So This Was Christmas 2010

the day after Christmas I couldn't get out of bed. I cried with the covers over my head and thought about running away. But where would I go? Despite a quiet, wonderful day with my husband and dog, getting eveything I couldpossibly want and more, I felt empty. And, for the first time in four years, I remembered why I wanted to move to Mexico. There were many reasons, really. Including being unable to find a career or vocation, the extended post college malais, mounting debts, and feeling bored, trapped and useless, there was the ardent desire to be estranged from my family. I hated them in their grief, their anger, their failure and miserable lives. And when I realized I could not wish them away, I decided to travel far from their depressing grasp. I thought I could espcape them. And I did, for a time. No one really knew where I was for a while. It felt amazing to be free. I didn't care if I was lost from them; they knew me not, so why should they interfere. Gradually, we spoke more, I felt left out of holidays, I missed their quirks. And I was happy to participate when we came home. I wanted to be part of a family again.

My family is nothing like me. And I am nothing like them. I hope. More than that, I must remember to be vigilant that I never inherit their terrible outlook and negative ways of life.

New Movement

tomorrow, I teach my first Nia class. I am going to lead a small group of women in dancing and joy. I hope I remember the steps. But I am so ready to take my place at the front of the studio.

the best words

syzygy
blithe
veracity
thistle
dwell
samovar
picaresque
sumptuous
quick
burrow

Lunar - Solstice

Tonight, after midnight, the moon will be eclipsed. It's also the shortest day of the year, tomorrow. Have I been affected adversely by the shortening of days? Have I been bright enough for myself and others? I wish to be so luminous, joyful and serene. I am trying to be better, and hope to renew these vows in the new year. This is going to be a spectacular season; it's snowing. I almost wrote, I am gratitude. And so, I suppose, I am. To the light! And here I sit snugly, safe in my house.

Of Shadows Said

is art more powerful than love, asked the poet.

stowed away in a tower, a stone house, a warren of writers and other madmen, will I become composed, edified, and finally glorious? But if that isn't the answer, can I conform, submit and not suffer. Wouldn't it be easier simply to love and be loved. An artist sorrows; but is a lover not also giving up power and ego for the greater good?

I just wish I were something, committed to a higher calling. half sick, I'm not here.

Flotation Devices

Maybe it's just Christmas. and absent ones. Maybe it's the surgical procedure that has left me barren and bereft. Well, not barren, but bothered. My body has betrayed me again. I want to stop the teeter-totter. upanddown, like Lily says. caffeine, ativan, alcohol. interspersed with vitamins, Nia, and quinoa. invoking balance.

Elementals

gnomes, undines, sylphs, and salamanders. earth, water, air, fire. How can I draw on these alchemical beings for inspiration and enlightenment? Wishing I could go swimming.

Recommendation

I need a letter to recommend my writing for grad school and I have no idea whom to ask. Not sure this application is gong to come together by February. Feeling very down today.I hate being coterized.

Advent

How many purple tapers have been lit and will the wreathe ignite with faith and passion? But passion comes later. What happens here is scarier. Birth is always a gamble. And what we're celebrating is more than the birth of illumination in a frightened world. It's the beginning of time as we know it, the era of individuals. We fold hands over the cradle and give thanks for the newborn word of life.

and the ones that mother gives you

well, this has done something! I feel like I am looking at individual objects, slowed down enough to breath into each action and appreciate it all with a loving eye. .5 milligrams is the perfect dosage. thank the heavens and their denizens.

recollections

something happened last night, something in a dream. i was chasing a memory, got caught in the web of desire and wakelessness. I wish i could go back for the thread and spend a few moments confrotning my own Ereskigal and come back wiser, with a calm grace. I am lonely for my other half while I walk consciously here, bored of this firmer, one-note reality.

Reward Pathways

must dance tomorrow between breakfast at Hot Suppa and homemade lobster bisque. I feel sluggish and slothful and ugly. Dancing should remedy this.

pick up prescription for very small amount of Lorazepan. very curious to see how this affects my mood and anxiety level. hope it leads to less to drink.

remembering Ken Kesey's conclusion that the drugs had taught them all they needed to know, experiementation could continue sans LSD, hope to quit the middleman soon.

while my husband is away on business in LA I will eat nothing but quinoa, spinach, tofu and eggs, drop a size and buy a pair of The (infamous) Editor.

read and write every day. work on launched. finish the children's book. read more of the grass is singing. go to l;ibrary. get something nonfiction.

be kinder to myself. starting now.

About Bob

Bob Flood had seven children and nine fingers. He lost his right thumb in a scallop accident. Bob was a fisherman; a doer, he told me, when I answered yes, that I was a reader. I was sitting alone at the bar at the Black Bull on Maine Street in Rockland, drinking a Stoli and soda, beginning Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, which I had just bought for five dollars at Rock City Books. My brown down parka was draped over the stool on my left and parcels from The Grasshopper Shop and stationary store stacked on the right side. I was shored up, so that no strange man could sidle in close and offer to buy me a drink. Bob was undaunted by this arrangement.

He had a ruddy face and the beard of a seaman, a small, shabby man you ignore at the bus station or in the park. He came in from the cold without fanfare and stood with his chest resting against the bar and ordered a Pabst, tipping the bartender two dollars. He had to say hello twice before I looked up, smiled, and cast my eyes back to page one. That was when he told me he had once had a girl who was a reader, a girl who was long gone. He then excused himself, topped his tall can with a coaster, and went to chat with other regulars around the horseshoe toward the back of the Bull. I had just come in to town by bus, to meet my family for sushi across the street. I settled the bill while Bon was absent.

When he returned he asked politely if I would lift my coat off the seat and I obliged. I had already heard him called Bob by some local voice, and so I was amused but not entirely surprised that there on the chair, carved - or burnished maybe? – was his name simply put. He wondered if he could sit down with me, since it was clearly his place after all. Check, mate. I apologized, already charmed, warming to his practiced but guileless act. I apologized again when he extended his right hand in greeting and I startled at the sight of his gnarled flesh. Actually, it was soft and I shook it tenderly. He was unoffended but declined to tell the tale of how it happened.

Bob did want to tell me about Jelly. Janelle Marie, his youngest child, was sixteen and had been trouble since before she was born, when her mumma came home with another man’s child. But he raised her as his own and loved her so dearly his eyes twinkled when he recounted how she broke her leg when she was a baby and promptly came down with chicken pox. She wasn’t a reader but her mother was, like me, and he asked again if I’d like to get back to my book. He had me. I was hooked. The town drunk had me in his ineffectual clutches. He had never been able to keep a woman, though he had had many, he assured me. He had never succeeded, though he could.
He barely graduated from high school, and almost missed commencement because he got an OUI the night before. His family bailed him out. His eyes welled with tears when he told me about his auto mechanic father, who died when he was eight. He was proud and baffled by the news of his grandfather, who was a prominent surgeon. Bob seemed both resigned to and surprised by his fate. He wanted to buy me a drink, and I wouldn’t let him. I told him again I was meeting my family, which was true, though it felt like an excuse because I had been pulling away when I first mentioned my plans. Bob asked me if I had a nice home and family and I said yes, and he said good. Later I learned he lived in a shed.

I can’t stop thinking about this drunk, this fisherman, this father and failure and sweetheart. I hope he is warm at the Bull tonight.

Haiku

I can hear seagulls/we are nowhere near the sea/they swim in mid air

Quoting Rilke

If I cried out/who would hear me up there/among the angelic order?

The Five Month Mark

It's been five months since we've been back in the USA. Twenty gloriously lazy weeks. We've walked and shopped and driven around the state, basking in the seasons, the language, the people, and the ease of being home. I have taken countless baths, slept late, gone to Target, the bookstore, the downtown shops. We have furnished, nested, and rested, sitting back to admire our work. It's entirely cozy, warm and happy, this home we have created.

I have been quietly waiting to act. And now it's time. I have everything. And so I must do something. I must write. dance. study. These are the things I love to do, that make me feel most like myself. I can be lazy and afraid. Both failure and success make me queasy. But I want to be more, find a vocation, be recognized, help, change or improve or impact a life, with my limited skills and ambitions. I need to try. I just have to begin. It's Action-time.

Here I go.

Tourist Season

I like tourists. With their maps and uncynical clothing, they are a collective I sincerely admire. Anthony Bourdain exhorts us in his travel network show tag phrase to be a "traveler" instead of a "tourist". And we all are meant to slap disdainy fives with the lanky snark archbishop about ugly Americans on tourbuses. But I say, fuck that line and fuck Tony Bourdain. Fuck the Mainers who scoff at New Yorkers and fuck New Yorkers who loathe their unsophisticated country cousins.

A tourist arrives with an earnest perspective; she loves her surroundings because they are different and fleeting, experienced for a few hours, days, weeks at most. She attempts to absorb her surroundings, compare what us unknown to sights, sounds and behaviors from the life she knows so well. A tourist doesn't try to be authentic, which I think is ultimately much more admirable. A tourist is an outsider and knows it. A tourist just wants to have fun, go home with a few souvenirs and pictures to prove that she was there.

And that's all I really want from life anyway. I'm a tourist here myself.

Food as Fetish, Cipher

I like eating. So do you. Everyone does it everyday. Which makes it easy to write about, easy to relate to. We may have different ideas about what's good, what's comfort, what's elegant, appropriate or healthy. But we each have associations, traditions, memories, and connotations with and of food. Food is more than nutrition, we all can agree. There's something extra, subtle, beyond the basics. A dietician may talk about building blocks and proteins, even the somewhat dated pyramid, which we all recall from placemats and lunchrooms. But we eat for pleasure rather than fuel, for better or worse. Whether you're a bedridden French writer or a zaftig blue monster, cookies make you think and feel. Memories mingle with very present happiness. You can remember things past and be here now while devouring an Oreo, especially one dunked in milk. Eating is an act of participation in the universe. I eat, therefore I am.

However, food for me is not an art. It has no aura, though it may possess soul.

I am not an expert, authority or professional. I approach my dinner as a bemused dilettante, with a little knowledge and a lot of enthusiasm. I don't claim any loftier aspirations than to eat well, whatever that means to me at the time. I am as much a pawn of zeitgeist as any woman of my age, eduation, and inclination. Farmer's market, quinoa, artisanal, local, sustainable, etc. I can't help it. I do what is pleasing and what I am told, mostly. Though there's also within me the need to rebel, to eat Kraft mac and cheese when I'm exhorted to never accept anything processed or Monsanto-made. I didn't go to culinary shool. I don't grow a garden. I only eat organic when I remember. I'm ambivalent about bacon and plan to try more brussel sprouts and kale. I am on the perpiphery of food culture. A tourist here, not pretending to know more than I do, but simply professing to know what I like, trying to improve my tastes, techniques and expand my sphere of experience as I am able.

I write about food because I am lazy. I would prefer to write about astrophysics or NGOs or medieval literature. But those subjects might require some research.

Re-Launched

I finally have the distance and perspective to write what I need about the four year sojourn to Mexico. I am so happy to be home, but was riddled with anxiety surrounding the move back. The last year there was just so hellish. And I am finally feeling ready to talk about it all.

I am beginning again. I have a new outlook, a new outline. I think it could be funny as well as inspiring. I hope someone wants to read it. But I have been desperate to write, so it would be really self-sabotaging to dedicate my efforts on another project when there's this.

I hope this inspiration lasts. fingers crossed.

Standard Time

Blue-gray light outside the bay windows at 3:30 in the afternoon. We've reset to standard time and the early darkening could quickly become depressing. We're lighting candles and drinking tea to feel warmth and keep light in the living room.

The secret is, this is exactly what I ardently wanted, during the season of north-formed storms in Yucatan. It was ugly, the threatening ocean rose closer. I felt cast out of civilization and the comforting culture of autumn in America.

There is a cozy consumerism and reassuring collective response to changing weather, shorter days, and impending classic holidays, my birthday included, that I longed for and could not create in the creepy tropical transition of November in Chelem.

I like that the buoy light is radiating warm on the yellow dollhouse table, next the the striped chair, on the Oriental rug, in the apartment I have always wanted. All of my surroundings are exactly as they should be. I am so contented to be home.

As Opposed to Ordinary Time

This is something new. A place to practice. To write every day. Nothing premeditated. But why do it in public? Because I am vain. and lazy. I want praise. But not pressure. And this format has become familiar. It's passive-aggressive. If you have found me, tell me how you got here.

I am here because my typing, paid-blogging job is endlessly dull. I'm bored of the internet at large and need a break from writing marketing not very well disguised as opinion. I want to write but need a purpose, a blue exercise book, a live diary of private thoughts.

I just turned 32. I moved to Portland, Maine four months ago from Mexico. I like being married to my husband. I am much less unahppy than I used to be. I am waiting to see what happens next. I am becoming a teacher of Nia; being a student has been fulfilling. I move and read and observe.

thanks for reading.