The Color of Lent and Advent

Strong seasons in the Roman Catholic calendar are corridors for shifts in consciousness. Preparing for birth, for death and resurrection is a journey in which we hope, pray, fear, and cast. In these long waiting weeks, we read and remember stories that guide us through dark times. We light candles. We fast. We alter our inner and outer environment to match a psychological process, as well as what is going on around us with nature, with weather, temperature, and light. We follow the sun. Vestments are violet during both these antecedent periods. After each holiday the temporal calendar is restored to ordinary time. But we are never the same, for having gone through the transformation, if it is practiced mindfully.

Together

You were with me when we drove the mountain route north from Cambria to San Francisco; we sailed past Big Sur. That pacific is sublime. I hiked along the coast and went to Muir woods with you.

I dance every week - sometimes it's just ass-shaking, liberating fun. In other classes there's wellness coursing through every movement, love energy and hope for change with knowledge and joy.

We moved to a farm with goats and apple trees and other trees and peaches for two weeks and New England barns and slopes of grass and flowers I cut and vased for the house. I bake things.

It's autumn and I'm home in Clinton - to the town beach, Hammonassett, marina, secret place, libraries, and bird sanctuaries. You are more active all the time. This is where I really started.

Maybe none of this matters. But I hope that it does, in an infinitessimal or fundamental way, because there has been so much laughter and beauty, I want to impart to you, from now until always.

I'd rather be active than impotently angry

I'd rather be angry in an unspecific way and act on my vehemence and find like-minded people to hold hands with and make signs with and shout, into a vaccum. Only, it is a movement now, with a captive audience. I don't believe there will be direct impact, but there's intention. It's in the air. To me, that is enough. People are finally doing what is most truly American: taking to the streets with a collective voice of dissent. There is a cohesive, overarching issue and of course thousands of smaller, local, particular, petty, personal problems that are also finally being delivered to the light.

Quotation of the day

"Maine is so beautiful and the weather is so fine in the summer - that's why I come here to rest and to paint a little, too."

Edward Hopper

Vessels and Bells

This afternoon in the rain, I went to the Bowdoin Museum of Art, for the Hopper paintings and was pleasantly suprised by the upstairs exhibit of art from the 14th Century BCE Yangtzi river region of China.

It was their Bronze Age and on display were inverted bells and vessels for washing prior to a sacred ritual. It's a small gallery and in the next room were slabs of carved stone from 900 BCE Nimrud, Renaissance and Mannerist paintings from Europe, and a few Greek amphoras for good measure.

I saw small, dark, elemental landscapes Hopper painted in Maine during summers spent on our coast. There was more impasta and impressi0nist influence, but always the sunlight, shadow and shade and perfect geometric lines of composition.

These images contribute to my sense that I know this place and was destined to arrive here. Lovely/lucky.

Vulnerability

In college I wrote an essay on handbags. I don't even like the word.

Of Human Consciousness

The curse - an ostensible gift - of human consciousness is work, which inevitably breeds dissatisfaction. Why do we have awareness after all?

Reaching Out/Reaching in

Two days ago I went ot the post office, bought a book of stamps and mailed envelopes all over the country. Belated birthday cards, thank you notes, a CD, and hellos I had written and collected, unable to get them sent off for whatever reason. All was well; I felt sunny and busy and ran errands, did my volunteer work, did therapy, browsed at Cole Haan and went to Zumba. Yesterday I woke up to lassitude. Couldn't get out of my own way, slept and bathed, languid as a odelisk. Torpor turned to melancholy and I was out of sorts until I slept. Today dawned with a question mark. Would I feel more optimistic, more energetic? What would Friday bring? And then I thought about the responses that were already arriving by email and telephone call. Had I or the universe known that I would need comfort and reassuring? Coincidence or synchronicity? We send out our desires as well as our fears and hopes. It can be more intentional. Hear our pray. I felt gratitude and wondered about these mysteries.

So, it has come to this

all the unfulfilled intimations, the longing to nowhere, the sense of a road not built, led me to this place. finally.

"she slips through time, like zebra in the striped forest"

i carry your heart

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) I am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

ee cummings

Women: A Rant

Women who make pregnancy a Very Big Deal are the same women for whom everything is harrowing and stressful. Yes, it can be physically taxing. I know how lucky I am to not have been sick so far. Mentally and emotionally, however, I felt very weighed down, and at times so panicked I thought I might faint, or die from fear. But it honestly, it is what you make it. Your pregnancy is your own creation. If you want to worry about every little detail, every symptom, every anathema food item, it certainly can be all-consuming. If you are the sort of pain in the ass, high maintenance woman who demands back rubs and ice cream and needs everything just so in order to be happy, then pregnancy will be terrible for you and worse for the poor son of a bitch who married you. I would just like for once to hear someone echo my sentiments. Which are, essentially, it's fine. It's weird. And wonderful. Thrilling and paralyzing and bizarre and miraculous and beautiful and gross. And also, it's totally natural and what we are designed to do. I expect to encounter difficulty. Pain and discomfort and uglier manifestations of this other life beating inside me that makes it a little less lovely to walk around in my body. But acting so put out is nothing more than an act some women have adopted. I happen to have a different act. An "aren't I funny and one of the guys and aren't bitches crazy and dumb" trip that makes my life harder in some ways and better in others. But someone needs to stop perpetuating the notion that you stop being a normal person once pregnant. Because you don't. It's fine. I'm fine. You're fine. Think of anything else for a whole minute, read a book not about babies, listen loudly to music, have a shout at the sky, and stop complaining.