Elephants, Cookies, and the Holidays

This is not how the year was to end, with memories tucked into cramped places, with so many arcs left unfinished, so many pieces left unplaced. Somewhere between tea too strongly brewed and nights too often spent awake I lost hold of the finer points of goals, and amidst missed deadlines and deflated hopes realized that I would simply have to learn to live five steps behind my perfect agenda, realized that Armageddon does not come with a Christmas card sent two days after Christmas or a host of unfulfilled wishes or a batch of cookies forgotten in the oven. I can do this, bit by bit. Performance isn't everything. I can afford to breathe.

I have to breathe.

New Year's Day resolutions being more of a collective nod to abandoned pursuits than anything else, I have none to make. Instead, these last two months of two thousand fourteen have slowly shaped an impression for two thousand and fifteen—this is what I want, this is what I have to remind myself of during these wee hours when rationale has all the stability of a dust-crumbled foundation: 

the grace to stand when I can stand and to kneel when I ought to be kneeling, the grace to fall flat on my face as I have so many times already and in the silence after the thud feel the persistence of my heartbeat and remember to get up and go on; sleep at night, every night, instead of the bending of routine to a too-taxing job; the chance to bake pies for people who need it and to not fear being called out while they are still in the oven; patience and persistence and hope to get through the long months between what is Now and what has become Then; matches enough to light my candles.

This, this, is my New Year. And right now I'm too weary to do more than crawl into bed and pray for enough strength to get up in several hours and go pour myself out amidst what has begun to feel like an emotional war zone, but even so there is enough of that vision laced through these days surrounding me that I can draw a deep breath over the dregs of my now-cold chai and murmur to the empty bedroom around me, "You can do this, you'll be okay." One night at a time, one day at a time, one hour at a time—and somewhere between those infinite expanses of weariness and aching there are pockets enough of warmth and belonging and love to make all of the pain bearable, and fortitude worth it.

Coffee Fumes, Tantrums, and a Morbid Sense of Humour

There is a heck of a long list of things that I will never be tacked to the right inside door of my mental junk cabinet, and at the top of that list in the very first slot, making the cut above 'sociopath', 'homicidal maniac', and 'Hitler', is 'matutinophile'. Morning and I were not made for intimacy, and there's nothing that sets the day wrong quite so much as rolling out of bed at an indecently punctual hour, after four hours of sleep, with exhaustion puffing my eyelids and ringing my eyes.

However.

There are consolations, small though they be. One of them is coffee. Another, fickle though it may be, is morning sun. And hot showers. And the chance to dash away to work without a panicking fit because of having overslept my alarm yet again. And a Celestial Seasonings tea tin, unexpected, tucked into the box.

Yes, I'm trying to make myself feel better about this whole "early rising" thing. Unfortunately, it's not really working. Because I practically dozed all through the shower, and I'm off to work in a bit of a panicking fit anyway because that on-my-feet-nap cost me a princely sum of ten minutes and I needed those ten minutes. Honestly, why do the minutes from seven-fifteen to seven-fifty have to go so swiftly?

But. Fortunately, I still have coffee. And my legs move. It's always possible I might have waked and found myself paralyzed from the waist down; things like that must happen somewhere, and I am a very lucky girl indeed because it has yet to happen to me.

Have a splendid Wednesday, people.

Growth

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don't try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you.,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete. 

—by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

Thoughts for November

On Thursday I ran away, on Friday I curled into a caffeinated stupor and contemplated dying. Friday night I cried myself to sleep. This morning, on the interstate somewhere between Point A and Point B, I found my way back to solid ground.

There are words I've put onto paper, into desktop documents, that I'd rather not share because they mean too much. They contain pieces of me that are broken, that are unsettlingly imperfect and difficult and painful and maybe far too honest for anyone but the quiet understanding of my future self and a God who grants grace. And yet it is when I try to write between the lines, to say what needs to be said without actually saying it, that I find the ideas paralyzed with in me, refusing to be shaped into any sort of narrative. "You would conceal?" it seems they say. "Then we have no place with you." Deception is a clever and occasionally necessary thing in conversation, but there is no excuse for it in art, and if writing is meant to be in some form a work of art then that writing demands a vulnerability not allowed by the desire to maintain a carefully constructed exterior manicured into inhuman perfection.

Why is it so important to keep that perfection?

Wednesday night I drove for three hours in the dusk and then the dark, reaching through the hum of road noise for some remnant of sanity and balance to call my own. There was none to be found.

Memories seep together in my head; somehow an evening with friends and sisters bleeds into a nightmare about losing someone too close to my heart, and that threads its way through an hour spent curled on someone else's couch, half dozing and vaguely aware of the rise and fall of many voices.  In front of me now is a mug of potato leek soup, microwaved and fresh from its cardboard box, and the odour rising with the steam holds all the richness of last Thanksgiving's late night cozy meal. It was the first Thanksgiving I'd spent away from my siblings.

This coming holiday might be the second.

I flip through my Logbook in search of the last entry, and from between blank pages a paper gravestone falls. I sat inside a house of mourning, and it was neither a palace nor a hovel, but merely a clapboard-and-plastic shelter raised to guard looming grief from the November wind. But that is a story for another day. Today's story is different. Today's story is small rituals and the question of survival, framed by three blue jays on the back patio and a gaggle of geese flying low over the Gingerbread House, screaming.

Thursday afternoon I watched Lost In Translation, and in one of the scenes Charlotte, lying on Bob Harris's bed with her toes barely brushing his pajama leg, asks drowsily, "Does it get easier?" I'm asking the same question, just not about the same things. Does it get easier?

Does it?

His answer has slipped from my memory as if he never spoke in reply. As answers go, I have none.

Through the now-frigid wind a siren is howling. I miss home.

Fifteen Blackbirds on a Tuesday Afternoon

1. When it comes to working in a clinical setting, there is a pecking order. There is always a pecking order. 

2. Acknowledging the pecking order will result in the near-immediate acceptance of you and what you have to offer on both a personal and professional level.

3. If you circumvent the pecking order by becoming the pet of the top dog, it is unlikely that you will appreciate any acceptance whatsoever, except that which we can find the grace to extend you despite your inappropriate assumption of privilege.

4. Acting as if people stepping aside to make a place for you is you doing them a favour is an inappropriate assumption of privilege.

5. Nonchalantly assuming personal responsibility for jobs that are part of another person's routine workday, without being asked, is an inappropriate assumption of privilege.

6. So is acting as if the connection formed through an introduction and then one half hour prenatal happens to be more important than a connection formed over two pregnancies and a birth and a miscarriage in between.

7. It's not.

8. The thing is, while I try to be reasonable I find that I'm also decidedly territorial, and what all this is showing me is not that you're a bad person, or that this conflict is beyond resolution, but that there's a wolf inside of me that sets boundaries defining what I call my own, and that wolf would rather tear you apart for one mis-step than it would allow you the understanding owed from one human to another.

9. The thing is, I keep discovering that I'm a nastier sort of woman than I think that I am.

10. I have teeth. Sharp teeth. And it's frightening to be so ready to maul you because you inched your foot over a piece of ground to which I had laid tacit claim. Because honestly, what's more important here? You getting the chance to meet a goal for which you've been working your heart out for years, or me having a month of comfortably roaming my own domain? You achieving something that will set you up for the rest of your career as a midwife, or me getting the gratification of being the one on the floor for yet another routine month at clinic? 

11. Does it matter if I miss a couple of births that I had been hoping to attend? 

12. Does it really?

13. So here's what I have to say, over halfway through this month, with all of the subtle distaste and distance there between us: Yes, there is a pecking order. And yes, you disregarded it. And yes, that stings. There were places I wanted to be and people that meant a lot to me, and you slipped between us, and I wish you hadn't. You were just a tiny bit rude. But the thing is, that's not going to matter in a year, or six months, or even one, and I'm glad, honestly glad, that you get the chance to accomplish something that means so much to you, that you're giving up so much to achieve. 

14. The thing is, there is a pecking order. There has been and there always will be, and it serves as a sort of social structure within a clinical context. But empathy supersedes that structure. That animalistic pecking order.

15. The thing is, I need to learn to let it go.

What I'm Listening To: "I Want You Here"

Because something happened, and it shouldn't have happened but it did — and right now this matters.

There Should Be Words for It

"I'm sorry you have to get up so early."

"I'm sorry too."

And I was. I was. And then in the morning I drove through a thicket of trees and out to the wide-open space beneath a sky swathed in purple-grey clouds that pressed down against red-speckled blue-grey mountains, with the sun curtained behind their ethereal expanse and the moon overhead, three-quarters full. Over and over again the road itself would stretch through autumn-cloaked tree arches. The changing shades of the atmosphere in the early hours, for some inexplicable reason, stabbed to my heart.

I don't know, I don't think I can take this anymore; I don't think I can keep going, keep holding space in this place. It's been a hard week—a hard month, really—funny how it's all by proximity and not direct involvement and still the pain wrings so viciously. My head aches, and a cup of tea is a fine solace when the world is in order but what about when it isn't? What about when the world is screaming?

Tell me, do I truly love living life, or do I just think that I do? Half the time I don't know because it hurts so badly.

Life—you love that. The real life that flashes through the pain; it's what keeps us breathing.

Then I dropped the phone and doubled over on the bed, face buried in my knees: I don't think I want to keep breathing. I think this has always hurt too much. I think I'm tired. But then, that option isn't mine. There's no 'opt out' button; we get what we get, and, as Cheryl Strayed said to a college graduate whining about student loans in her column Dear Sugar, "You don't have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you're holding."

I'm searching for the fragments of life strewn amidst shards of blood-letting death and finding a man with no eyebrows (girls, remember Canon Tallis?), steam rising from a brimfull mug and scraping voices blending harmonious around a fire, words and worlds scrawled by a passing stranger who writes with a voice all too familiar. I'm searching for meaning in ritual, in faith, in the death that comes with every morning and the resurrection from each killing moment. At least, I choose to believe that it is resurrection. Sometimes it feels as if a little more of me has stayed dead every time.

There is no why. Instead of answers there are questions gaping with hunger, questions starving for resolution. I haven't any. I only have this very second of cracked, aching wakefulness, my fingers curled around a cup of tea, the words I scribbled on a page while driving Sunday morning. I only have the weary determination not to succumb to the weight of the load but to try to go on and give everything I have to at least make it a little lighter for others. I have that.

And, for what it's worth, I do love the colour of the November sky.

"Lines After M. B.'s Funeral"

I keep trying to find the words, but this is perhaps a case of feeling too much and so being able to say too little. Ironic, isn't it, that where we care most we can express least? I'm reaching for letters, for sounds, trying to speak, but they're escaping me again; there are tears in my eyes, but shedding them is out of the question, shedding them would be a waste. There's a hole in the world. I'm afraid I might fall through. So instead I shuffle from market to kitchen to room and to kitchen again, seeking solace in mugs of tea almost too hot to drink and writing sympathy cards via dishes of food, because what can I say? What can I say? Someone has died, was, has gone, is where?  

The cry of the South-flying geese sounds almost too desolate and wild to be borne, and the silence wreaks havoc in its wake only because somewhere else, amidst the noise and clamour of life too loudly enacted, fragile people are stuffing trembling, over-white fists into their open mouths and asking soundlessly if they can go on, because my God, this is too much for us; can't You let us be? Tragedies are folded and laid by with years past, and referenced calmly, but only when the wounds are allowed to heal and then scar. What about when there is no scarring—when there cannot be—because the blows are laid so heavily and swiftly that the blood cannot even be staunched? This is neither the first nor the only time that space has opened. We are riddled with death like a sieve.

Is it easier when there is time to adjust to the morphing of eager hope into horror? Is it easier when the emotional battle can be fought in the privacy of a darkened bedroom instead of beneath glaring lights, amidst strangers? Is it easier to divide one's dreams from one's reality and lock those fantasies carefully away than it is to sign life away on a multitude of forms and carry death home wrapped in a hospital blanket.

How many times can a heart die before it stops beating?

The dark holes are as multitudinous
As the stars in the galaxies,
As open to the cold blasts of wind.
If we fell through,
What would we find?

Where is the mercy in this beating? Well-meaning people speak vaguely of pruning; is the definition of pruning truly laying waste?

The reading of The Year of Magical Thinking was serendipitously timed, I cannot help thinking with some bitterness. Now I can cling to it as a manual for grief. As a blueprint for how to be present without being burdensome. As a prescription to allow, if diligently taken, living with death.

I didn't want a manual. I wanted to pause and be still, be silent, and then move on from reading about one woman's pain to sharing in other women's rejoicing.

I wanted life.

Life is not stillness beneath my hands or static reverberating from a Doppler. Life is not a flat line on a fetal heart monitor. Life is not "Two children still living, two dead."

What is the point of this?

If we fell through
What would we find?
Show me
Let me look through this new empty place
To where
The wind comes from
And the light begins.

Yesterday's List, Tomorrow's Adventure: In the Interim...

making: kale salad; an overdue birthday present; tomorrow's work lunch; plans for the winter  

cooking: vegetables with much impatience and an ample helping of adventuresome forbearance  

drinking: Good Earth lemongrass green tea, every day, steaming in an oversized Eeyore mug   

reading: Tori Amos: Piece By Piece; Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, by Cheryl Strayed; the gospel of Matthew 

wanting: confidence in hope; the solution by which to fix my camera's nonfunctioning memory card

looking: for ambition, my copy of Elements of Style, and the perfect hula hoop 

playing: counters in lieu of the piano; the live-action anniversary version of The Game of Life 

deciding: to uncurl my fingers and let go of what I shouldn't be holding, bits and pieces at a time; to be more open and at the same time more closed  

wishing: that tomorrow could be postponed just twelve hours  

enjoying: a Starbucks venti blonde with steamed soy milk, always

waiting: for time to heal open wounds; until I get the chance to sit down again with Madeline and the Bad Hat; for the second season of Call the Midwife to be returned to the local library

liking: Tumblr humour worth saving  

wondering: how many people actually care about truly living life and how many just think they do  

loving: people for being refractive glass; people for being so alive and warm and real 

pondering: the difference between a god who demands ascent to his level for salvation and a god who descends to ours in order to level the playing field; Ian's theology in respect to popular regard of the blood of Jesus, from The Highlander's Last Song  

considering: finances; educational and work options for the next handful of months; strategies for spending time with my siblings  

watching: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, over again from the beginning; the airing season of Doctor Who; the skies change with the season  

hoping: for thawing as the earth freezes over; for new understanding; for faith even now uncomprehended  

marvelling: at being alive

needing: reassurance, a hand in the dark; the departure of this persistent head cold; to clean out my car; to actually stop eating gluten, for good  

smelling: something suspended uncertainly between frosty air and an upset stomach 

wearing: clothing and a very fuzzy blanket

following: impulse, as usual, with a dash of sense haphazardly added after the fact; her Tumblr and her art  

noticing: the way the moonlight fractures the clouds; how biting my nails makes my fingers feel clumsy 

knowing: the philosophy of Good Earth tea bags and fortune cookies, while compact, is too aligned with simplistic platitude to be deeply applicable to life  

thinking: that lying on the booth bench in the hotel bar in Eugene wasn't such a bad thing to be doing or a bad place to be after all, and maybe someday time will carry me back to it  

admiring: the white socks on the black cat that crossed my path this evening  

sorting: old papers, old notes, and a host of squirming ideas that just want to be put into words already 

buying: dull necessities such as floss and toilet paper; car insurance  

getting: into the swing of the holiday season (namely, Christmas)  

bookmarking: eggless cookie dough; a reminder; a blog post discussing winter health 

disliking: the way technological white noise disrupts clarity of focus  

opening: tiny missives from two of my dearest girls; the eleventh volume of Library Wars 

giggling: at ridiculous plans for future social anarchy and small-town rabble-rousing  

feeling: a little bit lonely, a little bit sick, and vaguely content  

snacking: on organic strawberry ice cream and baked potato wedges  

coveting: presence, and the chance to cuddle with Rye  

wishing: for the cozy corner of the leather loveseat and someone else's midnight breathing and Arrietty playing quietly in the dark  

helping: tomorrow drag longer by staying up late now; children in grocery stores stop crying and settle for bewildered staring because yes, full-grown people can be just that weird 

hearing: the skin-grinding hum of electronics in a room empty but for myself

inspired by jodi at practicing simplicity

Halfway Scribblings, for Shadow

Being the brilliant person that I am, I of course failed to have the foresight to recognise that I might end up spending the night at the enchanting little place my cousins call the Salem House, and therefore neglected to bring both earbuds and camera. While the earbuds are not so great a loss — I can play anything I need to aloud, really — the lack of camera is indeed regrettable, since there is no way to visually share the large round iced lemon shortbread cookies gracing cooling racks in the quaint little kitchen, or the delicate pattern painted onto the pale yellow of my borrowed, bowl-shaped mug, or the way the light falls just so over the bank of curling ivy and two-toned hostas bordering the wooden steps embedded into the earth behind the house. They tell me there is a graveyard at the top of the hill. In the back yard, a cement walk outlines what used to be an in-ground swimming pool; there is a tree planted in the center of the now-grass-covered rectangle that two decades earlier was chlorinated water. 

There are some places, indubitably attached to individual people, that leave me with a deep impression of what it means to be a genuinely welcoming soul, and this place is one of them, these people are among them. Hospitality is an abstract concept, but it takes tactile form in my memory: it is sock feet propped comfortably on the rim of a wood-burning stove, hot drinks after nightfall, fingers snipping and arranging and pasting to fashion delicate silhouetted cards, peach cobbler, conversations held in low tones on the single bench in the church foyer, hands curved around the car's steering wheel, flowers like petal-caged sunshine on the uneven brown of the window sill, the rise and fall of a voice reading funny stories, snorting laughter erupting from the depths of the couch, casual and comfortable trading of insults and compliments alike, ice cream, second helpings, random adventures, random hugs. It is fitting so seamlessly into the activities and the personal space of others, not because you do but because they do. It is watching everyone being enthusiastically included. It is dropping everything to run to the door and welcome impromptu guests into the house, and it is everyone being dragged into the kitchen to eat cookies and then to seat themselves freely on the floor and talk and talk and talk; it is the door swinging wide; it is the door always being open. It is borrowed belts and borrowed books and unspoken understandings. It is finding another piece of home.

Perhaps growing up is meant to be primarily about paying for oneself instead of letting other people pay for you. That is quite possible, and it is probably the case, which means that I have been missing the point of becoming an adult, because for me growing up has so far been less about seeing that my pocketbook gains weight and more about broadening my definition of belonging. For my entire conscious life I can only remember perceiving being part of a group as being acceptable if that participation had been earned. Do I make enough money to call myself a responsible member of society who is allowed to take breaks and have fun? Can I treat other people instead of being treated? Am I a smart enough, scintillating enough, genuine enough, friendly enough person to justify my letting go and enjoying other people's company? Do I deserve these relationships? 

Funny how such questions can be so consuming and yet so futile. Because no, I don't deserve the relationships, I don't deserve the welcome, I don't deserve the fun, I don't deserve the love. I never will, and to be quite objectively honest, it's unlikely that anyone else will ever truly deserve those things either. We humans with our limitations can tally and flowchart and quantify to our hearts' content what we do or don't earn from others and what others do and don't earn from us, but in the end what defines our interactions with others is not reward so much as need for relationship — a constant fluctuation between giving and receiving. And, oddly enough, it is the receiving of relationship — without the earning of it — that is somehow creating within me the strength to do what I could not accomplish merely for the sake of becoming a person worthy of being liked.

Unwritten Letters to My Father, Part One

There's a hole in the world.
I'm afraid I may fall through.
Someone has died
Was
Has gone
Is where?
Will be
Is 
How?
This is neither the first
Now the only time that space has opened.
We are riddled with death
Like a sieve.
The dark holes are as multitudinous 
As the stars in the galaxies,
As open to the cold blasts of wind.
If we fell through
What would we find?
Show me
Let me look through this new empty place
To where
The wind comes from
And the light begins.

                — Madeleine L'Engle, "Lines after M. B.'s Funeral"



There are so many things I want to tell you right now...

...that afternoons and evenings spent holed up in the basement painting doors and drinking coffee make me think of you.

...that I have been yearning to go camping at the beach with you, even though the thought of sand dribbling through my clothing and insects pressing close in sweaty, plague-like crowds makes me shudder.
 
...that I still incorrectly install doorknobs.
 
...that baking special treats for people is still my specialty, and that strawberry shortcake is next on my list.
 
...that instrumental guitar music makes my heart ache because I remember you playing to yourself in the living room that one night when I was still six and I came out of my bedroom rubbing my eyes because I'd had a nightmare, and that memory still makes me feel safe.
 
...that I want to sit down once more to the dinner table with you and listen to you turn the dishes of food into a cast of characters enacting a comic drama as we devour them.
 
...that your distress over my childhood sloppiness needs not continue: I put food away immediately after I have finished using it, wipe up every spill, even if it's only water, and cover both edibles and compost religiously to keep off the flies.
 
...that there are tears stinging the corners of my eyes because the last time we spent together you took me to a concert with a violin soloist and went out of your way to compliment me and make pleasant conversation, and I pulled away because I was tired and sad and had a headache — I wish now that I had ignored the pinching of my heels and the pain in my temples and thrown myself into having the best time possible.
 
...that my quondam condemnation of your coffee habit has been replaced by a curious sense of kinship over the daily ritual of consuming bitter brew.
 
...that introducing me to John Denver and Simon and Garfunkel and Kansas and George Winston has permanently impacted my musical tastes and style — for the better.
 
...that you handing me your guitar and saying, after twenty years of loving the instrument, that it was mine now because you heard what happened when my fingers met the strings and you wanted me to go on playing as much as I wanted, makes me wonder even now how much you cared and how much I failed to see it.
 
...that the way you weep when songs move you cracks my heart open.
 
...that I love the way you forgive your brothers and go on reaching out to them even though you still don't know how to get along.
 
...that I'm still waiting to hear the end of "Michael Joey and the White Lightning", and that Willy and Billy ought to make a comeback.
 
...that I love the quiet after everyone is in bed just as much as you do.
 
...that I miss taking long walks together, whether along the oceanside or on the back roads close to home.
 
...that I miss the rise and fall of your voice when you're carrying on long phone conversations with your "man friends".
 
...that I miss your mis-pronounced Italian phrases and your long-winded rants about whatever topic happens to be wound up in your mind.
 
...that it's been too long since we've eaten pizza together.
 
...that I miss you.
 
...that I miss you.
 
...that I miss you.

For Maman: An Update, of Sorts

While it has been for some time on my daily to-do list to compose a new post for this blog (as if finishing any of the twenty-odd pieces already begun for it were not enough), the task has clearly not been accomplished, most likely in part due to some misguided sense of self preservation, which runs to the extent of being at a loss as to just how to go about placing my thoughts with discretion upon a page for other eyes to see when I am so hard pressed to keep any presentable for semi-public viewing the first place. * Of course, some of it also has to do with negligence on my part, in not actually sitting down to execute the task until already rendered half-incoherent by a late hour; and then, at last, I did not start writing on a page at all but in an OpenOffice document, and that has made a great deal of difference. Odd how, while I used to swear by compiling first drafts digitally, it seems nothing is ever accomplished now unless I begin on paper and work my way up from there.

It is odd too, though I suppose also somewhat inevitable, that the more time I spend avoiding the laptop the less I want to be perpetually near it. Necessity demands still that I keep company with it often, as online classes, kanji, and socialisation with friends and family are based almost entirely upon internet resources; however, despite that unavoidable (and enjoyable, might I add) time spent with my electronic companion, I find myself experiencing greater yearning for the perceived freedom of the world beyond house walls, for the sky and its attendant breezes, for the attention given to the fleeting detail of sunset and silhouetted tree and the moon. There are even some nascent longings for my fingers in the soil—what is this? The high heat of August and a borrowed yard are hardly conducive to daydreaming about gardening. 

This week's responsibilities are crowding quick and close: there is music theory homework to be finished and turned in by Tuesday; birthday gifts to be made; another day to be spent at the library; packing to be done—my grandmother's birthday fast approaches, and once again I am venturing northward to spend time with her; doors to be taken down from their hinges and painted and then reattached to their jams... There is no dearth of activity to be had. I shall be engaged in it, in the midst of it, even, merely because I dare not face the consequences of acting the laggard and ignoring these tasks listed neatly at the beginnings of my week (yes, I keep a planner now—what of it? Planners are cool.)**

Amidst the satisfaction of well-paced activity, I foresee returning again and again to my small touchstones of sanity: fingers curling around a mug made hot by coffee, a odd half hour spent with a book in the play set loft, pen on paper, a dozen forays to the security of the piano keyboard. Some small personal necessities must be obtained at the store before this coming Sunday's departure for lands abroad—an over-dramatisation indeed, but not wholly ridiculous in light of the sense of disorientation that comes inevitably from departing what serves as home base—and a day invested in wrapping up some threads of investigation at the public library would be well spent, but other than that there is a near-entire week of productivity planned ahead of me. I will do well not to waste it.

Care to share what's on your week's agenda, and what you are looking forward to with anticipation in the days immediately ahead of us?



* Yes, all eyes but my own, all minds but my own, qualify as some form of "public" where my inner workings are concerned. Such is introversion.

** It is to be pointed out that some admirably organised Australian women keep planners as well, only they call them diaries, which is a friendlier, more homely way of referring to them as opposed to using some creased-and-pressed business-suited term like Daytimer to reference one's book of daily appointments with oneself. Australians are also cool.

July Tenth: A List

from the Logbook

Things for which I am grateful, even as I struggle to sort out the pieces of the day:

strong-brewed chai, savoury, steaming 

peanut butter scooped from the container with and eaten from table spoons
Imogen Heap
sunflower seeds in a stir-fry 

clean, open rooms 

the tiny private den created by the new filing cabinets placed temporarily in the living room
sunsets that leave me breathless 

mock-punch fights in the hall 

the stack of books awaiting reading to completion 

my memories of Washington 

my memories of my family, to be taken out and replayed over and over until they blur from running through my head 

strength to jog a mile's distance (sometimes, but not today) 

the ability to rest today, to recognise that my body needs the rest 

Howl's Moving Castle 

coffee and long, comfortable pants
low tables 

high counters and high stools 

candles, lists on Tumblr, and calcium magnesium tablets 

anime to be watched; anime to be rewatched 

moisturising cream

waking thoughts

Last night as dusk came over the neighbourhood I took a mug of coffee and my notebook, then went out to the back yard and climbed up to the little roofless deck on the swing set, intending to write. However, weariness overcame me, and I dozed off while lying face-up on the wooden planks. When I awoke (approximately three quarters of an hour later) the sunlight had entirely gone, and above me in the sky the partial moon glowed with strength enough to cast yard and house and surrounding trees in a pale dream-like light; a breeze, laced with the intoxicating flavour of wilder places, gusted sporadically around me. Somewhere between the moon and I there passed a helicopter, all alight. Slowly, as I became aware of the mosquitoes buzzing subtly around me, I gathered cooled coffee, pen, and untouched notebook, and returned with half-dazed steps to the house—a world bathed in the relentless hum of technology and electric brilliance, a world so different than the darkened one in which I had for a few moments been immersed.

I've been listening to Tori Amos through these past few days, and drinking less coffee. I'm trying to un-tether myself from my laptop and spend more time listening, more time breathing, more time reading. When online, I make a point of focusing on one task at a time instead of flitting between two or seven, writing an email or a forum post in one sitting, staying on the page of an article or blog essay until I have thoughtfully read to the end. There is a kind of life I want to live, a sort of person I want to become, and these are the ways to get there, starting on the cellular level of every day.

Through the medium of the internet, through the fusion of the digital world with every moment of my waking (and sometimes sleeping) existence, some of the best events of my life have occurred. My life is inevitably a meshing of fibres from both tangible physical and abstract digital elements, and I would not have it any other way, but if part of growing up is learning how to pick and choose between good and better, this is me growing up, ever so slightly. This is me recognising that the most important parts of my day no longer need to be passed in front of a screen, that constant digital input was a valuable part of my life for some time but that I now need to consciously let that go because it is no longer needed.

This is me saying that I refuse to spend whole afternoons aimlessly scrolling through image feeds long run into a blur of colour and flipping through sluggish social media pages merely to distract my brain from the fact that I don't really want to be living. I have an idea, even if vague, of what I want out of life, and it is not a self-imposed bubble of electronic isolation: it is laughing over ridiculous jokes with people I love, it is preparing tasty meals that will be savoured by those who sit down to eat, it is spending time outdoors—both accompanied and unaccompanied—even when the weather is not comfortable, it is noting the light mottled on the trees, it is spending hours immersed in the pages of books overflowing with literary and philosophical riches. It is eating well instead of clogging my body with edible garbage, it is drinking more tea and less coffee, it is writing and sending more letters more often to more people. It is writing, period, and copiously. It is remembering birthdays. It is giving hugs and learning to make use of telephones and Skype and in general focusing on forging relationships in many different directions. It is refusing to allow insecurity and obsession with personal inadequacy (which, for the record, is in all its legitimacy, self-centered) to paralyse my ability to connect with other people for their benefit and my own. This is me choosing life.

My cousins and aunt and uncle are presently travelling through various points on the west coast, and seeing snapshots of their adventures, whether it be cobbler-making in the cramped interior of the communal camper or my cousins in their Bermudas silhouetted against a broad blue sky and the Pacific Ocean beyond them, is stirring in my a deep longing to revisit Oregon and Washington, as well as a lingering sadness that while I was there I did not see the sea. Finances (ever the curse of civilised man) render a trip impossible now, but some day I shall pack a bag—just one, with a camera and a few articles of clothing and a notebook and pens—and I will leave my laptop behind and set out again to visit that breathtaking wild place on the opposite side of the country, and I will roam rocky beaches and hike through forests of sky-reaching trees in order to sit on lofty mountain shelves and I will haunt small-town coffee shops and walk penniless through street fairs and look up old acquaintances.

And maybe, if I happen to inquire among the right people at the right time, someone will go with me, and together we can be immersed in the splendour of the world exposed to the sky.

Matters of Marshwiggles and Feet

Shoes have come up in several conversations recently and the question of sizing with them, a question put directly to me for reasons to remain here undisclosed. Each time I have answered promptly, all the while internally recoiling from the sound of my own voice saying the number aloud, because...well, let's face it: I've inherited, along with the solid bone structure of my mother's more recent fore-mamas, their wide, beautifully functional feet.

Which is to say that their feet are, well, on the larger side of the spectrum.

And the same goes for mine.

Some girls are sensitive about weight; while there are certain aspects of my body I would definitely like to alter, such as the lingering flab around my natural waist and on my long un-exercised thighs, the actual number on the scale doesn't bother me all that much.

That inclination towards indifference to a number does not, however, extend to shoe size, as I have recently discovered.

Which is why I find myself, at six-forty a.m., after having jogged a mile and a half and walked briskly a mile and a quarter, Googling things like Karen Gillan's shoe size. I keep telling myself it's out of curiousity, since she's almost exactly the same height as I am and knowing such trivia is always interesting.

Not so.

Brutal honesty (ha) demands admission that my seeking the information stems solely from the desire to be affirmed in my shoe size by its existence in a woman widely recognised as both poised and beautiful, characteristics that I graciously pass by in public as being unnecessary but still cringe over not possessing in my more miserable moments. Granted, that is a point generally reached after I have spent all night going through an indefinite number of reasons why I am an impossible, disgusting person, which makes physicality the next-to-last thing on the list before I crash into bed to sleep off my night of self-obsessed ghost-courting. (The very last thing is frequently something like "If I don't get money for a dental visit soon I'll stop eating for good just to kill the pain in my jaw." That is always the point when I creep through the still-darkened house and slip into the bathroom with my toothbrush.)

Unfortunately, I find no consolation in Gillan. My height she may share, but not the size of my feet.

So I depart from Google and stare at the wall, or, more accurately, glare at it, because I have always wanted slender feet and of course that violation of satisfactory standard is the fault of the architecture of the house presently surrounding me. If my lower appendages couldn't have been small, could they at least have been narrow?

Clearly not.

After several minutes of grousing over my too-large feet (and complaining silently over the insensitivity of people with small feet who never consider how painful a detail it may be for those necessarily outfitted in larger sizes to publically share) I give up. My feet are my feet. They work, most of the time, and losing precious time fretting over an isolated aspect of skeletal sizing is completely pointless. And at least they aren't size twelve.

I did, after all, make a good showing with them on the road this morning. (My lungs are another story entirely, which is why they will not be discussed at the present time.)

However, there is still in my sleepy brain some hand grasping for a straw of affirmation, and, at the very last, failing to find anything of the sort in the realms of would-be-perfect celebrities, I turn to good old Narnia for consolation and perspective.

"I always was quite fond of marshwiggles, and Puddleglum's feet are huge..."

With that profoundly important matter settled, I betake myself to the kitchen to brew morning coffee before dragging myself and my feet upstairs for a shower to precede a much needed nap.

Lines by Louise Erdrich

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

— Louise Erdrich, Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

Walk With Me: A Peek Into Hillside Repose

[a throwback to June]

I.

 

  

II.

 

III.

IV.

V.

 

 VI.

VII.

 

I.

English breakfast tea and scrumptious chocolate pastries, my frequent companions.

II. 

Bookshelves I have known and loved...

III.

My grandmother keeps a window of plants at the top of the staircase to the second floor.
 

IV. 

Hall, night, second floor. Angles.

V. 

This baby squirrel dropped by for a visit in the wee hours, but refused to hold still long enough for me to turn on the lights and obtain a decent photograph before taking him outside; he leaped into an empty waste can and I carried him out into the night after castigating him for his inconvenient skittishness. 

VI. 

While there I went through most of my grandmother's photo albums, where I came across this photograph of my grandfather playing with one of my then-wee aunts.

VII. 

Evening engagements a la novel. My grandmother reads copiously. 

**For those readers unacquainted with my grandmother, Hillside Repose is the long-established name of the farmhouse in which she and my grandfather raised their family, barring a comparatively brief period of time during which they dwelt in Kenya.

"Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another."

*traversing Brooklyn on foot*

Yesterday evening I jogged without pause for an entire mile.

All day I curled into myself, hid in corners, wandered aimlessly from task to contrived task, asked over and over again in silence why I keep telling myself blindly to stay alive, stay alive, keep going, stay alive. Didn't eat. Guzzled cup after cup of coffee, black (and let me tell you, there is no better way to nurse a vile mood than by subsisting on coffee in all of its bitter strength). Made up my mind at last to quit tormenting my body and went to eat dinner. Cleared away the dishes and the leftovers from the meal. Went to the Keurig machine to brew another cup of coffee.

Stopped.

Told myself, No, you've already had your allotted amount of coffee for the day. Go run, and if you still need it when you come back you can have it.

So I turned off the Keurig dispenser and donned shorts and Skechers, grabbed the Rabbit and a pair of earbuds, and went out into the night.

And I jogged that mile without stopping, not even once.


The full circuit around the rural block is two and a quarter miles altogether. Alternating walking and running for the duration of the distance has served sporadically as my workout for the past several weeks, a routine both exhausting and refreshing, not to mention conducive to the completion of an idea first conceived in June: to by the beginning of autumn be able to run the entire loop.

It is, perhaps, an odd agenda to set with the heat of the summer months and all its inflicted lethargy arrived in full force. If the reasons driving the goal centered around weight loss and muscular toning, there would be dozens of methods by which to achieve those ends, but those aren't what I'm chasing with one foot pounding after the other on a now-familiar stretch of macadam. To be honest, I'm not running for my body, not really. Step after step, heaving breaths coming fast against each other, pain convulsing the space just below my right lung—I'm running for my life.

Because there are times—far too many—when I go to bed asking myself if the coming day is worth the trouble of waking for it, and far too many times that morning and an awkward faceplant in a great invisible puddle of despair run parallel. I'm not all that good at the whole keep-on-keeping-on thing, not without a reason.

Because I cannot recall one instance in the past two years when I did not feel like an abject failure, groomed and doomed from the start to make nothing but a faltering wreck of my own life and perhaps the lives of a few others.

Because that two-and-a-quarter mile loop is not some vague and fluctuating end to be attained, like fluency in a language or writing well or professional-level piano playing, all of which seem more or less impossible depending upon the mood of the day.


If there is one thing that I am, it is uncertain. Halting. Terrified of anything I haven't unquestionably mastered—which makes it all the more horrific to face the fact that there is hardly a skill I have already obtained, but merely a vast list of things to in the future be developed and pursued.

I, who catalogue my worth as a person by goals successfully accomplished and deeds already done, have a track record of procrastination and inadequacy and failure stretched long behind me. Given the seemingly endless number of bad habits that need to be unlearned and replaced, let alone the ambiguity making of my once pin-pointed aspirations a dizzying kaleidoscopic array of options and obstacles and fears, the record is not likely to see any drastic adjustment in the near months (even years) of the future.

But for running.

Talk about the ideal short-term, concrete goal...

Even so, it is far more than the mere satisfaction of putting something definable behind me.

Every time I strike out on pavement and propel myself best foot-both feet forward, I remember that I'm wrong about the invariable bleakness of the future; about nothing but greater failure—or worse, mediocrity—waiting ahead; and most of all, about whether I can open my eyes the following morning and roll out of bed to work through the day. Every time I stagger back into the house sweat-slicked and trembling from exertion, I realise again that the pact with myself to overcome somehow all that weight of my own making is not a rare fantasy entertained when I am feeling particularly mellow but a tangible, real goal that might not look like what I presently imagine it to be but definitely can be achieved.

I remember that I can live.

That makes a two-and-a-quarter-mile stretch of pavement all that much more than the measurement of the distance of a mere run.



*title quote attribution: Lemony Snicket