Emphasis mine.)

Gentle reader, what's wrong with this picture?

Sarah's Shakespearean Salad

2010-07-19T14:27:00.017-04:00

(a gentle parody)

O heartland mamas

and grizzles all!

Refudiate the wee-weed plan

to mosque new catastrophes

at the zero-ground --

The heartland!

But living language! --

too raw! Too real! It stabs

you in the heart!

Got to celebrate!

Coin it!

Refudiate!

Peaceful, raw New Yorkers all,

and citizens of the world:

A mosque to the living!

A mosque to the dead!

A mosque to our love

of words in the raw!

Begone, misunderestimation!

Arise and refudiate!

AnAngelia Thompson, "Celebrate Diversity"

~ with thanks to The Daily Irritant for the inspiration! ~

ASS (Astoundingly Stupid Speech) of the day: children, starving

2010-07-17T01:27:00.008-04:00

Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.

~ Mariah Carey ~

Sometimes, I swear, the effort it takes to read an *ASS* like that triggers a migraine.

Please, Mariah: tell us, your befuddled public, how we can come to understand what the f*ck you were on when you said that.

Whitey-man

2010-07-09T17:38:00.024-04:00

Thanks to PENolan's brilliant mind, I've discovered a stereotype -- one that I was born into. I admit my hereditary and cultural foundation ... and I consider Whitey-man a formidable opponent in my engagement with Waking Up.

Whitey-man is stupid, willfully so. Actually, I think of stupidity as willed ignorance ... a chosen kind. No one is born stupid; we're all born unknowing. Tabula rasa, if you will. Open space, ripe for implanting.

So it goes over our lifetime ... and if we're graced with enough intelligence and interest in what goes on between our ears and in the world, we make decent use of the events and experiences that Life concocts for us. If we don't, we end up like Whitey-man.

I come from a family -- and I love them; they're my blood -- wherein some folks took up the cause of Whitey-man, who's the most predatory beast on the planet. Whitey-man wants Empire, pure and simple. Whitey-man wants it all.

Whitey-man's skin doesn't have to be white -- and really: is any human skin truly white? This is white:

... and this is about the palest a human face can be (and by allegedly artificial means, yet!):

'Nuff said about skin tone and Whitey-manism. (Hmm. Whiteymanism. Oh no! A nascent orthodoxy!)

We all know who Whitey-man is (and he's not only male). Here's one of his archetypes:

Erwin Blumenfeld (1897 - 1969), "Hitler"

... and here's one of his latest acquisitions:

Here's something else that Whitey-man's acquired:

Bunged-up ears ... and weird dreams

2010-07-01T15:33:00.009-04:00

For the last ten days or so, I've had inflammation and complete closure of both ears. Lucky me! I seem to have caught a bad case of Swimmer's Ear while showering. I sure haven't been swimming ... although the forecast for my neck o' the woods portends heinous heat for the next five days. Gimme a pool!

So I'm deaf ... totally deaf. When I awoke today after a ratty, restless sleep, one of my first thoughts was, "Does autism have anything to do with chronic hearing problems?" There's nothing like being locked into the buzz of your own brain that makes you wonder. I've been in so much pain that I've wanted to bash my head through a wall ... and my poor husband has had to deal with a woman-turned-monster. When the shit hits the fan, he loves ...

I wonder about the dreams, too. Last night, I was one of the command crew of the USS Enterprise -- Jean-Luc's Enterprise! I sat at the console to the right of the captain's seat and got to push all the nifty buttons, which made sweet, trilling music. I had no idea what I was doing, other than letting my fingers dance. Whee!

A crew member's beloved cat had died and Jean-Luc delivered the eulogy. I think he cried. Anyone who's ever loved a cat will understand the depth of grief ... and the stories that get spun. After the feline funeral, it was let-your-hair-down time. There weren't any nasty enemies in the sector we were travelling through, so we got to play. A bunch of us were in one of the turbolifts and we told terrible jokes while being whipped around the ship's interior. Then Deanna Troi announced that she wanted to get plastered and talk about men. So Deanna got loaded and blathered, the rest of us listened -- you don't want to be in the company of a shit-faced empath; that woman ran off at the mouth for an eternity, but she provided great fodder for future jokes and teases.

Finally, I got to retire to my quarters. Apparently I bunked in an octagonal room that had nothing in it but Pullman-style beds that were pulled down from the wall. I yanked my bed down ... and it had a bubble-gum pink fuzzy blanket on it! Pink on the Enterprise?! I didn't want to sleep on that natty cot, so I headed back out into the corridor and back to the turbolift. Another crew member was hanging out on the lift so I rode some more.

I used to love riding up and down elevators when I was a kid, so I suppose this portion of the dream was dredging up my old love of lifts. Up and down, around and around I rode with this other person who was reading aloud from a book -- something turgidly poetic. I guess this man was loaded too. I was somewhat dismayed that it wasn't Jean-Luc quoting Shakespeare or Chaucer ... but when you're stuck on a lift, you take what comes.

I love my dreams. There's so much to do; so many surprises; so many journeys that don't happen in "real life." I've had a few dreams of being part of the Enterprise crew ... and once I even got to smooch with the captain! I didn't last night -- Jean-Luc retired early, feeling morose about his friend's late kitteh. I think Jean-Luc got loaded with his bereaved friend in the captain's quarters ... and I was stuck with drunk Deanna. Will Riker was nowhere to be found and she was pissed. Never, ever get involved with a Betazoid man, she told me. They'll zap your brain with their intuitive powers and suck out all your will. I guess the Will got sucked out of Deanna 'cause she was livid to find him and give him a piece of her mind.

Dream interpreters: whaddya think?

My husband ... my home.

2010-06-29T02:46:00.004-04:00

My sweet man has created another blog! It's called She: For the Love of Women ... and for the love of him, I want, want, want! to be well. His love surges my heart and I'm grateful beyond measure for his presence in my life.

I'll never forget our first date. It was early February, 2002 ... nearly a month after my mother died. Before Catalon and I sat down for our lunch date -- which lasted about four hours -- I already felt at home with him. One phone call did it ... I remember picking up the phone, saying "Hello?" and hearing "Hi ..."

GONER!

We met at a street corner in Toronto's Little Italy ... snow was cascading down ... I was about forty minutes late picking him up, thanks to the mucky roads ... He still laughs about it, 'cause I've always been a wee bit ... challenged by clock time. He swung his snowbound self into my car; we parked in an underground lot, and walked up to the street. We crossed ... and he remembers something that "did it" for him -- Apparently I circled my arm around him while we jaywalked ...

I was smitten ... and terrified. The ground under my feet was upended by Mom's dying ... and here I was, falling in love like never before.

I fell ... and remained fallen. Fallen and ascended all at once. Broken open and healed. Staggering and sturdy.

His love is the brightest, softest light in my life.

Disheartened

2010-06-28T00:12:00.007-04:00

Tonight I want a punch a hole through the sky. My hometown, Toronto, became a police-state fracas during the G20 summit. Forgive my yammering, friends, but the gathering clearly stated that banks matter more than people. I only read one headline that had to do with "halving deficits" ... that's all I could take. I also read that oil from the BP gusher is now infiltrating the Mississippi ... my head is bunged up with horrendously low air pressure ... storms all around ... and the final line from Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" is clanging through my consciousness without pause:

You must change your life.

Does anyone else out there feel stomped upon tonight?

I know this shall pass, like all shitty weather does. It just seems to keep passing through and through ... around and around ... and if the leaders of the so-called "free world" are most concerned with keeping the damned banks afloat, what does that bode for us "small people"?

I cling to what matters to me tonight; I cling to poems and to the shifting, eerie winds that herald more atmospheric jitters. Storms are raging all over the continent, and through my frayed psyche.

Do not become a shadow, a wiser voice intones.

I want to lie down in an endless forest, and sleep with the trees.

Photo: "A Night in the Forest" by Till Credner, via allthesky.com.

Have we yet another 'Axis of Evil'?

2010-06-25T03:51:00.016-04:00

Mega-corporations, insatiable militaries (official or private; sanctioned and not) that bleed communities, economies and citizens to death (because isn't a military's first function to kill an "enemy"?), and power-mongers of all stripes (like willfully ignorant, corporate-kept politicians who just want more drilling, dammit!) -- That's my idea for an contemporary take on the "Axis of Evil" that became a common moniker for wicked dictators when George W. Bush was president.

I can't help but wonder if the CEOs of mega-corporations -- and those who puppet them from the shadows -- are the hub of the current "evil axis" that is destroying the Gulf of Mexico. (Who might the "evil dictators" be now?) I consider it a chosen evil to hire a bastion of PR hacks to festoon the ruinous truth with a sheen of bullshit, and to keep the bullshit spewing at us with all the power of the volcanic fury that's bursting up from the ocean floor. I consider it a chosen evil that anyone who should know better is throwing a tantrum over intelligent calls to stop all offshore drilling; I consider it an evil act to create and leap smugly through loopholes which state if an offshore rig is constructed on an artificial island, rather than right over the water, it's not considered "offshore."

I came to these thoughts while reading Roderick T. Long's blog post, "A People's History of Pandora, Part 2." In it, he quotes Lester Hunt:

What makes the business corporation in this movie [Avatar] so evil? Well, it engages in the following practices: using military force to invade and conquer foreign lands, slaughtering wholesale numbers of the inhabitants and burning their dwellings, all in order to steal their property. … Gee, I thought, I can’t think of a single business corporation that engages in those particular practices.

I wonder if anyone in the upper echelons of BP (or any such mega-corp) ever has even a passing thought that their company's bottom-line practice ultimately does end up "slaughtering wholesale numbers of [a place's] inhabitants and burning their dwellings, all in order to steal their property."

The poisoned creatures of the Gulf of Mexico -- the amphibian and avian; the mammalian and human ... all of the sea's inhabitants -- and certainly the fouled, possibly destroyed ecosystem itself, would clamour in agreement about what this access of evil has left them: a wholesale ruination of their dwelling places: their homes ... and the matrix of water, earth, air and other creatures that sustains their lives.

~ All photos are linked directly to their sources ~

Who spun the Tonys?

2010-06-07T14:52:00.022-04:00

The Lint Screen has become one of my favourite blogs for blazing good wit and commentary. Yesterday, TLS featured a spoofy piece ("Rejected BP Scripts") that speculates on what BP chief Tony Hayward might have scribbled long into the night before he finally released his infamous words, "I want my life back." Herewith, I speculate, too ... on who might have been behind each of the scripts. Who could have been leaning over Tony's shoulders as he sweated and penned his heart-rending message for the tarred-over masses to hear? Take a wild guess, bloggins! Here are Tony's statements, as imagined by The Lint Screen's composer, Scullin ...

#1: I’m Tony Hayward, CEO of British Petroleum. Since this unfortunate oil spill, I have been getting terrible mild headaches. My appetite is lacking and my palate cannot confidently discern a ‘98 Petrus Pomerol from a ‘99 Chteau Le Pin Pomerol. Looking at my massive net worth does not bring me the intense pleasure it once did. While I can empathize with what many people and animals in the gulf coast are going through, I wish more people would empathize with what I am going through. Look, we’re all in this together. I feel your pain, so please, return the favor and feel a bit of mine. Have a little compassion, won’t you? Thank you.

#2: You know, it’s easy to play the ‘blame game’ for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Sure, BP had 760 safety violations in recent years, but let’s not assume that makes us guilty of negligence in this horrific accident. If you’re like me, you believe in God, and He ultimately is responsible for everything on earth. After all, He made it, populated it and allows both good things and bad things to happen. Why God wanted this awful oil spill, I don’t know. But my faith is strong enough that I am willing to accept His will. I hope that you will do the same. I’m Tony Hayward, asking you to pray for me and BP.

#3: At BP, we’re concerned for your health. While many support solar power, we know that the sun can also be very dangerous with its harmful UV rays. Especially to those of us with pasty white complexions. Well, one benefit of the recent oil spill is that the pristine beaches so inviting to so many sun worshippers will soon be closed for clean-up operations. This means that BP is helping save millions of Americans from the dangers of UV rays and the risks of sun cancer. Protecting people is just another reason BP should be your first choice in quality petroleum products. Thank you and please don’t forget the sunscreen. BP cares.

#4: Hello, I’m Tony Hayward, CEO of British Petroleum. At BP, we’re concerned about our environment because Mother Nature is our mother, too. She is getting on in her years and we love her as much as ever. So, we’re working hard to clean-up the unfortunate mishap that occurred recently in the Gulf of Mexico. While no one can say what exactly caused the terrible oil spill, we’re going to spend our own money and make great efforts to clean it up. Yes, it’s costing us a bloody fortune, but we will spend whatever it takes to make it right. You see, at BP we believe that oil and water don’t mix, and we’re going to help our poor Mother clean herself up. Not because it’s our fault, but because it’s the right thing to do for the poor old girl.

OK, kids -- time to match numbers with letters! Who spun which whinge?

(A) A long-ago, bought-and-paid-for surgeon general

(B) The Mother Earth death panel ("Let's put the old girl out of her misery, shall we?")

(C) Bill Clinton and Lord Pomeroy

(D) Mr. Hayward's nanny ("There, there, now; run along and play, dear.")

(E) Dr. Rev. His Eminence, The Spin

(Yes!! ... it's a trick question! ... The correct answers will be noted in a few days, hee hee ...)

~ All photos are linked directly to their sources ~

Who's the lucky boy?

2010-06-06T21:45:00.018-04:00

Stop the presses. Rush Limbaugh's getting (gotten?) hitched for a fourth time. I have only one question: Who in her right mind would marry this man?

Must have been one helluva prenup ...

What say you, bloggins? How might you caption the photo below, imagining that this is the big guy announcing his banns?

... and what's this I hear about Elton John serenading the nuptial pair? Elton John? I thought Rush was a -- you know ... screaming homophobe. Now I'm all confused.

But I couldn't help wondering ... If Elton John sang at Rush Limbaugh's (fourth) wedding, maybe the extremes of right- and left-wing personas have gone so far off the fringe that they actually intersect! Now, I don't know what Sir Elton's politics are, but we're all pretty clear on where Mr. Limbaugh comes from:

I get to wondering if a cadre of outrageous pundits (and I don't know the half of them, I'm sure, being a mild-mannered Canadian and all), from all edges of attitude, hunker down together on a regular basis in a top-secret location and swap ideas for the next round of airtime assaults ... sort of like Lorne Michaels and his SNL team.

Where big money's concerned, anything is possible. (So we have seen with the volcano of oil spewing from the depths of the Gulf of Mexico.) ("Ratings, people, ratings!") Who knows -- maybe folks like Rush Limbaugh, Bill Maher, Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart (to name a few) kick back once a week and toss around wit-grenades, deciding how they're going to punch each other out on the air ... and then roar with laughter all the way to the bank. I mean, these guys keep each other going! (Who needs politicians any more -- They've got each other!)

Remember Jon Stewart's parody of Glenn Beck's chalkboard conspiracies? Did that have you doubled over? I bet Glenn Beck was laughing harder than anyone. I hope he was, 'cause nothing is funnier than spot-on parody. Can you see Stewart and Beck together, tossing back a few beers, rigging that sketch? Who better to co-create the spot but Beck himself?

Imagine the possibilities! How about Beck and Stewart do a Point/Counterpoint sorta thing? Imagine them hamming it up like Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin, c. 1976 ...

Wouldn't that be the bomb?! And what would it do to our notions of "right wing," "left wing" and every other "wing" we've ever invented?

Maybe we're all simply wingless, batshit bonkers ... in this world where anything, anything is possible.

P.S. Methinks Lewis Black is in on it too ...

~ All images are linked directly to their sources ~

My favourite teacher, newly met

2010-06-06T17:53:00.000-04:00

I've just met her today, in fact. She wears glasses, like I do. Since I'm in the over-40 crowd, eyeglasses are no longer a Wow! thing. (Neither, come to think of it, are moles ...)

My favourite teacher sits in front of me, thinking aloud. She's a philosopher, this one; her eyes often cast upward, not to any "heavens," but to what I imagine is a fabulous compendium of wonders, musings, quizzes, complaints, epiphanies, hurdles and humble pies ... all the stuff of a mind; the long-as-you-live, arc-browing sky under the birdsonging ocean of stars --

Whoops; waxing purple-poetic there. Purple-prosing can be fun, if you know the game you're playing ... and as for poetic thinking ... A river runs through you, and Poetry is one of its names ...

Back to my teacher, whose taut,

regal neck

raises its beams and its

throat as she leans into

the back of her

being, buttoning

up the chair

with her spine

for a stretch ...

blending the bond

with her bones

that weigh her here now,

with me.

Focus, she says,

and I do.

Her gaze

is feline. mine lowers.

And I sleep.

... And I do want to sleep, though it's 4:27 p.m. and the neighbourhood birds fire up in the wake of a storm that sent me scurrying to the bathroom for cover.

Oh, yes, teacher: I'm afraid. Oh yes:

so are you. Oh no:

not the birds, while they sing. Birds do not

sleep after a storm; neither will I.

To my teacher, I say We

will sit here and be awake
with the birds.

All photographs found at photo.net...

"Mirror" -- by Alexander Kharlamov

"Dream of Sleep" -- by B READ

"St. Francis and the Cardinal" -- by Scott Cromwell

Music for this moment: Francois Couturier - Un Jour Si Blanc (Un Jour Si Blanc)

2010-06-06T00:10:00.000-04:00

Pad your ears with headphones ... and replenish.

This is the music I lose myself in when the world is burning ...

Am I Losing It, Finding It, or Letting It Be?

2010-06-05T01:52:00.004-04:00

... I ask 'cause I found myself about two hours ago sitting squonk on the floor like I always do, about to shovel out the kitties' poo box, and feeling this ... cold contact between my bum and the floor. Turns out I'd split my pants. My Winnie-the-Pooh jammy bottoms that I love to wear around the house. Air conditioning! I thought, and kept the raggy pants on 'til I shucked 'em for bed.

Along with everything else I've had to mourn this week -- two dogs, one who died last Sunday and another who's just been diagnosed with cancer; my best friend ever, who died three years ago the day before her husband's birthday and whose absence I cannot get used to; the Gulf of Mexico and all whom it harbours; the oceans; the one crude-slathered seabird whose only visible sentient feature was an eye, clouded but alive and damning to my own --

When I first saw that picture last night, I burst into helpless, fallen-down tears; like a child, I latched on to my husband and wailed.

I feel like I'm mourning Creation.

I feel overstuffed with grit and love and despair ... futility and a rage to awaken. I want to go to bed; go to sleep and stay asleep. I want to be with the people and creatures I love every minute from now until the end of my life; I want to disappear with my loves and my books and begone to the rest of the world. I want to launch every predatory human off the planet with as many rockets as it'll take -- shoot them all off to asteroids where they won't need to be bothered with anything but rocks and more rocks; endless rocks for them to mine and crush -- whole dead planets for them to shred. They've got to stop shredding this planet, the one we all live and depend on. What they are doing, and how they are doing it, must be stopped. Drill, baby, drill! is really Kill, baby, kill.

I've got children in my life, dammit, who are less than seven years old; one is a babe not yet born. What kind of shithole are we going to leave them with?

The best little toy on the web

2010-05-29T02:57:00.003-04:00

... is a DIY kaleidoscope! You get to play with colours and lines ... dotty and pulsy specks; droplets, linelets and zig-zaggy blips ... Watch the designs unfurl and flower ... give your brain a yummy treat. Brains love patterns, and moving patterns ... that's happy-hour for a brain like mine. Beauty, order, flowing movement ... cascading, chameleon colours ... It all becomes holy ... a million mandalas in one. Sweet rest with a touch of tickle. Enjoy.

... BONUS! I've just found out that you can freeze your image at any time by right-clicking on it!

Oil and water ...

2010-05-20T15:57:00.010-04:00

As for you, fellow independent thinker of the Western Bloc, if you have something sensible to say, don't wait. Shout it out loud right this minute. In twenty years, give or take a spring, your grandchildren will be lying in sandboxes all over the world, their ears to the ground, listening for signals from long ago.

~ Grace Paley, "Faith in the Afternoon" ~

Photo: from the Huffington Post.

Lisa and Leonard

2010-05-13T18:22:00.009-04:00

I got my biggest bloggy laugh today while visiting Lisa's blog and reading her prediction that, as she fasts in preparation for a medical exam, her stomach "will be growling like Leonard Cohen without the clever lyrics."

Growl on, girl! -- You're in good company. I'm reminded of a quotation of Leonard's I found a few years ago: "I am an old scholar, better looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face." I hear him growling the words in that belly-deep drone that I used to cringe at but have come to love.

I'm an eldering -- hell, not old yet -- scholar of sorts who sits on her ass a lot. I like to think that I'm better looking now than when I was young ... today, however, is not one of those days. Today my nose is running and I'm breaking out again. So maybe I have to sit on my face for a bit (is there a yogic posture for this?) so my ass will look better. Or maybe I have to call my man and tell him to bring me home a cherry pie.

Lisa, I'm not much help to you here, am I -- drawling on about how much I want cherry pie or a slice of that red devil's food cake you're pining for. Aw, hell -- we're all led around by the belly of our basest desires, and I figure that if my yen is for a piece of pie (warmed in the oven or gobbled down in glee -- probably a bit of both), rather than for a nation, gobs of money, an estate the size of Lichtenstein or the virginity of an eight-year-old child, I'm not such a horrible person after all.

... So there :-) Lisa and Leonard have reminded me to be kind to myself, and that's about as good as it gets. In all honesty, it really is that simple. Everything changes when you decide to dust yourself with a little mercy.

All things in moderation, I think, as I head into the kitchen for some pie and chai. For me, moderation regarding food right now means, Eat! Eat! But eat well. I've lost a lot of weight over the last two years, and I'm getting ... bony. Not a pleasant feeling. I've got hard little ridges sticking out of places where there used to be soft plains and plunges. I don't imagine my husband enjoys the feel of bone so close to my skin. So I have to eat, and eat more ... even as my body's "appestat" seems to be stuck on the "Off" switch. I can eat reams and reams of cherry pie (and a "ream" right now equals about three forkfuls) because (1) it's comforting (2) it's yummy, and (3) it's immediately available so I don't have to do anything but open the box, pull out the pie and engage my fork.

Moderation can mean so many things, depending on the context: absolutely none, ever; once a month; once a year; only on weekends; well, just this once. You know your own limits -- somewhere, somehow, even if you defy them -- and you know all the ways that you honour, deny, embrace and push them. Our limits define our moderations.

The one thing I will never be moderate about, though, is love.

Thanks, Lisa; thanks, Leonard. You made my day.

Life asks me a few questions ... a quiz from somewhere or other ...

2010-05-12T01:38:00.000-04:00

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Peace of mind. ("There are flowers everywhere for those who bother to look." ~ Henri Matisse.)

Which living person do you most admire?

My Cuz -- She is welcoming, resilient, ethical, generous, classy, goofy, radiant, courageous, avowed to compassion ...

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

"Where are my glasses?"

What is the trait you most deplore yourself?

My persistent habit of staying in certain self-abnegating ruts.

What do you dislike most about your appearance?

I don't want to go there. I finally like my bodily being enough that I can smile when I encounter a mirror ... and I know that deep down where it counts, I'm essentially a kind person. I'm 51 years old, for God's sake, and I'm not going to be plastifying anything, that's for sure ...

REPHRASE! --> What do you like most about your appearance? (Much better.)

I like that my eyes are kind.

Which living person do you most despise?

I don't despise anybody. It's such a terrible waste of heart to despise.

Who or what is the greatest love of your life?

My Sweet Man.

Which talent would you most like to have?

Courage. (Hmm. Note to self: contemplate how courage could be a talent.)

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

I would change that persistent habit of self-abnegation.

If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be?

I could say that I'd want to change a million things ... but it would all come down to grafting mercy onto the skin of other souls ... and I'd want my mother to be alive to see my man and I together ...

If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be?

I'd want to come back as a beloved housecat ... some human's best feline friend.

What is your most treasured posssession?

My sanity.

What is your favourite occupation?

Reading, writing, thinking, and conversing.

What is your most marked characteristic?

... I really don't know. (Note to self: contemplate this.) Lately it seems to be all the brain-farts I've been having ... :-D

What do you most value in your friends?

I value how they love ... all the ways that they radiate and enact loving-kindness ...

Who are your favourite writers?

Oh God -- I can't answer that. There are so many. I fall in love with books, chapters, paragraphs, phrases, poems ... but if pressed, I would say that the first writer whose empathy and way of seeing turned me inside out was Rainer Maria Rilke. My most recent writerly love is John Banville's The Sea.

Who are your heroes in real life?

"Real life"? -- Is there any other kind? ... My Cuz (as above), her mother and father, my Baka, my mentors KW and SN ... My beloved husband for the character he continually chooses to cultivate ... My own good, sturdy soul for surviving and staying sane.

What is it that you most dislike?

Deliberate infliction of harm.

How would you like to die?

In my sleep, while being lullabied and held.

What is your motto?

"Where are my glasses?"

How do I write an essay when I can't think for s**t?

2010-04-26T04:30:00.011-04:00

I never thought I'd head a post with such a vulgar title, but there it is. The Great Canadian Essay has yet to be brought into being. Again.

I've decided to enter a contest, you see, whose deadline for submission is four days away. I've already submitted this essay (in its earlier forms) to two professional writers for assessment. One is a writer and thinker of international stature whose gentle integrity underscores everything he does. I have to admit, his word on my work would be gold -- what I would aspire to ... He called my piece "beautiful ... beautifully written."

When a sage speaks, you listen. Then you freak out for a while.

I have four days to finish freaking and craft this piece to completion. Of course, I'm doing everything but. I don't buy "writer's block" anymore -- I once read of a writer who scoffed at the condition: "'Writer's block'! Have you ever heard of this in any other profession? Have you ever heard of 'truck driver's block'?" I read this and howled with laughter. It broke the old trance.

When I'm a little kinder to myself, I think that yes, something's blocked. If something's blocked, something else is blocking. Who or what is doing the blocking? DING! -- Me, of course!

And so it goes. I'm stuck right here:

Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.

(Marianne Williamson)

(Gulp.)

Idiotic headline of the day

2010-04-24T16:46:00.005-04:00

"TIGER'S PALS MAD HE WENT TO SEE NICKELBACK?"

Wah.

Two pictures say it all.

2010-04-20T01:21:00.005-04:00

(I found both images at Dependable Renegade, a site that's making me giggle and occasionally spew my tea. Comic relief before bed: priceless!)

WTF? ~ headlines

2010-04-06T15:05:00.010-04:00

I know why so many people have heart attacks before 9 a.m. -- they've been felled by seeing too many atrocious headlines! Those of us who are afflicted by OCPEUD -- Obsessive Compulsive Proper English Useage Disorder (pronounced "OC-pewed") have our breakdowns over linguistic maulings like this:

SLAPPED WITH RECORD FINE, TOYOTA WAYS OPTIONS

~ Scene: at the water cooler. Two cubicle rats meet up:
CR1: "Didja hear? We've been fined!"
CR2: "No way!"
CR1: "WAY!"

WOMEN ARRESTED WHILE TRYING TO SMUGGLE DEAD MAN ON PLANE

~ Now, this one's interesting. I've not read the story yet -- only the headline -- so we'll go from there. What might it mean to smuggle a dead man on a plane? Now, if those women had smuggled their corpse onto or into a plane, they'd just ... well, I'm not sure what they'd do. An adult male corpse is a heavy thing ... but it'd be inside the plane. ~ To smuggle on a plane: what is one person doing to another on a plane? Where are they, for one thing -- flattened to a wing, or dangling over the windscreen?

NICHOLAS CAGE'S NEW HAIRDO SHOCKS FANS

~ This was one site's top headline. Somebody thinks that a celebrity's change of hair colour matters more than anything else. That's the worst WTF of all.

Where has Jaliya been lately?

2010-03-29T16:33:00.003-04:00

Dear bloggy friends,

What a month March has been. There have been four deaths in my husband's and my kinship circle ... a very painful time ... and blogging has been the last thing on my mind. I am grateful for the advent of Spring. I will come back to my blogs soon ... In the meantime, I send love and blessings, dear friends ... xoxo

Why don'tcha skidaddle, Sarah Skidoo?

2010-03-19T11:24:00.018-04:00

Where's your helmet, Sarah?

Well, lucky us. Seems that Sarah Palin is dealing around for a reality show. Maybe she'll show us that fabulous view of Russia from her house!

And it's gonna be a nature show too! Drill, baby, drill! Maybe she'll take us up in a chopper for a wolf kill! BLAM! BLAM! -- Take that, ya furry liberal! Maybe she'll bring down a moose or a caribou -- BLAM! BLAM! -- and butcher it for us live!! -- and then she'll hold up the bloody, bewildered, stricken head -- poor thing was caught doing something un-American like munching on the tundra -- and she'll promise to hang it over the door of the Oval Office in 2012! -- And lookit those steaming moose guts! Won't they be great in a stew?, Sarah sez, and when she stabs her own hand with the knife (She can't take her eyes off the camera for a second, you betcha!) -- we're off on a whirlwind trip to Canada for some free stitches! Can't wait, eh?

She is a grace (for Vida)

2010-03-17T00:34:00.012-04:00

These are the days when serenity
comes in the form of a cat.

Winter's haulage is waning;
so is the heat of friendly fires

in a certain, uncurtained
dwelling of care.

Seasons are senseless
when November laces

a heart with stealthy,
steady frost

... creates the crack
and enters. June arrives

eventually,
inevitably

as a cat; bliss-fired
motor of purrs.

CRUSH: COLIN!

2010-03-16T02:50:00.001-04:00

I feel like weeping tonight so I need some beauty to inspire the tears. I kid you not: Beauty moves me to tears. Tolstoy wrote, "Beauty will save the world", and I know his words are true. Beauty comes on us like a swell of flowers unleashing light that stops us alive in our tracks. Beauty provokes the soul to wake up and respond. When my capacity to to feel and express emotion is iced to a crisp and I'm "that far" from saying Ah, fuck it, I have to get me some beauty now. (Note the potential wordplay with beauty and booty, hee hee. I did preface this piece with a photograph of Colin Firth that stopped me alive in my tracks!)

I go through times when I need to do everything in my power to remain in the land of the living -- I don't mean suicide here; I mean the terrible depletion of body and soul that comes with (in my case) chronic, major depression; the pushing it takes just to be alive and get through some days -- the exhaustion of any grave illness or injury that we have survived.

I also mean that winter can bring on some mean blues. A winter as paltry and monotonous as the one my neck o' the woods is getting -- Honey, if you get SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), this winter you'll get SAFID -- Seasonal Affective Fuck-It Disorder. This is the ugliest winter we've had in I don't know how long.

... So back to Colin Firth! (You can tell I'm close to the abyss of SAFID when I veer off from that glorious face into deeper woes. WTF?)

I was sitting here at my 'puter, thinking on cherished friends who have died ... and one cherished friend whose feline beloved, aged 15, died recently. I got to thinking: Death really, really sucks. Then came the onrush of memory "hits" -- Bruce's summer freckles; Werner's gentle, sturdy voice saying "Be well" ... Wendy's milkweed-soft cheeks; Binky's squeaky purrs; Laren's explosions of laughter; Renée's quick and sweet bloggy love-notes; my Nana's lilting way of saying, "Yes, dear!"; my mother's impish sense of humour ... and I feel so famished for one more moment of presence and touch with these irreplaceable ones that I could chew off my own arm. I know that sounds awfully desperate, and I'd never chew off my own arm -- but you know what I mean.

For reasons yet unrevealed, my psyche is reining me in where emotion is concerned. I want to grieve and mourn; I want to feel clean, lucid anger; I want to feel joy. I don't feel much but the persistent, underlying-all klaxon of fear that seems to have been my particular tragic birthright (we all have them, as well as our birthright of blessings) -- but the fear's (usually) held in check like a missile in a silo. Believe me, fear can be as volcanic as anger, and often incites similar storms.

So I'm not feeling much of anything ... and I don't like it. I especially don't like it when someone I've come to love is dying, and my heart is lamenting, "No ... I can't take another." But I can, and I must, and I will ...

So I leap into beauty before despair has a chance to drag me down. The sensory "hits" -- beloved freckles, cheeks, purrs, embraces -- transform from altars of mourning to suffusions of warmth that soften my mind and make me breathe deep down to the place where my soul murmurs Thank You for all these beautiful lives and loves ...

... and then I need a strong dose of beauty ... which comes in so many forms. My first thought of beauty when I needed it tonight happened to be a certain photo of Colin Firth ... So without further ado, here is this beautiful man once again, and may we all walk in beauty to whatever moves us when we need to pump up our love for life!

How to piss me off on a Sunday afternoon.

2010-03-14T14:43:00.008-04:00

Be a rep of my alma mater's alumni association, and call during my Sunday nap time. Sound perky and gleeful, like a talent-show contestant or a local station's weather girl. Gag me with your cute, razor-sharp soprano talk, and don't take a breath while you blather that your institution wants my money.

Hey, girl! You're representing a college that's largely funded by a Church. Whatever happened to the Sabbath -- the day of rest? I know that churches all over the world are palming for cash every Sunday, but silly me! -- I thought that Sunday phone calls are shared with relatives and friends -- you know, people I actually want to talk with; people who don't want my money.

I'm incorrigibly polite; courtesy was bred into my bone ... so I cut in to the girl's spiel and said, "This really isn't a good time. Why don't you call back during the week."

During the week ... when I never answer the phone during the day. (Damn those robo-calls!)

This is how I feel today ...

2010-03-11T16:19:00.005-05:00

My husband gives me an A
for last nights supper,
an incomplete for my ironing,
a B+ in bed.
my son says I am average,
an average mother, but if
I put my mind to it
I could improve.
my daughter believes
in pass/fail and tells me
I pass. Wait until they learn
I'm dropping out.

~ Linda Pastan, "Marks", from The Five Stages of Grief (1978).

Fly, Renee ...

2010-03-09T14:46:00.007-05:00

This photo of you reminds me of a poem given to me by a best friend back in '82 ... Composed by Gael Turnbull, it's called "And What If" ... Renee, you heart of hearts, I wish you to fly, to ride the wave of being away from your long-cherished, loved and loving, now broken body ...

And What If

And what if she looks
silly? A child
on a wooden horse.

And what if she has
shut her eyes? A race
with only one entry.

And what if she is
lost? The reins
over the rump.

I wish her joy
and a turbulent ride.

(The poem was originally written with a young boy in mind ... I tweaked the pronouns.)

Don't you love it when pictures and words come together?

2010-03-05T17:37:00.006-05:00

It’s exciting to explore the First Amendment for all it’s worth. Outside of saying, “I’m going to blow that president’s head off,” everything is pretty much allowed in this country.

~ Barry Hannah, in a 2004 Paris Review interview

Billboard location: near West Plains, Missouri

h/t to The Political Carnival, where I found the photo ...

A dove for Renee

2010-03-04T00:54:00.004-05:00

I found this exquisite image here while nosing through some totem sites ... This dove instantly brought our Renee to mind ... and Dove as totem is said to be of the "between times", when the veil between the material and ineffable worlds is very thin ... Renee's presence in the blog world has been such a gift ... I miss her so ...

Has anyone heard from, or about, how Renee is doing?

Here's to our flaws ... We've all got 'em ... (mildly macabre humour alert)

2010-02-28T15:57:00.012-05:00

What sweet relief to come across this today at Whiskey River (altogether now, heave a happy sigh):

... I want to acknowledge my own imperfection; I want to understand that this is part of the endlessness of my growth. It's absolutely useless at this stage in your life, with all of the shit piled up in your closet, to walk around and try to kid yourself about your perfection. Out of the raw material you break down, you grow and absorb the energy. You work yourself from inside out, tearing out, destroying, and finding a sense of nothingness. But this somethingness -- ego and prejudices and limitations -- is your raw material. If you process and refine it all, you can open up consciously ...

(Albert Rudolph)

Ta-da!

~ Photo found at Gilding the Lily ~

Beloved Renee,

2010-02-20T16:53:00.011-05:00

Your Angelique writes to us that your body is beginning to die. Oh, friend, what can I say but Thank you for your life.

If I was at your bedside right now I would gently snuffle my cheek into the nape of your neck, like I did with my mother as she was dying eight years ago. I would simply warm your skin with my breath and love you until you are gone. Or I would, as my sister did, tenderly trail my fingers through your hair, murmuring memories and offering my tears as your last sip of life.

But knowing me, I'd snuffle. I would just be there, breathing with you, keeping you warm, accompanying you to the threshold.

You are so loved ... You live on, Renee, already: in your constant, contagious kindness; in your sass and your whimsical eye; in your family, your beautiful brood, and all of your friends; in your presence -- your loving, loving presence ...

These words of Wendell Berry remind me of you:

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,
war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

May Love bless you and keep you, Renee ... Thank you for your life.

The Donald strikes again.

2010-02-15T14:30:00.003-05:00

Imagine that. A man with a fake tan, fake hair, and no scientific cred adds his booming voice to a nitwits' choir ...

Lent already!

2010-02-13T18:19:00.010-05:00

"Deep Winter Glow" by Jon Rattenbury

In the deep midwinter ... we tend to forget Spring. All is ice ... and dead.

Along comes Lent, promising Easter like Winter promises Spring.

Pop over here and let Fran blow your mind with one simple question. I've already posted two comments ... This promises to be a spiritually scintillating conversation!

Thanks, Fran ... You are a philosopher par excellence!

Thanks to artist Jon Rattenbury for the perfect image for this post ... Again, the promise of Spring ...

What an excellent whack upside the presidential head!

2010-02-09T20:14:00.002-05:00

... with a h/t to Ellie for the 'toon ...

Cartoon time!

2010-02-07T17:53:00.003-05:00

I'm being a lazy bum -- It's Sunday, after all, and I have always honoured the directive to pass the Sabbath in a soothing way! -- so I'm just going to post some cartoons that always give me a giggle. My brain is Sunday-mush, so there will be no profound, mind-blowing thoughts today. Just one teeny-weeny complaint about our southern Ontario winter. Seems that everywhere but here is getting "Snowmageddon" ... I have a friend in Virginia who says her neck o' the woods got 18 inches yesterday ... Washington is digging out from under the white stuff ... Better that than digging out from under piles upon piles of hot air and political bullshit, yes?

I haven't written much about my love life here ...

2010-01-26T00:10:00.008-05:00

... and I find myself wondering why. No big deal ... just curious. My first thought is, "Old flames are best left to burn out." Second thought: "My love life? -- My whole life is my love life!" Third thought: "What's there to say?" Fourth thought: "Uh-oh. I'm married. I shouldn't be thinking like this."

My beloved husband and I are in some kind of relational doldrum ... and for my part, I've decided to just let it be for a while. I'm going to coast through the rest of the winter and do my utmost to settle my poor, sun-starved self on as many imaginary beaches as I can jet away to. Truth is, I wouldn't get on a plane right now unless I was heavily sedated. Who the hell wants to risk sharing a big, metal flying tube with a nutter who's packing a bomb in his gauchies?

... and how'd I get from my love life to boxer explosives?

I got strung along this weave of thought by PENolan, whose blog, Menopausal Stoners, always gets my mind off the grid ... out of the mud ... up from a rut.

"We can't ever control another person's behavior," PENolan writes. "[T]he only thing we can control is our own response. When we change our response, the steps in the dance with that person must necessarily change. He can try to revert to the old pattern, but it will never work in the same way again because my pattern is different."

Sometimes I trawl the web for novel, wake-me-up thinking ... and sometimes I just fart around and fantasize. Nothing bawdy these days -- apologies to those readers who are hoping for smut, tee hee ... more along the line of having my brain twitched into rememberance. Geez! -- you turn fifty, and every second thought is a memory! ... or a brain fart.

So here I am, being binged and twanged along Memory Lane day in, day out. Every memory ends up being about love in some way. Never fails. So naturally, when my present-day "love life" is blah, even though I'm wed to a man whose soul I adore, my mind flits off to kisses long gone, soulmates long dead, and the ones who got away. Lest this post start dragging like a dirge, I'll tell you that one man told me I kissed "like a deer" -- and another, who was gay ("Honey -- I'm a TEN on the Kinsey Scale!"), huffed and puffed with lust for me on more than one occasion (including a co-worker's wedding), and declared that if "a woman could do it for me, you'd be the one." Damn, there are moments when I can't help but wonder What if ...?

So I hit here in a wee spot o' potential trouble. Thinking outside the box, so to speak, isn't the wisest choice when one is married. It's inevitable, though, during the dry spells when your libido can't seem to crank itself out of indifference ... nor, it seems, can your beloved. And I realize that it's a lifesaver.

Amorous nostalgia -- most of all, for what my husband and I used to share -- keeps me engaged with my own heart. This is going to sound strange, but lately my heart and its environs have felt stomped upon. Not by anyone in particular, but by what Rilke called World -- the stuff and noise and frenzy of modern-day life ... the crushing weight of all that we humans are and have done. Even the most daisy-fresh optimist must be feeling a little shredded right now.

Naughty talk on the telly

2010-01-21T00:53:00.009-05:00

This was recently said of a politician by a famous and very popular television personality:

"I want a chastity belt on this man. I want his every move watched in Washington. I don't trust this guy. This one could end with a dead intern. I'm just saying. It could end with a dead intern."

... I feel a nauseating mix of astonishment, hilarity -- I mean, come on: a chastity belt! -- and dread, when I ponder the fact that someone who thinks like this seems to have the ear and attention of many, many people. The speaker, as far as I know, is not a comedian ...

Here's who said it ...

Photo found at this amazing design site ...

The thought of actually getting all the laundry done is ...

2010-01-08T13:55:00.006-05:00

... as far off as a Caribbean beach when you're stuck in a Fargo blizzard.

... an intoxicating fantasy, up there with a lottery win, a night with George Clooney, and a daisy-fresh toilet.

... a pathetic bargain wheedled with a snickering deity who never, ever helps with the housework.

... a quaint, bygone joke that's gone the way of June Cleaver and "leisure time."

... your present-moment road-to-hell good intention.

... good for a red-hot laugh, a sigh, a cocktail, and a toast to the void that you pray will suck up all those foul fabrics in the basement.

... enough to send you reeling into I'm Such A Loser!-land for the rest of your life.

... an outright delusion, for now and all time, for ever and ever, Amen.

... The laundry? F*ck the laundry -- go green and reuse!

Here's my caption ...

2009-12-30T01:03:00.008-05:00

... for a particular Craption over at cracked.com ...

GRUELING PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE FLATTENS IL DIVO.

What's the Bible in 15 words?

2009-12-04T18:52:00.004-05:00

I just found a most fascinating meme at Eileen's Episcopalfem blog. The invitation is to describe the Bible in five statements that total 15 words:

1st statement: one word.
2nd statement: two words.
3rd statement: three words.
4th statement: four words.
5th statement: five words.

I couldn't resist. I haven't studied the Bible in about 25 years, although there are passages ("Be still and know I am God") that are embedded in my bones. I jotted down my immediate, intuitive responses as a very lapsed Christian ...

1. Creation.
2. Jesus wept.
3. Lots of blood.
4. The Song of Solomon.
5. Love ... hate ... everything in between.

Wise and beautiful rage ...

2009-12-02T11:57:00.006-05:00

... fires through this essay by Adrian Worsfold, via the Episcopal Café.

Somehow the heart is dying inside Christianity, Adrian writes, so that it becomes a pointless husk, where some of its core messages are tossed aside in order to promote one institutional fantasy or another.

Yes, a fantasy ... and a delusion. How is it that our institutions tend to do everything in their power to crush the love out of human hearts?

I left the Anglican Church about 25 years ago, in part because of institutional bullshit that had nothing to do with the love of Christ. That included a priest who stared at my chest, rather than gazed into my eyes, when I was stammering away about my inability to pray and my sincere desire to be what I thought was a holy person.

I've no idea if Jesus actually walked this earth. The question's become moot to me. What matters is the example of the man ... what he chose to reveal and radiate in his relations with others.

In so many ways, religious institutions try to legislate and prohibit our expressions of love -- our natural instinct to relate, bond and be with one another.

This is wrong ... so wrong.

Thanks to the holy mischief of MadPriest, who posted a link to the article. Sigh ... I wish there was one like him in the pulpit of every church ...