Juxtapositioning

Past Blast

I’m holding a ring in my hand. Actually I’m not really holding it, since to type and hold simultaneously would be awkward, difficult, and likely result in larger than the usual number of typos. But I was holding it a minute ago. It’s large, gold and has a royal blue stone in the center. The ring isn’t mine, yet it’s been in my possession for more than 30 years.

The ring belongs, in my opinion, to someone else. It was given to me once as a symbol. That symbol connected to things. Promises. But life got blacker and I fell down a rabbit hole and drank a potion making me small. The ring grew too large to fit my finger. It wasn’t mine. That life wasn’t mine. I didn’t know what my life was then — not at 17 — but I knew what it couldn’t be. So I ran.

The first thing they tell you in Life School is that running doesn’t help. I missed that day.

It occurred to me, three weeks ago when through a series of events the ring’s owner became a real person who, inexplicably, lives not far from me — what are the odds?? of all the places on this planet! — that the running finally caught up with me. Here were things I haven’t wanted to see in 30 years (yet surfaced continually anyway), and now they were in my back yard.

Today we had lunch.

I tried hard not to have expectations. Expectations can ruin things. I know that much. Expectations either good or bad. Or in between. I tried, actually, not to think about it at all. When I caught myself thinking about it anyway I returned my thoughts to the present. What am I feeling now? Weird and awkward. Like I am 15 again.

This is sounding like there is romance here. I’m not seeing that, no. But there are memories. And a sense of continuation of something that was begun. Not down the path begun once, but a different path. I have met with people from my distant past before and there has been a feeling of warmth, of connection, of familiarity-yet-not.

Lunch was pretty good. Better than expected. It started this morning with a phone call that startled me with recognition of a voice that spoke to me from hours spent in a green-walled kitchen, lying on a black faux-leather sofa, yellow touch-tone phone glued to my ear.

I’m still filled with feelings. A lonely scared child in a woman’s body. Snips of pictures, words, one after another like waves crashing on rocks. What might have been but wasn’t. What was instead.

The message is that there is something to take from this. Something to take and a lot to let go of. I felt the rumblings three weeks ago when I lay awake one night in panic, feeling the volcano trembling underneath. I feel them still, closer and less frightening. I can lay open the doors, gates and walls bolted down so long ago. It’s just a dragon, after all. Nothing to be frightened of.

I channeled once that this relationship, my first, lay the groundwork for all that came after. I saw that, felt bound by it. Now I see it doesn’t have to be that way. Patterns are reversible; plaid turns into paisley. Undo what was done. Create something in its place. This opening, then, is a gift.

2009 in the rear-view mirror

A year ago I had just moved from a country that didn’t want me to a bare echoey white place hidden under a stifling canopy of tall dark trees. I adore trees, and loved lying in bed looking at green branches, but the bare echoey place had an inner emptiness that rang loudly in my ears.

Plus it had weird carpet.

In the spring I discovered forested trails and alternate universes. I sat, motionless, sometimes for hours, staring out through a skylight and eventually emerging into a giddy, childlike state, a person who thought lakes were oceans and wondered whether she should be driving real cars.

A year ago I had a job, a sort of a job, a full time gig for part time pay, plus a promise of a someday full time pay for the time I was putting in, so I wrote and I wrote and I edited and I wrote my little heart out. In February that world exploded and it limped along through May, and then I was done. No job, no pay.

I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane and found my way through a maze of fears. Later, a motorcycle fell on me.

In June I moved to a smaller place near the water and near the trails and across the street from a banyan tree and in a community. The Magic Bus drives up from time to time and takes people places. I look out my tiny window and see a slice of ocean. The place isn’t hidden, is sometimes a fishbowl with the world looking in, but it fits me better. I have an easel and paints, and I write. The sun shone on this place and now the rain falls gently on my sari-clad zen room and my bicycles smile through their gears.

In July my intentions caught up with the world.

In August I brought my heart-pieces closer and together we walked my world, now theirs. We ate 18 pounds of blueberries. We laughed. We parted with new paths woven between us.

I discovered a box.

Summer tumbled into autumn and soon the bright crunchy leaves became dank and moldering and slick underfoot. Outward turned inward. Not being a joiner — ever — I joined and joyed. I sang. I found a home, at least for now.

Now, inward, I sing. I joy. I raise silent lips in inner song, singing my heart into wholeness. I breathe and become one with my heartbeat, and with yours. I walk and feel aliveness in the dirt under my soles, in each sparkling raindrop on my face, in each leaf and sound and sigh. I touch hearts and they touch mine.

What do I wish for 2010? More. More of what comes next.

Hello Kitty is 35

This is as full of awesome as it gets.

Who knew that an 80′s icon would survive this long? Now Hello Kitty is ironic. Depth of flavor.

Let’s examine some other 80′s icons, and find out whether they slipped quietly into ex-iconic obscurity, or became ironic-iconic. Shall we?

Boy George. Jumped the shark. Sorry, Boy. Now you’re old and creepy.

Breakfast Club. Timeless. Does it help that director John Hughes has died? Do we feel older now? Will you recognize me? Call my name or walk on by?

The A-Team. Oh, come on. You can hum the theme song, can’t you? It doesn’t get more retro-cool than that, especially considering I avoided this show like the plague when it was running. Some things just become a part of you by osmosis.

Madonna. Does something smell like shark in here? Shark with a lot of excellent plastic surgery? And a faux English accent?

Optimus Prime. Wow. Did you see that? You just sat up straighter. A little taller. That’s the effect of Optimus Prime. Even now. I am Optimus Prime, and I send this message so that our past will always be remembered. For in those memories we live on. (Nah, I never watched this either.)

David Lee Roth. Ol’ Diamond Dave was jumping over sharks before there were sharks. Instant kitsch! He’ll be cool again in about 10 years, when we’re sure he’d break a leg or pull a groin muscle. Right now he’s in that in between stage, where you can’t help but just … look … away.

Spuds McKenzie. I can’t even comment. The memories are just too painful.

All the pretty little horses

At 6, given a shiny penny to throw into the tinkling fountain at the mall we visited once a year in order to buy school clothes, I knew exactly what to wish for. I closed my eyes tight, imagined the elegant, stately horse I knew would be mine one day, and threw the penny into the water, feeling that odd mix of anticipation for something wonderful happening someday and regret for having thrown something valuable away.

At 7 in the car, we’d pass horses sometimes. Living in what was once a cowtown and now was an emerging bedroom community of physicists and engineers and their kids, we were surrounded by empty golden fields dotted with scrubby tiny-leafed live oak trees, fields that were lined with tumbling barbed wire fences and sometimes contained horses instead of cows. And if there was a white horse, that meant a wish. I saw no irony in wishing FOR a horse when wishing ON a horse — after all, wasn’t that natural? Didn’t everyone want a horse?

At 8, I started seeing my power. I was awarded the opportunity to spend two weeks with horses that summer, in an all-day camp. Horses in the morning, crafts in the afternoon. Disappointment was huge when I was assigned the camp’s only mule — not a horse — to learn to care for and ride. Sure, I was the youngest there but I couldn’t help but feel my horse had been taken from me. Sitting astride my mule’s short back, his sharp spine a deterrent to bouncier gaits like galloping, I looked upward at the girls dashing about on spirited mounts. Someday.

At 9, another magical thing happened. Once a week I’d leave right after school and be driven far in the wrong direction to a former chicken ranch that was now where a woman taught horse riding lessons. We’d ride around the ring learning to change gaits, make turns, and understood that if we kept this up long enough, we could learn to jump. After a few months I was taken to a western shop where I had to choose plain and simple (cheap) amid all the sparkly rhinestone western shirts, pants, and hats — I was getting duded up to be in a show. Showing Western Pleasure and Equitation, I received no colored ribbons, as I had imagined doing, and never understood what other riders did better than me. It was a blur of horse and rider and loudspeaker’d voice and people’s faces watching us go around and around.

At 10, the ultimate. Pepper was an ornery pony, at least that’s what the unpleasant beefy man, the friend of my mom’s alcoholic Austrian friend said. Everyone had an opinion. But I loved Pepper and wanted to ride him, even though he was just a pony. Pepper gave way to Copper after a few weeks. Copper was large, plodding, solid, but he had some get up and go. The first time I rode him off by myself, I fell. I took him to the large grassy field behind the nearby Church of the Latter Day Saints. Copper spied a small fence and ran toward it, convinced he wanted to jump over it. I couldn’t turn him away from the fence. He jumped, and immediately came back to see why I had fallen off. He looked contrite and I forgave him. We had Copper for 7 years.

At 11, Copper got a friend. Dusty was small and neat, an Appaloosa with no discernible spots, with a bushy stand-up mane like a zebra’s. Dusty had a mind of her own. I took to riding her, deciding to ride saddleless and bridleless. Saddles hurt my knees and bridles were yucky to put on the horse (it was the sticking a finger in the horse’s mouth to get him to open up for the bit), and I imagined Dusty’s pleasure at being ridden by me,  a small light person who didn’t knee her in the belly in order to tighten a cinch. Dusty lived with Copper in a rented field that grew only dust, and ate alfalfa that we kept stacked in the old barn, a remnant of our town’s cattleman past. On weekends I’d ride my bike the two miles to get there, smelling barn smells of hay and dust and old wood, digging my hands deep into the molasses-scented oat and grain mixture the horse loved as a treat and picking out the flattened corn kernels to crunch as I sat on the fence, talking to the horses.

Horses gave way to play rehearsals and boys and a part-time job at the donut shop. I felt sad when Dusty was sold. Something had ended. Copper remained for a few more years, even though no one rode him. He finally got a new home with the aunt and uncle of a friend. He was close to 20 then, pretty old for a horse. I never went to visit him. That part of my life was over.

Serena, younger daughter and maker of small everyday magic like turning red stoplights green, crafted her own horse magic as we left Pennsylvania four years ago and drove four days west into the sunset of Colorado. In Colorado, she told us, she’d have a horse. His name was King. She knew what he looked like — he was white — and only needed to find him. She spotted him one day, his white color magically now coppery, but that was definitely King, standing tall among 15 or 20 horses left on their own in a large wild field with its own stream and plenty of scrubby trees and grass. All year we watched King and his band while the seasons turned and autumn turned to icy winter and then spring again. Serena’s belief in her magical powers never waned — one day she would own King, and we all saw in our minds the someday place we called our Horse House that had horses grazing in the back yard — but leaving him to drive east again just a year later meant we were leaving behind her dream. Well, and my dream, since my own horse dreams were reawakened that year, kindled by Serena’s certainty and passion.

Today, horses don’t populate my dreams. Like when I was 16 and looking ahead, that part of my life seems over now. It’s been a complicated maze, getting from there to here, but here I am.

Pink

I have a new thing for pink.

No idea where this comes from. For years, pink was right up there as Most Hated Color in the Universe. Possibly because I was surrounded by it: my walls were an insipid shade of pastel pink, my ruffled bedspread was sort of a washed-out salmon color, and even my rug was pink. There’s a photo of me as a wee thing, lying on that pink rug, nose in a book, wearing something plaid. Oh yes, 1970 was a great year for interior design.

Pink clothes were out. I allowed my body to be clad in drab plaidish kneelength dresses with Peter Pan collars, my long blonde hair with bangs to the forehead partly tied back with what appeared to be a thick length of colored yarn tied in a rabbit-eared bow at the back of my head, but at pink I drew the line.

Pink was for girls.

I thought I was destined to be a boy.

At age 11, I started wearing my older brother’s outgrown clothes. I could mainly get away with this only at home, so on rainy November weekends I snuggled into his old brown corduroy coat. I wanted to wear his old striped tee shirts as well but was afraid to ask for them, so I contented myself with choosing mannish corduroy pants from the Sears catalog.

I still couldn’t be a boy.

I asked to mow the lawn. I loved the snick-snick-snick of the old-fashioned reel mower’s blades, but they were afraid I’d cut off a foot so mostly the answer was no.

I wanted to empty the trash in the house, taking a brown paper bag around once a week to the various wastebaskets dotting the house and then putting the whole thing into the metal can outside the garage in the side yard, but no.

My job was to set the table. Every day. Was that right? Was seven table-settings worth one trash-roundup? I hardly thought so. In addition to setting the table, I also cleared it afterward. Seven times a week, one for every nuclear-family dinner. 14 trips back and forth from the kitchen with plates and forks and knives and spoons while the men in the family sat back with their feet up, lit cigars and took swigs out of brandy bottles.

I also vacuumed (sometimes) and cleaned the bathroom (sometimes) and dusted (frequently). I liked the old metal Electrolux canister vacuum. I liked the smell of Pledge on the old dusting rag, and shaking the rag out afterward on the front porch. I liked moving the knickknacks, one at a time, carefully wiping invisible dust from under and around them, and replacing them again. I liked the smell of Ajax sprinkled into the bathroom sink and the swish of the toilet brush.

But I didn’t like being a girl. I didn’t like being excluded from being taken to the rifle range to shoot a .22 at paper targets. I didn’t like being left out of week-long backpacking expeditions to Mt. Whitney — I never even got to taste the freeze-dried food they took in packets to save weight. I didn’t like the assumption that I was smaller and weaker and somehow not as interesting, because I was a girl.

Pink was a girl color.

In my 20′s I discovered fuchsia. Fuchsia is not pink. Fuchsia is stronger than pink. Better than pink. I had a fuchsia dress. A fuchsia bag. Fuchsia shoes. I embraced fuchsia as the not-quite pink, as the more-than-pink, and as the essence of being more than just a girl.

And then fuchsia became passe and I moved into black and brown and stayed there. For a long time I stayed there. Black and brown are safe. Black and brown have nothing to say. Black and brown hide hurts. Black and brown have no requirements.

This year I moved on from black and brown. Oh sure, they will always be my friends, but I’m making new friends now.

Pink.

It started with a Pepto-Bismol pink sweater. I tempered it by covering it with another sweater in brown, but still the pink was there. Matthew liked it, and said so. I liked it. I liked the person I saw in the mirror who wore it. I liked how it felt.

When I moved last month, I bought furniture in robin’s-egg blue and butter yellow. The other, obvious color that the room needs is pink, so I have begun creating the art for the walls using shades of magenta and turquoise and orange, to bring balance to the walls. Balance to my life.

And this week, a pastel pink tank top found its way to me. It looks good on me, this girl’s color. It feels good. It feels right. Pink.

Wandering, times three

At 24, on weekends (when I had them off) for a while, I took to walking through the too-large, too-empty colorless high-ceilinged rooms of my new house, walking slowly past the new furniture, wondering where my soul had gone. Time stretched into frightening nothingness and it seemed that by walking — slowly, endlessly walking — I could somehow fill that void.

It’s easy to find ways to fill up the void.  Having a job that you take home nights and weekends, every night and every weekend.  Having children.  Then having more.  Letting life revolve around you, propelling you round and round, always in a different direction, any direction.

There are too many blank spaces again these days.  Life has conspired to leave room for thought, for direction, and the idea of becoming one’s own rudder again, when the rudder itself stretches into gaping darkness, seems like an endless bad dream.  The walking has begun again, only there’s nowhere to walk to.

~~~~~

I read something today that seemed incredible to me, a laundry list of things one might feel when beginning a spiritual awakening process.  Every single item on the list was also a sign we associate with depression.  Deep inner sadness. Check.  Sleep issues.  Check.  Physical disorientation.  Check.  Every one.  And I have felt ALL of them, at one time or another or all at once, since about the age of 9.  Which means that:

1. The awakening signs list is a load of crap, or
2. I’ve been depressed since I was 9 (or before), and
3. Everyone else I know is depressed as well, OR
4. There’s totally something to this awakening stuff and it completely absolves me of guilt over feeling so crappy for so long, BUT
5. Since I was 9? Am I not yet awake, then? WTF?
6. Because dude. That awake stuff is, like, my business.  I help OTHER people.

I don’t know whether to feel heartened by this or to feel like running screaming in the other direction (maybe that’s an overreaction … checking list for “overreacting”).  Does knowing this, if true, mean I can release not only any expectation of this ever to go away but also and sense of responsibility about it?

It’s like a relief and yet not.

~~~~~

Speaking of reincarnation, I’m going through a sort of one.  That’s, of course, in addition to any painful deep inner stuff I may have already mentioned.  A job thing, squeezed now into a smaller space, and soon my belongings, rapidly and unwelcomely having grown out of the everything-fits-in-my-car stage of only a few months ago, to be also squeezed into a smaller physical space: I’m moving in a few weeks.  Again.  But this time I get to take along new things like a bed and a chair and a desk and a coffee table and dishes and a TV (why?) and a Wii (why??) and a motorcycle.

The alternative seems to be along the lines of chucking everything into storage and leaving the country for someplace exotic for many many months, but that was going to take planning, and since the farthest I got on that road was to buy a guidebook and I am still lacking small details like immunizations and visas and plane tickets and, well, PLANS, moving seemed easier.

Blame the blue-haired witch

[warning:  standard "I haven't blogged for a long time and this is my lame apology slash explanation" is forthcoming.  Scroll down to the good stuff.]

Benign neglect, that’s what we’ll call this, shall we?

Oh, and my x365 project is going to take me three or four years at this rate, isn’t it?  Sort of negates the whole “posting daily” idea.  Oh well.  I’ll still continue them.  Hacking away until they’re exactly 100 words has been rather fun, and certainly the trips into the recesses of my memories have been interesting.

When I was nine I was in the 4th grade.  Do the math a minute; I need to point out that I skipped a grade and I was the youngest in my class until grade 9 when I was appalled to meet up with someone even younger than me.  She was smart, too.  Alice Mayall.  Where are you now, Alice?

So I was nine and I was in the 4th grade.  Actually, I was eight most of that year.  Eight and having a spring birthday, turning nine.  This is really irrelevant, but it tells you that I was pretty much a little kid.

I remember two things from that year.  No, three.

That was the year I taught myself to hold my stomach in.  Been doing it ever since.  Except in pregnancy, when I couldn’t, and in sleep, every other moment since then has been one in which my abdominal muscles are contracted.  I walked past a large window every day in the school hallway, and one day I caught sight of myself there.  Skinny kid.  Except in the stomach.  Holding it in looked better.  So that’s what I did.

That was also the year I had mono.  It started with a lot of throwing up and trips to the hospital, a 40-minute one-way drive in the middle of the night.  Then came antibiotics, horrible-tasting pasty white pills that I had to take along several times a day with aspirin, which weren’t so bad because they were orange-flavored.  I lay on the couch for a month, eating Red Vines and saltines, watching Dick van Dyke and Andy Griffith re-runs, reading all the fairy tale books the library contained.  When I went back to school finally, something had changed and suddenly I could wear pants to school instead of dresses.  I always connected the lifting of the pants ban with my month at home with mono.

Somewhere along there was the dream that haunted me for years.  I know it happened while I was in fourth grade because of the location of my classroom in the dream.  And because there was a witch with blue plastic hair that chased me through the empty nighttime school.  There was nothing in my eight-year old life that was scarier than that.  She had Barbie hair, sort of plasticy but long and flexible, and periwinkle blue.  To this day I can’t stand that color.  And she was the scariest thing ever.

I dreamed about that witch for years.  She probably gave me mono.

Red red rainboots

I took a walk in the rain today.

That in itself is nothing spectacular:  this is Vancouver and it rains here a lot.  To avoid rain, one would have to stay inside from mid-September through April or May, and I’m unwilling to do that.  Luckily, most people here have a similar regard (or is it disregard?) for rain, and people can be seen out in it all the time.

I walked through the neighborhood I live in, enjoying the feel of the drops falling on my hooded head, and the quietness that rain brings.  Sure, people are out in it but from necessity, not joy.

I was walking in the rain for joy.

When I was five I had red rain boots.  They were a deep cherry red and boasted a single button at the top.  They may have been the type that go over the shoes, in which case they were really galoshes, but that seems an unwieldy word for the boots that gave me so much joy.

In those rain boots, I became huge.  Powerful.  I could step through puddles, no longer limited by walking around them.  I could even splash a little if no one was watching who might reprimand me for such frivolity.  I had freedom.  I could walk in that surreal wet world under my hooded raincoat and umbrella and forget the other things happening in my life, and just walk.  Rainy days became a magical world of escape.

In high school I took to walking around in the rain whenever I wanted to get out and think.  Walking through our neighborhood on a rainy Sunday afforded me more inner quiet than any other place I knew; everyone else was indoors and dry, enjoying blazing fireplaces and weekend TV football games while I haunted the wet streets, not caring how wet I became myself.

Just having the opportunity to walk again out in the rain seems rather huge right now.  Transformation is often measured in tiny moments.

I am so getting a pair of rain boots.  Red ones.