CertainlyUncertain's Xanga

Monday, May 29, 2006

Mon, 29 May 2006 01:54:19 GMT

Stayed up with Doodlebug all last night because she had a high temp and was throwing up. Later this evening right before sunset it was cool enough and she felt well enough to come outside and blow bubbles. I had to keep reminding her to blow downwind so she could watch them blow into the sky or down the street. sometimes the wind itself would carry them away wo she would try to comman the wind - and I would say "the wind is big and you are quite small, you can't command the wind to come at will, just to blow your bubbles." "But you can, huh, Me Ma." "No, even I'm much smaller than the wind. The wind is beg enough to make tornados. Only God is big enough to boss the wind , not me."

And the old Spanish guy across the street turned from looking down the street and looked across the street at me - and I wonder what he thought at what I was teaching my grandchild about the wind and the bully bird the other birds were trying to drive off the block every day -

and about the quiet that descended on the street when the birds settled down and the wind died to let you know the sun was just about to set -

that maybe I wasn't just this single woman sitting on the porch trying to catch a man but watching the birds and keeping a weather eye out and watching the grass and the dust and the way the children grew.

So late this evening - I mean late, like 11:30, the other women were out to, sitting on the porches with their children - in the cool of the weekend - letting them ride their big-wheels, and chattering in the sway of the whispering elms and listening to all the evening trains run. And the men weren't playing the radios so loud - and just maybe this can be a neighborhood for families - for children - for people - where it is safe out at night and we watch out for each other - just maybe.

Insomnia and Strange Movies that make me cry

Fri, 26 May 2006 04:46:15 GMT

I swore last night I was going to get to bed on time because my new summer job of watching kids - of creating a kid safe, kid friendly, kid creative house was going to begin and I really needed some deep sleep because I have had little rest and my emotions have been very raw - but these wierd movies just keep appearing on the sundance channel - or I have strange dreams - it is either one or the other - and I wake up crying or cry so hard that I have to go sit outside on the porch at three am and stare at the corner street lamp in my yard that back lights the leaves on the elms and makes them shimmer soft silver green as they whisper in the wind and I hear all the night trains go by one after the other, and I lose count of how very many there are - and I watch my insomniac neighbors peak out their windows to see if it is just me sitting out on the porch with my dog buddy again -

and I swear that one night I'm going to come out with a huge piece of black or dark gray paper and do a pastel of the street at night with the corner lamp and the back lit trees and wish somehow I could capture that sound of the train and the neighbors checking to see if it is me, and buddy sitting so still and erect with his square nose stairing off into the dark as I keep wiping my streaming eyes and my raw cheeks.

And I don't know why this damn movie got to me so much. I wish someone would tell me why.

And why I keep having dreams of coming home walking on the highways of I-40 and they are torn up under construction and I am hauling myself up hand over fist pulling myself up over ropes over huge concrete blocks.

Or on one huge cement road I was carrying a white crane on my arm - who kept fluttering it's wings - and I would pass groups of native americans who would hold up corn or squash or the lids off of hollow pumpkins as a salute as they silently passed me on the other side on their way to Oklahoma.

Or the one where I narrowly made an escape from the man camp where David worked in he artic by disguising myself as a nun with a habit whose headdress was make out of white paper towels, and I see myself leaving from the back - and all my relatives are arriving there to live as I am making my escape from there to live here. They are going to the frozen place and I am narrowly making my escape disguised as a nun though it condemns me to a lifetime of celibacy and isolation.

And I am still alone - but at least no one can find me or be there to shame me or trap me or condemn me but myself. And the journey is my own because I have gone a route to hard for anyone to follow - maybe that is why all of the movie was so painfully familiar - but maybe I was also grieveing that part of the movie that contained the home movie of the devastation it caused, the intimacy with my children - the joy I once truly did know - the ability to relax and have a voice and a personality and to be truly happy and bring out the joy in someone else. I hope this part is starting to show up again, with the children I now watch and the time I am finally beginning to spend with my grand kids.

Two Threads

Fri, 19 May 2006 02:25:48 GMT

I have two threads of conversation running through my heart constantly these days. They remind me when I used to play Pasacaglia out of Anna Magdalena Bach - because it always sounded like a conversation.

One part of me is grieveing all the losses and sorrows and feels shoved aside because noone has the patience or time for me while I'm going through this - yet I feel as devastated as anyone having gone through a major disatster. It has affected my diabetes and my Bi-Polar - yet even my daughter says "all you lost is stuff." not realizng that it is "stuff that holds memories of even her since she was the age of her own chldren and it is like having my mind and heart erased, or held hostage somewhere - like when the jews lost all their things and are just now - decades, decades later, having them given back to their grandchildren. It isn't just stuff - it is the legacy with parts of our souls mprinted on it, part of our energy.

Yet another part is thinking of how I always admired the monks nuns of the different contemplative traditions - and of the mercy works - and of the Bhuddists traditions - and of the stripping down and taking on the vows of poverty and spending time in meditation, contemplation, prayer and good works

to be shriven of all that is not necessary till there is truly room for God - and now there is noone watching or caring if I let go and just followed God - because I've always felt that ull -

yet when I was young that calling seemed like an echo of diving romance - and now after years of finding romance so disheartening and disapointing - I wonder truly what diving romance with God would be like - because I reread all the texts and memoirs of the contemplatives and read the painful parts and it doesn't sound romantic at all - it sounds like life and relationship as with anyone else except it is with God with much different results -

I feel like Profrock in T S Eliots poem - well dressed, going from one erudit conversation to another yet not able to make that divine leap into what is truly remarkable.

Afraid of being afraid of what is truly fearful and full of awe.

Hmmmm....

And You Would Say?

Thu, 18 May 2006 20:07:27 GMT

I was wondering about this voluntary silence thing - almost like contemplatives, yet almost like a punishment. I wonder if oblates often go in for sometimes the same underlying reason?

But if you don't have to put your words out there for others to crash down on such as "Be sweet." "Be Kind" "Why do you let them run over you like that" "Why do you let them buffalo you?" "Don't act like that, my friends live in this town." "We must be harder on ourselves than we are on others." "Why are you so hard on yourself?"

Paradoxes out of the same mouth till you don't know whether you are coming or going and still at 45 you don't understand the rules.

So if you kept quiet and didn't offer anything out - what are you saying inside. You. yourself. You at 13, 23, 33, 43, 53, 63.

One time I thought I had multiple personality disorder until I realized that all of the people we were never go away and talk all at once, with all their beliefs - talking among themselves. They each have their own kinds of wisdom and irrational fears.

What are they saying that we need to listen to without being fogged up by what everyone else is saying. If we don't listen to them - how do we know to rest easy we've been listening to everyone else instead of listening to the all of us's, giving them what we always wanted - just for one day - a truly listening ear.

Maybe giving them each a day to do what they love best. Not all in one week but spread out so they all have delicious time to think about it and plot and plan.

Mmmmmm - - -sounds like hope and a letting go of expectations and just being.

Exile or freedom?

Thu, 18 May 2006 19:07:22 GMT

Leaving my husband with nothing but the clothes on my back and a few precious things - leaving a 3 floor house and a huge income to very little money and a small cracker box with unregulated heat and cold - has been harder and more devasting than I imagined. Though he had the affairs - I feel like I'm the one being punished - and he acts like I deserve everything that is happening to me.

I swing between so many feelings, anger, rage, despair, acceptance, joy, determination, - till my body just wore out and I have spen a week in bed sleeping day in night with high blook sugars and a major kidney infection and a sense of isolation so profound - a belief, maybe excerbated by the ill health - that I shouldn't cll anyone or speak to anyone ever again but should just keep to myself because I was just too damaged and disruptive because of my pain and my pain and anger leaked out even when I was trying to be polite in public and I just should stay away.

It felt like Exile. It felt like being isolated like some kind of toxic substance.

But then y whole life I've waited for a time like this - a time when noone called or cared what I was up to all day and my life was thinned down to the bare minimum - and all I had to concentrate on was getting my writing an school-work done and working on my art - letting the hidden part of me that noone else but me seemed to care about come out.

Noone stops by, noone calls, noone even knows when I leave the house or come home. I think the dog and I could get in the car and take trips to Quitique or other places I've loved and noone would even know I've gone.

All these rather normal things I read about in the books I've loved that the rest of my family found strange - except for my children - I could just go do and noone would be the wiser. I could train buddy to get used to riding with me in the car all the time - and get him used to staying right by my side when he goes with me - because frankly, he feels like he is in exile, too.

I have to remember all the famous solitary women I wanted to emulate. Georgia O'Keefe, Willa Cather, Annie Dillard, . . .

They say middle age is when women come into their own - maybe because all of a sudden we are invisible so noone notices what we are doing because they think our jobs are over?

Who We Are Instead

Tue, 16 May 2006 07:19:56 GMT

It has been a hard couple of months wondering if I'm crazy or if everyone else is. No matter where you go, there you are, and no matter where you go, the culture has it's set stereotypes of what women are supposed to act liek - at least in public - in private is your own business, unless you are in a really small community or your family is really close knit and then who you are and act like seems to be everybody's business. But it isn't an excuse. I'm learning that we no longer have the excuse to play that victim game. After a certain age it is up to us to choose. We do have choices and how other people react is their business. We have to choose which consequences we want - the consequences of being brave enough to accept who we truly are and acting that out with patience kindness and tolerance and having the same towards the people around us - or accepting the consequences of living our lives towards the dictates of others.

And it is a bitch. it really is. It is - as a friend of mine once said - like getting used to wearing your coat backwards and shoes on thour hands for awhile.

At this stage I'm haveing to learn athat I am often like a wounded porcupine asking for help but if someone comes near out go my quills

That it is okay to be fierce and beautiful and intelligent and tender and compassioante all at once.

That once I heard a man describe how when he got back from Nam he realized eh had like killing too much and I realized I knew an anger and a rage that deep inside of me and that I had moved fromt he victim stage to that anger and that I realized that was why I was isolating and not callign or visiting anyone because I felt liek a dangerous person - not that I would physically hurt soeone - but I remember my mother my whole like sayign I had a toungue like a double edged sword and no-one could win a fight with me - and that even growing up she controlled me with silence (oh, the silence of that woman was like walking into a meat locker - the froaen shoulder comment was made for her- but between her father and raising me - it was the only defence she had i guess)

So when you ar edeeply compassionate and deeply angrey all mixed up with an amazing tongue - what do you turn to? Isolatin and deep silence. Is this my thirty days in the desert? Is this my days of temptations and cleansing and making way for the coming of the Lord?

Is this my Dark Night of theSoul?

I get here so often.

When it seem God has made you so Fierce and sometimes Beautiful and sometime Crazy and often Bright and always compassionate

What do you do with that - where does that energy go when youought to wear a t-shit that warns

"Doesn't Play Well With Others"

Saturday, May 13, 2006

Sat, 13 May 2006 20:50:19 GMT

Sometimes I think it really helps to be tired in life - to have woken up after having a couple of months from too much stress and to have to collapse in a couple of days sleep - and then to wake up still tired but receptive in a very still room with no tv or music, and then your soul and God catch up with you at the same time - and you find out what parts of the struggles you took on that were not yours, and which parts were.

and you grow from it all.

I'm finding that nothin from the past can hurt you once God transforms it - not in a way that kills you but that makes you a witness, helps you bear witness to say what in this lifetime is given you to say.

What has been given you to say? What has been given me to say? Are we following the timing God is giving us?

Not always, never perfectly. We bungle along. But it happens - and healing and hope if we let it. but never perfectly.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 02:42:46 GMT

Am just getting the hope back that it is time for me to start writing again. Maybe this time I will be able to go beyond the personal and onto other topics - explorations that will flesh out essays that will be more than mental and emotional angst or self-pity.

I've been listening closely to people and surroundings and tasting and looking and feeling with my skin and my tongue and the membranes of my eyes and the insides of my nose - and smelling with my eyes, ears and nose - that incredible way they all tie together - that sensory acuity that makes everything - even the bitter, worthwhile, because it tells me what is valuable. What is merely inconvenient and uncomfortable and what is truly tragic. This year there has been a lot of that for a lot of people - but I don't think so for me.

Yet there is the rumbling of the volcano 8 hours south of here. It may come my time yet.

Friday, August 19, 2005

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 18:20:03 GMT

Going crazy lately. Going sane, also. Just hit my one year of sobriety on the 8th of August and my 45th birthday on the 15th of August. I was sick the month before and felt time was slow slow slow and the world and people whirled past me at a breakneack speed and I just wanted to yell at them to stop because they were missing so much. But now I am back in that vortex - and I want back to where I was without being ill - with being whole in body and soul. I want to stop this moment - to take a long pause - to have time to gather wool and moss and even drier lint if I have to hang out and hide in my laundry room just for respite so my thoughts can clear and deepness can ooze up, that deep rich silence that comes with wisdom in it.

I miss that because that is when my best drawing or sanity or listening comes from - that stillness - when I seem to forget myself and just am still as a tree or a chair - or stone.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 06:10:25 GMT

Buggle's was holding a clear box in her hands - and her eyes were all puffy from crying - and I thought "Oh no - separation tantrums have arrived." And they had. Buggles had a frog or toad - we weren't sure which - that her sister had brought for her to see - and she wanted to keep it. Not just observe it and let it go.

I told her that she could never catch enough bugs for the creature to eat because it had to eat as many as it was big every day. "But how do they keep the ones in the stores alive?" I'm not sure - but this is a wild one and isn't used to being in a box. It doesn't know you love it - and it would be like a great big God showing up all of a sudden and scaring you half to death."

That reasoning had her going for about 5 minutes because she was sure if she let this one go her mother would buy her one from the shop. But of course - that wasn't going to happen. There were already at least five adults and four small children next door all the time - and a big German shepherd. And one small frog - even a teeny tiny one - would just be too much because Buggles would probably insist on taking it out all the time even though she would Promise , I mean Promise not to - and the frog would slip between her fingers and might just get squished with everyone trying to catch it or end up down the dog's throat - so Buggles had to be told "No' - and to Buggles - that word today was just to, to hard. She couldn't bear it. She heart so hard inside she felt like someone was pounding inside her to get out with a rock - inside her chest and her head - and she couldn't stop crying no matter how hard she tried she just had to have the frog so so bad.

But I walked up to her and I said - Buggles - I know you hurt - It hurts not to get the things we want - when we know how much we love them. Everyone older seems mean. But really - Frogs are made to be outside. So I brought you some honey made from flowers like the ones by that tree there - the fireweeds - and if you let me have the frog - I'll let him loose there where it is nice and cool and damp and he can dig in the mud if he wants and there are tons of bugs - and every time you taste this honey - you will remember we let him go by the flowers by the tree. Okay?" "Okay"

"You want to name him?"

"Henry"

"Okay, kiss Henry, and give him to me and I'll let him go - and you can ask your mother if you can have honey on toast for desert."

And so her day went lots better. Of course she sat on the fallen log by the tree looking for Henry till night came - but kids will be kids. And she never did find Henry.