Juxtapositioning

Sick no longer means sick. That’s sick.

Seething with a virus, I stumbled on to a series of airplanes the other day that took me from northwest to southwest. I coughed and tried not to blow my nose with too much proximity to anyone else, but after a two hour drive, a parking shuttle, an amble through security (which really was an amble and was eerily quiet), and a wait at the gate my inner energy reserves had become depleted and it was Time To Die.

Oh, figuratively. Whatever.

So I brought my virus to my friends, who are cheerfully helping me either feed or quash the little buggers, I’m not sure which.

I have been in bed two thirds of the time I’ve been here. I am a great guest. Quiet, they say. Go ahead, invite me to your house and see.

~~

If you spend any time on Urban Dictionary or listening to anyone who a) has a sleeve tattoo or b) is under 30, you’d know that “sick” has now taken on new meaning. Tell that to the Brits who think it’s a synonym for throw-up. But no, sick now means awesome, which is a word that no one who a) has a sleeve tattoo or b) is under 30 would ever say. Because it’s been replaced. So pay no attention to the arbitrary age screening devices here, it’s nothing personal.

Words are sick.

~~

There’s something awesome — er, sick — about being comatose in a strange bed where people are plying you with strange substances. You give up ownership of your body, your outcome, and just flow with the go. Like turning a dream inside out.

Highly recommended, though maybe with less coughing and nose blowing. Also I would like my sense of smell back, please.

~~

There are still deals to be had at the Tucson Gem & Mineral Show. To you it might be a bunch of rocks but to me it’s pieces of the planet.

Sick.

Just like an ordinary day

I have lost my pendulum, or it’s conveniently misplaced, so instead I decided to use a pendent I wear sometimes (when I can remember to put on jewelry). It’s a ceramic disk that hangs from a black cord. The disk is green and blue in a Celtic design and I can almost remember where I got it. Ireland? Maybe. Anyway, I asked it if it would stand in for my pendulum, which I rarely use anyway but prefer to use over my Tarot cards, which I never really got into despite having the beautiful Robin Wood deck.

The pendant said yes.

My questions tumbled out in a heap, and the pendent hung quivering, black cord taut. I calmed down and breathed and asked my questions slowly, one at a time.

I’ve been so tired. Tired and not caring and not sleeping. Not doing. Keeping the blinds closed, especially on sunny days where the slap stings — wasted sunlight? how dare I? — and I close my eyes and sink into the next hour and the next. Some days I eat, and some I don’t. Google calendar tells me when and where I must go, when it is absolutely necessary that I do.

I’m starting to avoid things, like Tai Chi. And people.

Someone who didn’t know me would point diagnostic fingers at me and hurl prescription meds in my direction, but I know myself. This isn’t that.

Last week I freaked out a little about the future and dependency and the next day 100,000 people just perished, just like that. The smoke of 100,000 hearts wisped up into the air while the dust of buildings and crushed bodies and  hopes of today, or tomorrow, or even the sun were blotted out in an eyeblink. And people texted money and wrote and got on airplanes and did something to keep from feeling the WTF and the OMG. And that day I knew that my day-before freakout was a premonition, a getting-ready, and I thought fine, well, you’re done now, you can get back to normal.

No.

I told my pendent-pendulum to get me the hell out of here. I’m done, finis, finito, kaput. Please.

Not that a pendulum that isn’t even a pendulum has any power like that.

Today I went to the beach. Sorry, not a sandy warm, sunny beach. My beach, one of them, is a tumble of lush volcanic flow, suspended in time where it once met the edge of the water. Rock, meet water. Water, meet rock. Hi. The sun was waning but still evident. I squinted at the sea birds rafting on the water’s surface, and closed my eyes and held my face to the light. Breathing. All the while, cells in my body are multiplying, changing, readying themselves for The Next Thing.

The next thing.

Not alone

The room was spare. The single bed, covered in a mauve quilt, was pushed against the wall. A gray and white stuffed dog sat atop the nearby dresser. A single, empty chair filled the space next to the bed.

The woman lay on her back with eyes closed and mouth open, her body slight under the quilt. Her breaths came hard, ragged, with spaces in between. The sound of her labors filled the room.

We quietly arranged ourselves on chairs we had brought for the occasion, facing the woman in the bed. She kept on with her breathing.

One of us whispered. “We’re here to be with you on your journey.”

Hearts lifted in song, quietly, softly.

Out. In.

Above her body, the woman greeted us, smiling, welcoming. We sang.

Others gathered above the woman’s body. A boy she had played with as a child. Family, friends. All her selves through the years. They crowded in above her, waiting. We sang.

Out. In.

We watched for the fall and rise of her chest, our notes matching a dwindling cadence. The people waited.

“I’m glad you’re here, ” the woman said to me. “No one else here can hear me.”

“It’s okay,” I told her. “This can be time. Look, they’re here.”

Out. In.

Our repertoire complete, we gathered our coats and chairs and left the now crowded room.

Out.

Oh, Haiti

Like many people whose eyes, ears, and fingertips are connected by the vast Interwebs, I heard the news of yesterday’s devastating Haiti earthquake via Twitter.

7.0. OMFG. I’ve been in a 5.5. I know that 6-point-something is pretty damaging. Every point-something is a factor of 10 in magnitude. So this 7.0, in a country where most people are painfully poor and (I imagine) live in the kind of rickety shack housing I’ve seen elsewhere in the Caribbean, is huge.

And it is. According to what little I have read (and I avoid TV news like the plague), 100,000 people could already have died. And the inevitable deaths from disease due to damaged water systems, lack of food and shelter, could raise the figure precipitously.

I am trying to figure out how I feel about this. What I feel.

In 2001, when we all saw surreal footage of airplanes flying into tall buildings that had become part of an iconic skyline, I felt something. That night I lay in bed and imagined helping herald 2000 confused souls into a warm light-filled embrace, and helping tens of thousands more through those first days of shock and outrage. In the days that followed, it became easy. All that shock and outrage got funneled into hating someone and something that someone else decided we should be hating anyway.

That’s how wars start.

But how do you hate an earthquake?

We can’t hate the earth, because it’s our home. It sustains us.

Less than two weeks ago I channeled information about people — many people — choosing to exit their earthly lives this year. In working with this kind of information, I try to remain a little distant and not feel the pain and grief associated with such an eventuality. When just one person dies, many grieve. I’ve protected myself from feeling that on a grand scale. My fear is that I’d be overwhelmed by the immensity of such pain on that large a scale. Many people transitioning? There are 7 billion or so on the planet now. A few thousand here or there doesn’t make much difference overall. Many people would have to be … many.

People.

100,000 beautiful, alive, loving people in Haiti died yesterday, ending lives that had love and pain and laughter and tears. And it wasn’t an ethereal Rapture, where they simply got lifted up into some alternate reality. No, a good many of these people likely died in pain. That’s twice as many people as live in the small city that is my home, and it’s pain that I am afraid to feel.

What is compassion?

I think about Haiti, just as I thought about the Christmas tsunami a few years ago. I hear a big ’should’ in my head. I should be feeling this, because I can. It’s my job, my livelihood, to tap into a global consciousness, or into the energy body of a single person. To me, it’s all the same.

And yet, I don’t.

Last night I approached a woman, older than me, who I knew had been having some physical issues. I asked how she was. I could see how she was, could see where there were energy blockages. I asked her permission to touch her, and I briefly touched points on her shoulders and down her back. I asked about her feet because I could feel immense pain there. I wept, not from the pain but from the sense of it.

I can feel pain without feeling it. Strange, that.

And yet I don’t go to Haiti. This makes me smaller somehow, less human, I fear.

Last night I also wrote a column in which I cried about some of my fears. Fears of my own fragility. In the light of the new day I can see that this was, in some way, an expression of my response to Haiti. I know we all process everything that comes into our being — from near or far, it’s all the same — through our personal perception lenses. That’s not being selfish, it’s being human. We can’t help it. So I transferred the cries of tens of thousands of throats into one cry from a single throat, crying, “Who will help me when I have need?”

I could rationalize that just as children are better off when you let them make their own lives and their own mistakes, that I should keep my virtual hands off Haiti and let things transpire there as they will. I am not Atlas and I cannot hold the world on my shoulders. I have trouble some days with my own piece of the world.

At the risk of sounding trite, or incomplete, I can love. In the end, that’s all any of us can do. For some, love will be a $10 donation to the Red Cross. For others, it’s being airlifted along with dogs and rescue teams to pull people out from under buildings. For still others, it’s prayer. And for others, it’s a blink in the daily crush of living. Who am I to determine which facet of love has more merit?

Ordinary

Yesterday we went for a walk. It was raining a little and I put my hood up to cover my hair, missing my favorite black beret that disappeared last week into The Land of Misfit Hats when the mighty wind blew and trees toppled. We wove our way through art galleries. I admired some pieces and took away new inspiration. There was nothing that needed to be bought, not even the beautifully-colored large glass octopus that called to me from its waterless perch. I turned my eyes quickly  away from a young woman’s impossibly large nose, even though she is probably accustomed to nasal scrutiny. A plate of untouched and drying  fruit stood near the counter.

We walked through a boatyard. Two signs: “Empty” and “Full,” with no other explanation, were posted on the side of the building. Instant art. We went around to the bayside after standing and studying the hundred-years old dog-drowning pool where Padden Creek meets the bay. No dogs now. We crossed the tracks and step-crunched mussel shells on the empty beach, singing improvised Irish drinking songs. I flipped the mitten-ends of my fingerless gloves over my fingertips against the cold coming off the water. An empty cruise ship stood in the bay.

Neighbors stoked the fire in the coffee house across the street when we came in bringing the cold of the bay with us. We watched the flames flare up and then die back down again while we talked in a sine wave of unremarkable connection.

Inhale, exhale.

Forest love song

It started two years ago (or was it two millennia?).  I rented a wee dollhouse in the forest space high above the rock-strewn beach of Pt. Roberts, WA, a tiny peninsula that juts from Canada into Boundary Bay and that because of oversight or a mapmaker’s joke actually belongs to the U.S., requiring border crossings and passports. My dollhouse-in-the-woods was to be the perfect writers’ retreat — difficult to get to, remote, quiet. I could overlook the tiny bathroom/shower combination, sit on the wee sofa built for two, and write.

I found myself drawn outside, though. Late-season blackberries still dotted the tangled vines marking the steep trail down to the beach. Beaches had to be walked. Driftwood and mollusk shells had to be examined. Photos of texture — some rocky, some pebbled, some wood-grained — had to be snapped. The ocean’s calm waves had to be gazed at. Forest trails had to be run through.

And I ran through the forest, marveling that every trail felt like it went downhill. I stood under tree canopies, with rain dripping gently over me through a leafy filter. I shuffled through ankle-deep drifts of maple leaves the size of dinner plates. I knelt reverently under the One Tree, its wide trunk belying its wisdom. I drank in the love of trees, of the forest.

Trees and forests like this don’t exist in Pennsylvania, where I was living at the time. After my ten days in the Pacific Northwest forest, I went back to PA and looked at the Blair Witch trees there. It wasn’t the same. My heart was with the tall mossy firs of the wet west.

Now I live a short walk from the forest. I ran the nearby trail the other day, taking in the heady scent of fallen leaves that reminds me of the smell of pumpkin carving, remembering. My forest runs are meditational. This one was filled with color — gold, deep crimson, and moldering deep wet green-black. An artist neighbor who makes colorful banners that decorate this part of the city with unexpected waving splashes of color made a banner in those colors exactly. It waves on a bamboo pole just opposite my livingroom window next to the wide tree across the street.

Matthew’s house is not far from another magical forest. We go there at night, when the walls become the world all around and the trees disappear into time. We sit under a big tree, melting into the rough bark, remembering when trees were our world, and feeling the slow sap heartbeat awaken within us. I hear whispers in that place, and the tall trees bend their branches down, inclining their regal heads, remembering.

OCD much?

It has recently been pointed out to me — not thrown in my face, since that would be, well, awkward, wouldn’t it? — that I might be a teensy bit controlling. The world “rules” was used, maybe even the phrase “lots of rules.” Repeatedly.

Ahem.

This may or may not be true.

But in visiting my house, there are a few things you should know.

1. Anything that touches or may possibly touch my naked or sleeping body (or the naked or sleeping body of anyone whose body may at some point touch any portion of my own), including but not limited to sheets, blankets, pillows, duvets, towels, and clothing of any kind (unless obviously dirty and therefore unwearable), may not also touch the floor without a complete tour through the entire laundry cycle.

2. Toilet seat lids shall stay down lest some wayward item befall a watery death, having instantly been rendered forever untouchable.

3. Hands that touch any part of me shall ideally have been washed within at least the past hour.

4. Cabinet doors, drawers, etc must be kept closed, not left standing open unless in active use.

5. All horizontal surfaces must be kept free from clutter, debris, and should ideally be lickable. However, lickable horizontal surfaces must immediately be cleaned after having been licked, should that occasion occur.

6. “Clutter” shall be defined as “anything not belonging directly to me”.

7. Floors shall ideally be vacuumed daily, or at least be free from discernible crunchy pieces that may be felt when stepped upon. Portions of floors left unvacuumed because they are under furniture may be left undisturbed at my discretion. Anyone other than me wielding a vacuum must of course leave no floor surface undisturbed.

8. Uncontained liquids (including but not limited to water, overexuberant cleaning splashes, and bodily fluids) in the bathroom or kitchen shall not be tolerated, especially on the floor or other horizontal surfaces.

9. The act of dusting shall not occur or be discussed except at infrequent and sporadic intervals, prompted by a suddenly obvious need to have all surfaces free from accumulated dust, in which case the dust freeing process must be completed immediately.

10. Foods descending rapidly and accidentally, if in the amount of a single bite or less, and especially if consisting of chocolate or anything crunchy and salty, to the floor and residing there less than six (6) seconds may be consumed, especially if no one else is present, at which occurrence the time constraint may be extended at my sole discretion. If this act is performed by someone other than myself, I reserve the right to prepare a facial expression that could be described as “mild sneer” and also to utter the single syllable “ew.”

See? No big deal, right?

My coming out story

When I moved to the house I’m living in, I made a decision. I would throw open my blinds, my heart, and my life to the outside passing-by world. No more hiding behind fears of being seen. I would challenge myself. I would join the rest of the world. For keeps.

Every day, I see the same people walking by. Sunglassed mothers pushing jogging strollers. The old woman in the plaid shirt-coat who walks as if she’s recovering from a stroke. The Steve Martin lookalike who wears the same royal blue shirt and iPod earbuds every day. The runner who sprints upright down the middle of the street, first this way and then that way, stopping at the end of the block to check his time. The Tuesday night dancers who gather to West Coast Swing across the street in the dance space at the coffee house there. The Wednesday morning family who picnics under the wide maple tree across from my living room. The Friday-night students carrying pizza and beer home to their apartments. My-neighbor-the-artist walking the howling dog-next-door.

And all of them see me, I imagine. They glance over at my window. I sit, writing, inside. My blinds, like my eyes and heart, lay open to the world.

It hasn’t been easy. I have darker moments, moments of doubt and fear, that cause me to twist my blinds closed. I want no one to see me, to see my pain, to know the twisted ugliness that lives inside me in those moments. I cringe at the sunlight outside, knowing I am wasting its preciousness by remaining hidden indoors, and knowing too that its brightness would expose my flesh to the elements and strip me bare, leaving my bleached bones in a dusty heap on the sidewalk for people to politely and hastily step over.

I had a dark time recently. The blinds remained closed for two days, or three. Sunlight blared outside, evil tendrils daring to enter through the cracks. Cars came and went. Mocking footsteps echoed from across the street where happy shiny people played and worked and loved. My heart swam in blackness, my thoughts oozed self-doubt. At last I could hide no more. Something outside called. I slunk invisibly to my car, sure to feel safe in its steely black embrace, and drove off. Immediately the assault began — sunlight! people! open space! — and immediately knew why some people become afraid to leave their homes. I was vulnerable. My powers of invisibility wouldn’t work. I was no longer safe within walls and was instead part of the wide skies. My body flew apart in a million directions, one limb, one cell at a time. I screamed in pain and then wept.

As the tears dried I could feel my body reforming. My hands were still on the wheel. I glanced in the mirror and saw a different face. I pushed on the gas pedal, feeling with quiet resignation my acceptance of the world around me. The walls came down. I was open again. I breathed the world in.

I sit now, observing the life outside my door. Mike, the mailman, just left something in my mailbox. The firetruck from around the corner just went by on its way back to base. A string of Buddhist prayer flags flutters in the tree across the street. In a moment I’ll go out and feel the sun gently warm my body, feel the wind on my face. Feel alive.

I hate your dog

Somewhere along the way I must have offended the Dog Gods, because dogs and I have had a hate-hate relationship all my life. And when I say I hate dogs, I don’t mean just any dog. I mean your dog.

Dogs have been pissing me off since I was a little kid. When I was three I remember walking down the block from the babysitter’s to the corner candy store to pick up a pack of candy cigarettes. I hated the flavor of these cigarettes — they were a horrid spearmint monstrosity with a powdery coating of cornstarch, not exactly kid-friendly if you ask me — but I adored sucking on them, always careful to let them hang out of my mouth at the proper angle, pink tip glowing, while I rolled up my sleeves and fixed the engines of cars, beat up other kids ,and hung around on streetcorners flicking my switchblade. I was a tough little kid, as tough as I could be while wearing pants that buttoned to my shirts. But walking back from the candy store clutching my sticky loot, I’d invariably encounter my Worst Enemy. A dog. Not just any dog, but a Big Dog. A dog taller than me, with sharp teeth nine feet long that glistened in the sun. That sort of dog. Your dog. And my biggest fear was that the dog could smell my fear from across the street, and run over to me and sink its nine-foot teeth into my leg in the soft place above my knee. I knew this would happen with the certainty that a three-year-old knows that cookies will never happen again and that all of them must be eaten today.

There’s a dog next door to me that I hate. He pokes his head through the curtains during the day when his people are gone, hooking one impossibly thin leg around a chair and staring suspiciously out at the world with his squinty eyes. He alternates this misanthropy with howling and whining, often for hours at a time, a sound that curls through our adjoining wall and pierces my eardrums with the compulsive obsession of a small, mostly white dog who has nothing better to do than terrorize his next-door neighbor with his shrill cries. I have often thought about slipping a flat poisoned sausage under the door while his people are away but I am certain such an act would be traced to me somehow and that forever more I’d be known as the Dog-Killing Lady and people, even people with cats, would shun me, slam their window blinds shut when I walked by and point stiff accusing fingers. So no poison. I send him psychic darts instead, hoping to hear little yelps from the other side of the room from time to time when he gets a particularly sharp one in the backside, but so far I have only succeeded in attracting looks of pathetic disgust from him whenever I walk past his window. Other people stop and exclaim, “Oh, how cute!” and take their cameras out, smiling at his droll antics, but for me he reserves his highest disdain. I hate him.

And if you walk any of the 4000 miles of trails within walking distance of my house, I hate your dog too. Because you are the person who watches your dog crapping and picks it up in a blue plastic bag designed expressly for this purpose. (NOTE: This brings to mind the following conversation: “What do you do for a living?” “Oh, I design dog poop bags. Want to see my portfolio?”) And you carefully tie the bag shut, safely enclosing your dog’s poop inside. AND THEN YOU LEAVE THE FREAKING BAG AT THE SIDE OF THE TRAIL.

I was curious about this phenomena and asked about it in my writer’s group.

“Oh, I know!’ said one dog owning writer (I hate her, too). “It’s so they don’t have to carry the bag around the whole walk. They leave it there and come back and pick it up on the way back.”

In a perfect world, this might be the case. But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world where I hate dogs. Your dog. And I see the blue poop bags lining the trails, adorning fence posts like a decoration gone horribly wrong, and I am convinced that 95% of people leaving their blue bags along the trail have no intention whatsoever to picking those blue bags back up on the way back, or ever.

Which begs the question, Why go to the trouble of feeling your dog’s poop in your hand — separated from your dog’s poop by a thin layer of plastic — to mummify it in a blue bag? You’re essentially polluting the trail; does it make you feel better to pollute using a non-biodegradable plastic bag?

Somewhere along the way, dogs figured things out. “If I act really stupid they’ll give me food and let me sleep on the bed and they’ll even pick up my poop! What a great life! I only have to give up my dignity!”

Cats on the other hand, always retain their dignity. They don’t need someone picking up their poop to assert their superiority. They can poop where they damn please, except it pleases them to also bury it. Cats are not stupid. They also have a functioning sense of smell, something that dogs apparently lack despite the pervasive misconception that dogs can smell.

I hate the way your dog smells. Even freshly washed, a dog will always smell like a … dog. They can’t help this. But I don’t want it near me, thank you. I realize that I not only have an over-developed sense of smell but also that I rely heavily on it when making decisions about people, but no. You dog smells. I hate your dog.

I particularly hate your dog when it’s off its leash. Leashes were designed to keep dogs and small children contained within a small space. Anchor the leash to the ground and dogs and children will soon tire themselves out from running endlessly in a circle. This is as it should be. Dogs off their leashes, like small children, are attracted to muddy puddles and smelling things. There is nothing I hate more than someone’s dog’s dog slobber swiped across my hand when I pass an unleashed dog on the trail. If you can’t fully contain your dog, either leave it at home or use a leash. And there’s a particular place in hell reserved for dogs who can’t be stopped from planting their noses in a person’s crotch. If you have a dog who does this, I can’t even speak to you at all. Or look at you. Please go away.

I would wax rhapsodically now about cats and their obvious superiority, but that seems like too contrived a direction for this post, don’t you think? We all pretty much know about cats — how they smell good almost all the time, a faint whiff of cat-spit and clean fur; how clearly intelligent they are; and how I can’t even think of a single cat I have disliked. Dogs I have liked? It was always grudgingly and half-heartedly, and they number less than the fingers on one hand.

But mostly I hate your dog.

There were no dogs harmed in the making of this post. Pity.

Local color

I’ve always enjoyed the places I’ve lived, at least until the worms began crawling out of the woodwork and infiltrating my brain with messages of malaise, causing me to long for U-Haul boxes and the feel of newspaper-wrapped dishes in my hands (I am very good at packing, ask anyone). But no place I’ve lived — and there have been many — has given me the utter joy I feel these days when I step out my front door and face west and the water and the sky and the islands beyond.

Oh no, I take that back. Colorado did that, too. The nightly sight of the Front Range silhouetted against the technicolor sunset sky never grew old in the year I was there, and I wept to leave it.

But this town is even better. I feel a part of the color here, not just a spectator. There’s a difference.

1. Yesterday we drove over the hill into the other part of town. A couple, neither young nor old, stood in the street near their car, talking. He was wearing pajamas. With penguins on them.

2. Today I saw a cat I didn’t know in my yard and then across the street in the shade of the wide maple tree. I opened my front door and called, “Here, kitty kitty kitty!” A woman stepped out of her car parked across the street and asked me if the cat was mine. Later I went over to talk to her; she’s homeless, waiting until she can move in with her son and his girlfriend. A handknit pink hat covered her frosted, over-processed, bleached blonde hair. She said that in parks, where she’s been spending her time, the animals have become her friends. Her name is Jeannie.

3. Matthew and I rode together on my motorcycle the other day. We drove past a strip-mall church. In the parking lot in front of the long low building there were about 8 policemen with bulletproof vests and what I guessed were automatic rifles. One gave a hand signal and they moved as a group toward the church, guns pointed in front of them.

4. The blackberries — which are everywhere, along every trail and path, coming up unbidden in every yard — ripen at different times. If you can brave the thorns and you keep going back every couple of days, there’s an endless supply for a few weeks.

5. The burritos here are the size of newborn babies, but taste much better.

6. You can swim in 60-degree water, sure.