Too much science

After years of repeatedly throwing herself headlong into a wall in fierce pursuit of her elusive muse, our heroine finally thought of a new tactic...sidle up on the muse quiet-like and slow, while reading a heavy textbook to avoid any suspicious look of creative yearning. Of course, the muse is a mythological being, and any real creative pursuit should focus instead on potent catalysts, sustainable fuels, and rich substrates. Consequently, the muse will become "saturated" with substrate and the initial velocity (v) of the catalyzed reaction will react a limiting value called the maximum velocity (Vmax). Goddamn overly fascinating textbook. Now, what was I saying?

Psyche

The soul is nothing,
My desperate self cast against emptiness,
and comes with its own physic,
a doll I prop up in my chair.

Mark,

Over twenty years ago you told me you believed that life spirals out in ten year cycles, each rotation bringing us not back to where we were, but to someplace very similar. I thought you were full of your usual bluster and bullshit and idiosyncrasy, but you were right. Every ten years, at the start of a new decade of my life, death visits. There are other landmarks I seem to pass about every ten years, but death once a decade is the most striking.

The first death in my life was my great uncle when I was ten. It was strange, surprising, and disturbing, but mostly unfathomable. I didn't realize before then that death could happen to someone I knew.

At twenty I faced my own mortality during 22 days in the wilderness of the North Cascades. By day I slogged and hauled my weak and weary flatlander bones up and over dozens of stunning, awe-inspiring, soul-searingly beautiful mountain passes and summits. By night I shivered in my sleeping bag and dreamed of falling endlessly into the void over razor-blade shale and tumbling boulders. Life by day, death by night. In the final week of the trip, I spent three days fasting in complete solitude under the shelter of pine trees laced with sun-gilt gossamer, rich humus smell of dirt for sustenance and cold babbling creek to slake my thirst. On the third day my mind and heart slowed down to the resonance of the place and I saw that there was no need for gods. Life was enough.

At thirty, I almost died. I came close enough to sense the void again, but this time I was under cold fluorescent lights, my skin was clammy and greenish from septic shock. I was run down from weeks in Thailand and Myanmar, living like the indestructible globe trotter I never was. My family was summoned and came from the four corners of the world to see if I would survive that first night. On some level I didn't. Any illusions I had about my own permanence or importance were lost when I discovered that there is no fighting death. It bloomed in my chest and raged in my blood, and I was not even conscious most of the time. I suffered and emerged and could take no credit for my fortune.

When I was forty, death took my mother. As she breathed her last, and my gaze drifted out the window to the great Red Cedar tossing its boughs in the wind, I felt the pull of the void again and said, "I'm not coming with you, mom, not yet. I've got kids to raise and a life to live." Mom gives us rainbows whenever we meet, my brother and me. She really does. The first was just before her memorial when we met at her favorite beach on San Juan Island. It was a strange feather of rainbow, high above the beach in the middle of the clear blue sky.

After each of these passes, I felt like I'd been cut loose from whatever it was I had been thinking my life was about. I felt untethered and terrified, but also inspired, magical, like anything is possible. It's like being on a plane, and seeing that there is nothing I cannot leave behind. Gravity itself seems like an illusion. Art pulls at me then. I get very creative, poetic, strange and deeply alive, but it doesn't last. I always choose love over art. There are no other options, and I don't have the mind for both.

It's been two years since mom died, and I am trying to hold on to the depth and inspiration her passing brought me, but the days get lost in love and family. I can't maintain the weightlessness.

Like the new look? The old white type on black background was doing a number on my old eyes, so there ya go.
It's a soggy, droopy drip of a sunday here in B'ham. I'm sewing a McGonagall costume to wear for my second son's Harry Potter birthday party next weekend. It ain't half bad. Next I must transfigure my spouse into Snape. It's a bit of a stretch, but I think we can pull it off.
I'm also baking a peach pie to fool my stepdad into thinking I've cooked him a great meal this evening, when it will really be leftover ham made into simple pasta carbonara with garlicky lacinato kale and some glazed carrots.
I comfort myself with all this domesticity. I went to a Bat Mitzvah yesterday. It was the first time I ever set foot in a synagogue, and it was lovely. The synagogue itself was simple, small, lovingly and sensitively cared for. I already knew a large percentage of its members. Somehow all my friends and neighbors in Bellingham seem to be Jewish. It all kind of made me wish I was. Maybe it wouldn't matter that I've lost the ability to believe in the old patriarch if I could still go through the rituals of caring and participating in the passages of life and community. The Bat Mitzvah was a perfect ritual to honor a young woman. She had the opportunity to teach a lesson from a bit of Torah reading that was assigned to her. She chose to interpret the lavish promises and dire warnings of Moses at the side of the Jordan as warnings to us not to trash our world. Hers was a strident environmentalist message, similar to the one I'm often guilty of assaulting people with. She was heard and rewarded with praise for her thoughts and beliefs and wisdom, though she is only 13. What a profound honor for her. It was sincere and loving and very inspiring. It made me wonder what sort of coming of age ritual my kids might have with their non-believer parents. I formulated the ingredients in my ideal coming of age ritual: a course of study or physical trial to develop a sense of accomplishment, a mentor, a community service project, a ceremony, and a celebration. All of these were parts of the event I witnessed yesterday. I suppose a secular version wouldn't be hard to create, but what community would gather to support this offspring of atheists? I guess the Unitarian Universalists are always game.
It's all so much harder when you can't just work from a template. Why bother? Because the self-confidence, determination, and support that young lady earned yesterday will carry her far in this world, with or without the vengeful deity dude.

This one didn't photograph well. The camera kept correcting my colors. The blue is really darker and colder, and the sky is distinctly more strange. I might try again with fancy manual settings, but I'm not optimistic.

Disillusioned

I’m missing something. That’s why I keep trying to make contact with you, old friend. In the still moments of my days, I start to panic, casting around for something to engage me...a book, a song, something to learn, something to do, because I feel adrift. I think you know what I mean. Something about losing my mom a couple of years ago set something in motion, some chain of reasoning I couldn’t stop, and it left me with no god, no father, no mother, no connection to my past, no sense that I am connected at all, to anyone but my kids, and sometimes my spouse. It isn’t grief, nor is it some cynical or depressive pose. I don’t feel sad, I just feel very compact and a bit too light, like an astronaut without a mother ship. I float, see? I am a little too aware of how alone we all are, really, too aware of how fragile and brief it all is, and I don’t know what to do. This isn’t what I thought mid-life would be like. I thought the way I’d feel about my husband and kids would be similar to the depth, the all encompassing immersion I felt in the family of my childhood. It wasn’t all good. I remember inventing a father for myself, and cramming my brief encounters with my real fuck-up drunk of a dad into that ill-fitting mold. It fit, then, and I didn’t call him anything but dad. I loved him. I remember my mother, her love and her need and her never ending ill health. I always feared that she would leave, but I never really thought she would. I remember my magical grandmother. I thought I could carry her magic forward in my own life. It’s harder than it looks. I remember god. I remember being moved to tears by the certainty that some larger than life parent figure would always love me and guide me. I remember myself, all talent and faith and possibility. I actually thought I was special, arrogance of a youth that lasted way too long, apparently. So what do you do when you finally understand? Pick up and carry on? Is that it? Is there no way to make the present feel as convincingly solid and real as the past? Even the past has lost its solidity, like a play after you’ve watched the set come down and the actors come out without their makeup and costumes. I guess I’m disillusioned.

On a Roll

So far, today has been delicious. I got my kayak out for the first time in almost a year. I injured a shoulder in February, and it has continued to be painful ever since. Despite that, I hauled my boat on and off the van and into the water with minimal help, and felt fine paddling. It was perfect paddling conditions in the bay...warm and smooth and still. I put in at Marine Park and paddled south past herons and eagles and the occasional school of fish to Teddy Bear Cove. I was hoping to see a hooded nudibranch in the eelgrass. I'm sure they were there, but I didn't see any. I love being on the water. It is such a strange thing to ride on the sloping shoulders of a heaving, teeming, thoroughly inhuman world. Sometimes the surface deflects my curious gaze like a mirror, then a swell rises in front of me and as it slopes upward I can see right through, as if there were no barrier at all. It is hypnotic and rhythmic and seductive. I'm scared to death of it sometimes. An acquaintance died in that water this year, on a sunny day, paddling with a friend.

Now I am alone, a very rare treat. My husband and kids are all at the theater. I could listen to loud music and dance...I could veg in front of something really worthless on the tube (I never do that, but I miss it occasionally)...I could bake something celebratory for my two little actors who are performing at said theater...I could sleep...I could draw or paint.... Whatever I'm going to do, I'm not telling you!

I guess I do feel like blogging

I went dancing with a friend recently. It was the first time I've gone out to dance in a full decade, and it was insane...wild, slightly drunken, deliriously joyful fun. The band was, reggae with a very contemporary sound and big energy. In the weeks that followed, a poem percolated up through the gray matter (look to the upper left), and I found myself daydreaming, doodling, and scheming as I did before I had kids. Cool, thought I, there's still a kernel of my original self under all this efficient maternal hooha. Then, a month or so later, I hear from Jeff, of local comments fame (see below). This, o best beloved, is of gravest significance because Jeff does not know that I was ever less than fascinating. He knows that I was a distinctly dysfunctional artist and girlfriend type person, but he and I lost touch once I committed myself to wifedom and motherhood. Poor Jeff is a busy man, way too busy to delve far into the waters of rekindled friendship or even introspection, but I could just box up a big mess of kisses and UPS them to him for contacting me again because he has sparked yet another smoldering flame in my soul furnace ( and he gives great creative advice). I may be becoming a touch manic in my old age, but I prefer to think I am just reaching my creative and intellectual prime, and not a minute too soon. I cling to each ember and pray for critical mass. Stick around and watch, won't you?

My three rugrats

long time no blog

Hello Jeff, Thanks for reminding me I was once, briefly, a blogger. Not sure I want to maintain the habit, though. I'll have to think about it. I mean, really, do I want to share my innermost thoughts, or even my outermost ones with the world at large? If I do, is it right for me to wantonly waste the time of whomever might stumble upon my ramblings? Maybe I should. I have so many thoughts, and they often seem important to me. Perhaps a blog is a measure of the worth of ones thoughts. That's a scary one, that is.

Kisses and fond memories....Wraitch