More sinners in heaven?

What is it I'm doing here? I'm thinking. Sort of rudimentary brain work since I'm tired and sleepy and just waiting to go to the airport to pick up my brother and his family and then come back and do the Halloween candy hand outs.

Yesterday, I spent the day in some sort of squirrel chasing my tail sort of endeavor which in the end doesn't amount to a hill of beans since I've decided to progress in life like a nun. In other words, just accept the world as it is and stop getting my knickers in a twist whether it is reality or unreality or illusions. Because in the end, what matters is that I just get on with it.

I mean the world is an illusion. I'm creating all of the illusions I labor under. So unless I want to live in a blank box I have to create something to manage chaos. And if it is a pile of illusions, I might as well have fun in these illusions and make them fit my needs. I could of course do the world's illusions of reality but how dull is that?

The illusions of reality of our world are based on external crap and they are fulfilling like Halloween candy fulfills our need for sweets but after a certain point, we want to eat something more filling. Meat. And so I don't ever believe the illusions of reality provided for us ready made by the media, our social organizations and our families are going to do what is necessary to satisfy us in this life. We have to do our own work and make our own illusive constructs and create something to add meaning to the illusions. Some of us choose a religion to embroider the cloth of our lives and hey, if you can believe, more power to you. I can't believe. Well, I could if I suspended all rational thought but I'm unable to stop that annoying buzzing fly like hum of my thoughts that question all the religions of the world and ask them why can't they prove their religious icons are real?

Faith. Oh, yeah. Believe in something because you believe. Sort of like Nazism and body piercings and simple cultism. I believe. I believe. I don't.

Give me proof. Then I will say, hey maybe there is something in the entire mess of words that add up to a god or goddess figure. But right now, I'm the creator. I'm making my world. I'm doing the central making of a life. And if after it, I go to the pearly gates and meet with the real creator, you know what I'll say to him or her?

"No disrespect intended. I'm skeptical like any creative entity should be. And besides, you made me. In your image. So why expect obedience? I'm sure you expect rebellion, questioning and creativity. And if all that leads to rejection of you - does this not mean that you were a good parent to me? That I am independent and grown up and able to do my own thing?"

I'm sure the creator if there is one has a sense of humor and as he sends me on down to do my time amusing Lucifer he or she will sigh and wish that there were more sinners in heaven. It must get darn boring there with all the Hosannas and Hallelujahs and bowing down and praising. Some sort of a rebel would surely liven things up there.

Illusive constructs for the end of our lives

If life is all a series of constructs of reality made of illusions that our mind creates in order to deal with an external world that is beyond our control, then it makes senses to create illusive constructs that best fit our needs.

By this I mean that we consciously make sure we understand what our constructs are and how they are being developed daily. The thoughts we input into running of this construct world are like the code for a computer program that we are building based on requirements set by others and ourselves. If we do our programming well, we are able to function well. But what happens if we use faulty thoughts (i.e. thoughts that just are out to lunch?) to form our life constructs?

What happens is this - bugs in the program, a wavy section in our screen, a construct that doesn't function well and won't work well for us. Maybe it will even breakdown. For people who are not functioning well, there will be other effects as well - maybe they will cause changes in the constructs of others around them.

When you are in midlife, I think this is a natural time of construct breakdown. You get constructs from childhood and adulthood breaking down and nothing is in place except a malfunctioning midlife construct. No wonder we feel like there is something awry in our worlds. There is - our imagined constructs of reality that have to adjust to new things - aging, loss of goals that we thought were all important and we have to accept that will never get done and ultimately the final challenge which is readying ourselves for death. That is a pretty big program to create and a darn difficult illusive construct of reality to create.

So that is why midlife is full of blows, alterations in self and social relationships, changes in our levels of functioning and energy levels. We are taking a great deal of our energy to design and code and implement and do user testing on a new illusive construct that can be used for the end of our lives.

Creepy out

I went out for a walk with hubby. Creepy outside. Pumpkins aglow. Witches flying. A hand coming out of a grave. Dead bodies. Skulls. Parts of human beings. Yeah, you get a premonition of death every Halloween.

I was impressed by the care and trouble people go to in order to celebrate a minor holiday. I mean this is an illusion too and yet they are investing so much energy into it. Perhaps that is the secret. If you invest enough energy into an illusion, it keeps it's structure and form and value and it forms a sort of reality that will last for as long as you invest that energy into it.

Illusions are false. But illusions with human energy invested in them are partially true. And partially true illusions can be reality for the human beings who are living essentially meaningless lives. And since we can live reality as this meaninglessness or we can live reality as meaningfulness - we have a choice. Live the way you damn well please but just get on with it.

Question and Answer

If the mind is all we really have to master ourselves by not creating illusions then how can we master our minds? How can we get ourselves to think about what we are making in our consciousness?

I try to question myself as much as possible. When I'm mad as I am right now about that damn traffic ticket, I come here and write out the question.

I ask myself: "Why am I mad?"
The answer is this - I'm mad at my husband for the ticket and the cost of the ticket.
Then I ask myself:"When did the traffic offence occur?" Answer is October 8,2008.
Then I ask myself: "Can you do anything to go back in time and fix this problem?" Nope.
But I'm still mad at hubby. So I ask myself again: "Could you have made this mistake?"
And the answer is "Sure I could have made this mistake, but I didn't. He did."
And the question now is "So this is about punishment rather than being mad. You want to punish your husband for his mistake that he cannot reverse."

Aha! The mind has opened me up and shown me the false construct I'd been boxed in and I'm out of there.

The mind needs a question and answer session each time I go spinning off into a false construct. Sometimes, this question and answer business doesn't resolve the problems caused by a false construct because sometimes, a false construct on important matters like love is far more difficult to resolve than one involving a traffic ticket.

But it is a start. Beyond this point, there needs to be more work. Contemplation. Getting to the source of the emotions. Then clearing it all out. And making oneself aware that there will never be the loss of false constructs, but there will be an ability to detect and manage them and their associated problems.

Illusion making stick

So everything is a construct. But there are solid real things in the constructs. For example, I'm solid. The car I drive on a road is solid. I see other people and their cars. They're solid. So where does the illusion come in?

The illusion comes in with our thoughts about solid objects. We think thoughts about these solid objects and create a fluid entity called our consciousness around them. The consciousness we create is the illusion.

So what differentiates what our society calls "normal" and those we can define as "mentally ill"? I think every society establishes a sort of master consciousness to which we, as individuals partially subscribe to. When we are more subscribed to this master consciousness we are considered to have normal constructs. When we are less subscribed we are considered to have eccentric constructs but are still acceptable in terms of our thinking. However, when we go off the scale in terms of our subscription to the master consciousness, we are called mentally ill.

What would be considered mental illness in Canadian society - such as the killing of other people and their consumption (commonly called cannibalism) - maybe a preferred activity in other societies.

Constructs are illusions - false versions of what exists out there but they incorporate "solid" elements that are living or present. We make up different constructs through out our lives - as we grow - we alter these constructs sometimes to the detriment of the other solid elements in our external world - such as spouses, children and extended family.

If we are making constructs that are inherently false and individualized with each of us being the central figure in each of these constructs, then the emotions or feelings we associate with these constructs are also necessarily false and egocentric. Thus, if we are in agony over a feeling of love and loss - this feeling may be false in that it is only part of a construct but true in that we are - inside of us - willing to feel this feeling because we want to or we feel we have to.

I'm not sure I'm making sense here. If all our feelings are based on false constructs - does this mean our feelings are all lies or simply fleeting things? Then what about love, marriage and other personal contracts? How can they endure if we do not base them on permanent constructs?

I don't know. Maybe these concepts are also constructs, illusionary like all the other aspects of our lives - and we keep them going because of stability issues -in other words, to have company, to have a stable medium to bring up kids in, to enjoy sex and affection and to make our lives less "lonely".

But loneliness is also a construct. And a false one as well. All our emotions, our concepts of our world and our intellectual theories are all illusions. Nothing remains in the end when we come to the end of the spinning of illusions.

Nothing except the mind that wickedly and persistently goes on creating constructs or illusions to keep us functioning adequately in our world. Nothing except the maelstrom of thoughts that assault us every day, evaluating, deciding, making decisions and finalizing our last touches of our constructs.

If the mind, alone and stripped down is all that we can get out of the loss of our illusions, how can we best use this mind to survive the instability created by the loss of our walking stick of illusion making? I don't know. I'm not able to think beyond this point.

Illusions of the mind

What are illusions? I think of illusions as this: when I was a child in Yorkshire, the fog would come up and the recognizable world I'd constructed became lost and missing and I could no longer navigate my way to school. The fog world - I thought was an illusion - a false construct of reality. But what I did not realize was that both the original fogless world and the foggy world were both illusions. Everything we view around us are constructs we create.

Why do we create fixed constructs of the external and internal worlds? We do this to have some continuity in our understanding of our place in the world. If the constructs did not exist, if we were in continual flux, we would be unnecessarily stressed in our simple daily tasks of life - such as biological tasks, growth tasks and journey tasks. We make constructs to survive efficiently in our world.

Constructs or illusions are what we think the real world is like. But they are illusions because we are developing these constructs individually - in each of our heads. There may be commonalities between the construct in my head and in your head but ultimately each construct is unique and flawed.

The positive aspect of creating constructs is this - you can change the construct you are using any time you want to. Sometimes this leads to problems in human relationships. For example, this morning, someone told me that her son-in-law left her daughter after 11 years of marriage after a simple "I don't want to be married anymore." What had happened so that he left his wife and three children? Could it have been a change in his construct of reality?

Sometimes we go on for decades with a fixed construct in our heads and then we encounter another person's fixed construct and something in their construct changes something in our construct and you are never the same again. I call this phenomenon - the kick in the groin experience. You wake up. You find out that your construct isn't reality. It is just an illusion. And in fact, the other person's construct is also not reality. It is just another illusion.

It is deeply frightening to find out that we are living lives of illusions - fake realities so to speak and that the only thing required to make an end to all these fantasy lives is a change in our mind's way of operating. If I were to decide that the SAHM construct I'd been making for the last decade is no longer serving me well and decide to make another construct - the writer construct - that may serve me better - I still need to be aware that the new construct is also false, a misrepresentation of reality, a thing that will not and should not continue forever but must mutate as my mind evolves.

In the end - none of the constructs we make of reality is valid. The only valid factor in all of the experimenting is the mind. If we stop the ceaseless searching for illusions that will make us happy, if we simply go inside to the mind and understand that it is the source of all our creating of the shells we make and break, if we simply shut down the mind - what would be inside that silence?

Laugh

Humor. Man I love a man who makes me laugh. I love women who make me laugh as well. Why? Well, humor is medicine. It cures anything.

Even death is salvageable with humor added. You can talk about your own death and not fall apart because you can say that you had a humorous life or that you lived your life in such a funny and delightful manner, that you can go to the dust piles at the end of it -with no regrets.

I can't see how one can live life without laughter. Or how one can write without looking for the funny bite to what you are talking about. It makes my writing happy when I have the sliver, the bone fragment, the splinter of humor cutting into my mind when I'm making lines.

Humor. I can put humor into everything I do and I'll be fine. Loved a guy and got killed? Find the funny aspect to it - you made an idiot of yourself and really that is great. Making an idiot of oneself is a lost opportunity for most adults. We are all so stuck in the mode of being inhumanly perfect. Lost a job? Hell, laugh. So what? You can get another job. You can do better. Laugh and it all goes to the past where such failures, such losses and such breakages belong. You belong in the present. You belong out of the suffering and belong to the present humor of the situation.

You can never be destroyed by any event, situation and person - if you are able to laugh. Laugh at yourself, at your vulnerability and courage and keep marching on. To laugh is to grow and growing is what you - the human rat in this experiment by the creator - are programmed to do . And in the doing of this growing, you are just making data. So why not make the data in the funniest possible manner so that the creator is confounded, confused and amused? The creator needs her laughs too. Make her laugh.

Volume

I write basically the same stuff over and over again. I make them new by rephrasing them but the things I say are basically the same:

1) Be kind.

To yourself and others. It costs you nothing and dammit, the world needs this type of behavior.

2) Be truthful.

Even if it hurts you (but try not to hurt the other). Most of the truth telling will hurt you the most rather than the other because you are doing the truth telling and it really is all about us, not the other in every matter of our lives, and so the truth will be about you and will kill you many times. Die. And then reincarnate yourself.

3) Don't store crap inside you.

Get it out (blogs are useful for getting crap out but if you are a privacy freak, a private, locked journal can do the same job for you or you can blog anonymously).

4) Suck it up.

I whine. A lot. But after whining, I suck it up. Life isn't a Cinderella story. Sometimes the Prince Charming isn't going to be able to do the happy ever after business. Try and do the happy ever after minus the help of others (no matter how charming they are).

5) Fairy Tales. They happen. Really.

Otherwise why would I be married to a man who has to put up with insanity every day and why would I have two boys that I never expected to have? Fairy tales in real life do happen. Believe in the fantasies your mother told you.

6) Life has lessons to teach you and these lessons will repeat themselves until you graduate.

This one is sort of my main theme on the blogs. We get lessons. We learn or we don't learn them. But life, that irrepressible teacher will keep handing out homework, drills and tests until you get to graduate out of life into what? Dust. It is all dust.

7) Even though it ends in dust, that is no reason for you to give up on life.

I mean we all know that a university education won't get you anywhere unless you do some work after you graduate in a sort of step wise conformity of rising positions to the top. Well, it is the same way with life. We are on a step wise progression of steps to the pinnacle of our lives which is death. Death is the CEO position we are all striving for and we all get that large, roomy office. No pay or benefits though.

8) Be happy.

I know, I know. It is hard. But I'm not taking about sexual Olympics here with the hot babe. I'm talking about taking pleasure in the open face of your child, in a kiss from your spouse, in a drink of water, in the fine lines of a piece of pottery, in the leaf that sits in your front lobby -curled bodily around itself in some sort of dried fist. Take pleasure in small things and you will be happy.

9) Love

Even if it hurts, love. There is no other way we grow - except in the presence of love. Do you think my boys learn that crap at school out of duty, determination or willingness? They learn out of love. For me. They don't give a shit about school work but they know their grades are important - for me and they work hard - out of love. May not be a perfect system but hey - that is all I've got right now - until they discover love of learning for themselves and won't stop the addiction to the word and idea.

10) Understand you are not immortal

Yeah, it hurts big time to see loved ones die or sicken or just fade away to living corpses. But the bad things, the things that happen that kill us and even aging itself, are all useful reminders that we are not immortal. Get going folks. You may not be here for tomorrow's blog entry. Do what you love to do (hey, that could be what I talk about the most but I'll stop here).

It is worth writing, because I make it so

My family is frankly bewildered by why I write. I make no money from writing. So if you don't make any money writing - their thinking goes - why write?

It has been hard for me as well to get out of this mindset that they are in. I mean I thought it was shameful to do any type of work unless there was financial renumeration for doing it. This is me - prewriting era talking to my graduate adviser one day:

Professor of oncology (well paid, no idea of what it means to be poor): "I've got this person who wants to work for me for free - what do you think about this idea?"

Me (lowly, poorly paid graduate student dreaming of better financial future) : "I think it's stupid." I think is stupid still. If you are going to work - might as well work for money to pay for bills if nothing else.

Professor of oncology (still clueless): "Why?"

Me (fed up): "Well, the poor woman is obviously a new immigrant who can't get a Canadian job unless she spends five years serfing in a laboratory here to get some sort of work history. She is only working for free to get that history so that five years later, she can have a decent, well paying job. Or else, she is a desperate first timer who has just graduated from school and needs a first job. No one would work for free."

Yeah, no one will work for free. The operative word being work. I am not working I tell myself. I am playing. I am playing at writing but this playing requires work. And that is the difference.

If I was working, dammit, I'd want money or I'd not work. Work requires some sort of subjugation of the authentic human being that you are in order to perform machine work in an automated manner. Work, except for exceptional creative projects, require conformity, accuracy and a loss of creativity. Work requires money to make it palatable. And indeed, I believe any work, must be paid or else you are ripping human beings off.

But transform a thing into play and you work at that play for free. You do it all the time. It is worth doing this for you because you love it rather like you love your spouse and children -open ended, unselfish and filled with passion. You do the work of play, you do the work of writing for free because this type of work doesn't require money to make it worth doing. It has an intrinsic reward of self growth. And for me at least, it is worth writing, because I make it so.

Second chance

I'm writing to get alive. Most of the days, I'm running around in this fixed schedule of things that must be done. We all have this type of life. I call it an automated life. I don't want to be this way. But I feel I must justify my existence. I must offer up some reasons for my existence. I must do some tasks.

But in reality, I don't want to be doing these tasks. I want to make them the extracurricular activities after the school of writing. I want to make writing central and the life tasks peripheral.

Perhaps this tendency to defer gratification of the doing of things on my to do list, is part and parcel of the midlife crisis we all go through (whether we recognize it as such) in our forties and fifties. By this time, people are dying. People we know. You are forcibly reminded that you are not immortal. That the stuff on your to do list aren't going to get done. You have an epiphany. You realize, that if you really have one or two things that you simply must do on that list, that if you don't start, right this very minute, well they aren't going to get done and your life is worthless. Less than paper money. So you start. You get rid of useless activities. You stop talking to people. You dig a hole in the ground. You bury yourself in it. And you do what you have to do to make your life one that you are pleased with.

Really, that is all that you need to do. You don't need to please your parents, your employer, your spouse or your kids. You just need to do this one essential thing that will please you and make your life one that you are utterly satisfied with.

When you come to the end of your life, you will have a ton of regrets. Just ask me. I nearly came to the end of my life. And dammit, I was kicking myself telling myself "I wish, I really wish, I had done this." I lived. I got a second chance. I won't screw this one chance up. I'm fashioning a life I can be happy with so that when the second chance is gone, I'll go to dust without any fricking regrets.

Yeah, when the big door opens and the ghost maker is there to call me through, I'll go without any regrets. You see, I got a second chance. I took it.

Flow

I am writing about how I feel when I write. I feel really smooth, like the pebbles I pick up at the beach on summer holidays when the waves are rolling themselves into the dunes and the sun is warming my open body as I walk down the zig zag line I've perfected in doing beach walks. I'm a beach bum. I can do the beach thing when I get a piece of land and a dot of water. I feel the exact same feeling when I'm at the beach as I do when the writing is rolling into me - sort of like a slide of sand being engulfed by the rush of the water.

I wonder if it were possible to evoke beach feelings any time I'm doing writing? Or is it only reserved for those days when you are in "flow"? Is flow like the beach day when you are turning on the towel and there is that burst of red behind your eyelids when the sun rips out the shades and comes peony like into your head? Or is flow the slide into the arms of the man you love when you slip your hands around his head and there is that play of flesh and bone? Or is flow all the delicious moments after sex when you are satiated and yet empty?

Writing in flow is when the word leaps out of your throat and you net it immediately. It is when your body runs down a path and you can keep up with it. It is the dance of water on the leaves, plop, plop and onto your umbrella or if you don't have an umbrella, when the water drops accurately into your open mouth and you drink. Writing is water, necessary and cooling.

I spend most of my time here trying to get to the part of me that needs to be expressed. I wonder why I don't come out of hiding more often. Why I lurk there in the darkness instead of peeling off the wrap and revealing myself to the other in the writing? Is there a reason why writers are streakers? Emotionally naked? Or are we all this way in the beginning and it is only those who write who work themselves back to the naked ape state?

I sit here listening to music, drinking one of a thousand cups of coffee, burning out of the last day's work and into the new day. It doesn't matter. Time goes and I write anything and wish for the slide into the simple sure state of working where the words set themselves down, one after another, in perfect symmetry, to make the most of the day.

Mental eraser

I got up late and yet here I am writing a snatch before I go to breakfast and lunch preparation. I got up grumpy. But I took that mental eraser and used it. It is amazing how much better you can make your mental frame of mind if you use your mental eraser.

This doesn't mean you don't feel grumpy at any point in time. Grumpiness is a sort of indicator that you may be tired, needing a change, must stop overdoing and just vacation. Grumpiness that is continuous means that maybe you are just a grump. If you want to stay a grump, fine. But being a grump and a mother aren't compatible. Grumpiness has a way of being passed onto kids. Therefore, using a mental eraser is a perfectly good habit to implement. Passing on grumpiness to the next generation is simply not useful.

I've lived most of my life with sick parents of one sort or another. Illness is a perfect breeding incubator for grumpiness. I'm not got that excuse. I'm perfectly healthy. So there is no reason for grumpiness.

Right now, I'm off to make lunches. I'm going to have a pretty darn good day. I'm going to walk. I'll get music infusions. I'll make time to read. And I'll keep the mental eraser near to use when ever I feel the least bit of grumpiness today.

Conjuring

When I'm down in the pit wondering whether I'll get to the point where I can make a poem that I can look at without feeling sick, I go to the books of real poets and I'm sure I can never go there into that territory of accomplishment and skill. I think this task is too big.

I get to the end of each day of throw away writing and shift through what I've written and I can barely stay awake. Why do I have to write such utter rot? Why can't the poem just spontaneously create itself?

Today, I was in the minivan waiting for older boy to beautify himself after the orthodontist trip and I doodled on a small book I keep in the car. It was fun. No requirements. Just a few lines. That is all I ask myself to write when the feeling comes in transit. Sometimes, when I'm walking, I'll see a pile of leaves and I'll have the line in my head and the count of the words in that line and I'm off in that poem. I will have at least one part done by the time I get home. And that walk writing was fun.

What makes the poem writing not fun? It is the failure to get it just right. To get the embryonic poem to the finished adult form. I am not there in my skill set yet. I've conjured up visions but I've no bottle to capture them in.

The Internet is always waiting for a new voice in the wilderness

When I first started writing on my blogs I thought rather demurely and self consciously "Who the hell will read this crap?" Then I realized that the Internet is putrid with crap. Porn. Games. Gambling. Boring writing. Dull topics. Racist bloggers. Nasty, sexual perverts. Deviants from mainstream society. So I realized I wouldn't be an oddity. I'd not stand out. Anything I wrote would be less sensational than even a blogger doing home movies of her sexual life.

In fact, most of these darling, disgusting and profitable sites get far more views and money earned than I'll ever get (for which I'm a bit disturbed and envious of them for their undeserved success records) but short of parading around naked in sexual romps with hubby (he refuses to let me do it with sundry sexpots) there is no other way I can increase traffic on my blogs and thereby generate those cheques that will finally shut hubby up about my addiction to blogging.

So anyway, what was I talking about before I got diverted into jealously, envy and greed? Oh, yeah, the fact that I would be writing puerile junk that would shame a fifth grader (but not my fifth grader who still believes I will make money from my blogs and is convinced we will be able to go to Disneyland in the next decade with these earnings. I try to let him know that I'm working on that trip but not to count on it any time soon).

But back to the pallid color of my writings. Well, the fact is I wanted to write. I didn't give a shit if the writing was near death or not. I wanted to fling my offerings to the gods. I wanted writing published even if it was self publishing on an anonymous blog or ten blogs and even if hubby hated the idea of me putting out "falsehoods about his manhood" and the boys hated the idea of losing all their privacy (Oh, for god's sake, I took their names out of the blogs didn't I? What more do they want? Shall I turn them into girls to protect their precious identities?), I went ahead and wrote.

I figured what the hell? If it sucks, it sucks. And if no one reads it, screw them. I'll have my writing practiced and I'll write junk and get enough experience so I'll be writing less junk as time passes (that is the theory people - sometimes theories don't become laws).

Fact is there is one thing I've learned about the things you want to do in this life - you just have to do them if you want them done before you die. It is nice to think about things like going to the Himalayas for a trip up Mount Everest, but if you don't work on mountain climbing, if you don't gather up the monies to pay for the expedition, if you simply don't start -despite the lack of encouragement of all the people you love and who love you (except perhaps your cats and dogs) - you will never do it.

I guarantee it. I wanted to love a whole pile of men in my life. Did I do it? Hell, no. I was too cowardly. And I never made it a priority. Then hubby came along, put the ring in my nose and that was that. You only get a certain window of opportunity to do what the hell you want to do and once that window is gone, you are done with that particular thing on your life to do list. Mind you, I guess I could still love other men but hubby has a certain possessive streak about him and frowns on extramarital love affairs. So I'm still constrained.

In contrast to hunting men while married which is forbidden in our household, it is open hunting season where writing is concerned - especially writing on blogs . You can do what the hell you want and you need not be constrained by the fact that no one reads your blogs. Even better, really. Because you can say what the hell you want and your loved ones can't complain that you are defaming them, abusing them in print or breaking some sort of family privacy law. The best situation is if you write, no one reads your writing except some perspicacious editor at a famous name brand book publishing company who offers you a lucrative contract to write a series of children's books that somehow generates bazillion dollars in book royalties and product spin offs and you die rich and happy because it all started when you were afraid to write crap on a blog.

Messing up is good for you just like dying is good for you to really appreciate your life

When you mess up, you can do one of two things - continue messing up or change. I guess this is why change is so hard to do. It is simpler to just continue messing up - no surprises, no alterations in thinking/acting and certainly no risks.

But what if you changed the way you view your mess ups? What if you stopped and asked yourself what was the reason for this mess up? Why did you do what you did to mess up?

What if the reason was you just felt crappy about yourself, your life and was seemingly stuck in stasis and unable to get out of the bog? What would happen if you accepted this reason and then decided that you don't have to change, hell it is your life but that perhaps you should reframe the life you are living so that you gave yourself no choice but to change?

What if you said to yourself - "Hey, bad screw up. But that's just life. What this mess up tells me is this: I have reached the point of no return now. I must change now or I must die."

When I have my kick in the groin experiences (and being rather dim witted, unconscious and stupid, I've been gifted with a whole pile of them) - I do just what I've said in this piece. I change. I give myself no choice.

Now most people also change but sometimes they fart around and don't do the giving up of the bad habit that they want to eliminate. This can be exemplified by a conversation I had with an older guy at the YMCA.

Older guy (Oh, well, he was older. At least five years older than me. At my advanced age, it is simply lovely to be able to say that someone, anyone, is older than I am.): "You're the only person at the YMCA I've noticed who is losing weight. How did you do it?"

Me: "I walked."

Him: "What about all these other women, they are gaining weight."

Me: "I don't like weight training. They do aerobics and weights. I just walk."

Him: "How much walking?"

Me: "Every day. It's a religion."

That is the difference. I make the new change into a religion that I practice fiercely every day. When you are a new convert - you don't sit around reading obscure religious texts and trying to find god in the interpretations of the masses. You go to the source. If you are Christian, you go to the bible. If you are a Muslim, you go to the Koran. And if you are me, you go inside, to the creator inside and become a fanatic.

Mess up? Good. Don't feel bad about it. Feel absolutely wonderful because you've had a wakening. You've come out of unconscious, cruise control mode and now you know you aren't happy with the ride. Get conscious. Make changes. Do them right away. Embrace the faith. If it is walking, walk every day. If it is writing, dribble words like any baby on to his bib. Don't wait for someone else to show you how to become enlightened. You have to do this work yourself.

So I used to sit in the rubble of self whenever I'd mess up my life. I used to have to get the rubble cleared, make new blueprints for my life, start financing up and reconstruct my world. Now I still do this. But the emotional pain is managed better. I know I'll hurt. I know I'll have to work out daily. I know that there are bad times involved in change. But I also know that the change must be made or I'll cease to exist. If the ultimate fate is non-existence - I think most of us would chose change rather than messing up over and over.

Ultimately, messing up is good for you just like dying is good for you to really appreciate your life. If we did not have physical non-existence staring us in the face, we would never make good use of our time and evolve ourselves sufficiently to allow the ultimate enhancement of our species. We wouldn't have to bother with working on our lives if we lived forever. But since we don't live forever, we are able to concentrate our minds and energies to make our short and erratic journeys ones full of personal meaning and joy.

Similarly, making mistakes concentrates us fiercely on the true purpose of journeys, burns away the distractions and brings us to ultimate self knowledge. With this self knowledge we can change how we operate and create new design code so we - can operate like new robots in machine world. Perhaps that is being rather simplistic. We aren't robots exactly. We are imperfect robots. With a need for meaning to make our lives worth living. If we don't have that meaning, we create it. And some of this meaning is created from messing up, changing and correcting our driving on the great highway of life. We can all do this. Even when we mess up.

The rush of making

When you get the words just right, when the emotion fits hand in glove, when your body is absorbed and forgotten in the hunting of prey and when you have the quivering, still breathing deer between your jaws, there is nothing quite as perfect as those moments. You are in heaven. You don't want to leave the writing. You can just go on forever. You think you are immortal. I've only had such moments writing poetry. Poems call forth emotions and emotions mastered to turn into concrete images - well in that work you get this sheer joy, this rapt attention and the final product -good or bad - you don't give a shit - because you've already had your reward in the rush of making.

It is a bit like wandering off to do a cross country ski trip. The first part of the journey is fine. You have loads of energy. Then there is the middle part. Slog, slog and more slog. You get fed up. You want to just stop on some ice floe and make like a suicide. But you push yourself beyond the inertia. You keep plugging away. An image catches you like a snagging branch your clothing. You start to feel good. You know you are making something different from what you've made before - something novel and new for you. It may be trite and boring and dull for everyone else but who gives a shit? You are in love with you, there is newness and shivers there and you want it so badly. You are flying into new skies, you know the way to the South and the sun. You get there. The climate is so much warmer than any of the places you passed to get there. You are in the rush of making. And even if you chuck the product - it doesn't matter. You had your episode of being the only creator.

I always laugh at people who tell me they hate writing, that they can't put down their thoughts into writing, that their works are like termite eaten dead wood. I think in my head "What the fuck? Can't they understand that writing is really sex? They don't have problems doing sex do they? It is natural. So why the fuck do they have problems with writing? It is natural as well. We are meant to fuck with our bodies and with our minds in bed and in writing".

We are meant to but so few of us do this. Because? The fact is that people who don't write haven't discovered the rush of writing. They've never pleasured themselves writing a poem. They've never made love to words in a song. They don't understand the tearing away from reality and the leap into fantasy. What if they tried? What if they left the tired, every day world that they occupied so grimly and entered the world, the universe and the eternity of words?

I think they would never stop writing. Once they get a shot of the drug, they will be permanently addicted. They will give up everything and everyone else in order to make their own worlds in their poems, music and stories. But they won't do this. If they did this, we'd have no one working at paid labor. They'd do the unpaid labor of writing for the rush.

So funny

When you are blah, you have to find something to laugh about. And I've found it. Listening to John Hodgman yapping. Don't know who he is but he is funny. Alien Love Child.

http://www.thoughtoffice.com/?page_id=446

Yeah, when life sucks, you can't do anything else but find something to laugh about. That is the reason I just love human beings who can make humor out of dust, aliens and ordinary life.

Laugh. You get out of the bed. Laugh. And you can go on for another day. Even if life is really meaningless.

Just listening to John Hodgman talking about his encounter with a girl and talking about sex pyramid and close encounters makes even a meaningless life amusing and worth going through.

Making a meaningful life

When I'm most depressed (which usually and funnily is on Mondays - the day I don't start a work week), I usually get chores done (groceries, dish washing, laundry) and then come to the writing place to write about the reason why life is meaningful. I mean I don't really believe it is, but I write why it is meaningful so that I anchor myself in the concrete facts of these reasons and don't go flying off, balloon like into space.

Reasons why life is meaningful:

1) I write. Writing is worth doing because I say it is so.
2) I take care of my boys. No one else can do my job with reference to my boys.
3) My husband needs and loves me.
4) The extended family needs me.
5) The natural world is worth living for.
6) There is music.
7) I see visions of a better future.
8) Happiness isn't necessary for a meaningful life.
9) The ability to grow and become kinder each day makes life meaningful.
10) Poetry.
11) Books to read. Millions of them.
12) Garden. Plants. Flowers. Trees.
13) Birds
14) Hiking
15) Mountains

It is strange that I put poetry towards the bottom of the list. Is this because it is becoming less important to me to write poems? Or do I only write poetry in the terrible times?

That's a smallish list. There are other reasons for living but I can't think of more than this right now. Once in a while you get a day where even though the sun is chanting itself into being, the garden lies frozen still inside and you just want to head to bed and lie there like a bit of broken machinery. This is one of those days.

What's a life about?

Getting to peace is one reason for writing in this blog. What do I mean when I say peace? I think peace is when you are able to be at rest - mind, body and spirit.

Most of the time we are operating in a state of desirous energy. We want money, products, experiences, people and emotional states (power over someone, love from someone, hatred for someone).All these wantings result in unrest inside of us. We are either miserable because we don't have what we want or happy because we have them or neutral because we are in an in between state.

Wanting, motivates us to act to get our wantings satisfied. This in itself isn't bad. We do manage to achieve a great deal in our lives because we act on the wantings of our soul. But eventually, you find that all this wanting, acting on the wantings, getting the wantings satisfied or not satisfied, well they are not giving you what you really want which our society calls "happiness" and I call peace.

If all the striving in the world won't give you peace - then what's a life all about? What are we doing here? What is the meaning of the daily struggle?

Writing is the way I've chosen now that I no longer have the striving method of getting to happiness and peace. It is very difficult having a void in oneself. To find out that the life I've lived up until now was not the one that would give me any satisfaction. When you get to this point in your life, you can either turn back to the old way of doing things and continue to commit to achievement based methods to walk you to happiness or you can entirely give up on them and start a new path.

Writing is my new path. It may not give me the way to peace either. But at least it gives me a tool to dig out all the crap and lies of a life time and walk myself to peace.

Sellers of words

When I'm writing and the writing is sinking it's teeth into my brain and devouring whole chunks of thought, I'm happy. I'm the way I want to be. I'm not sinking into the gap. I'm not running around with the black dog of depression nipping at my feet. I'm not blah. It is just homeostasis all around.

I come to the writing place with no other aim but to put down kicking balls into the net. I'm inept. The balls miss. I'm sure I'll lose the game. I do. I start to do another damn game. I've no one to blame but myself. In these writing games there is only one player and one loser/winner.

I think if you are able to be in a room with no one - in utter silence and be able to pull out the words like gems from a bag and put them out on the table, evaluate their worth accurately, price them and sell them, you are a salesman worth employing.

Writers are sellers of words. We come here with nothing. I mean at least I do. There are probably an entire fleet of writers who know exactly what they are going to write about when they come to their tables but I'm not one of them. If I knew what I was going to say before I got here, I'd be bored. Part of the fun of writing is not knowing where your mind is going to go and whether you end up lost or in some regular destination that you've visited many times before or whether you are going to arrive at a dead end and have to return to start.

Most writers, presumably have ideas. Must be nice. I don't have ideas. I have some thoughts about stuff that I'm stuck on. I write about life accidents mostly. It is a way to try to get unstuck from the debris and mess of the life accident. I don't have the type of life accidents that necessary qualify me for victim of the year awards, but in every life, there are sufficient life accidents to teach a solitary soul how to grow and I've had my share (although I'm a slow learner).

It is these life lessons that interest me. What do they really mean? Why did I do what I did to get the opportunity to get a life accident that floored me? Most of my life lessons floor me. I'm not the strong and able type. I'm the squashed bug on the window of life type.

But there are life lessons in every accident. I tend to write to find them. When I write them out, it makes the life lesson less flattening and restores me to the full gravid, confident bug that I usually am that can buzz along to get squashed on the next window pane of life accident.

When I've got the juice out of the lesson, I sell the lesson here on the blog - not for money but for dissemination of the learning. I'm spreading life lessons. Maybe if you read my life lesson you won't get your own version of the same accident. And maybe not. I find human beings need their own life accidents to ensure they get the message and no matter how much reading of the same facts accost them elsewhere, it has no impact until they go through it personally. It is rather like the concept of death. Logically we all know we are going to die. But inside of ourselves, we keep hoping we will live forever and that really, death can only happen to other people. Nope. Like death, life happens to all of us and life accidents reinforce lessons that we need to learn and I'm going to remember mine by hawking them on the blogs. Even if you don't get it, I will.

The gap

I've just read about Anais Nin's second husband Rupert Pole. He sounds like such a darling man. No wonder Anais Nin was unable to resist him. Here is a link to a story about a bit about him:

http://paperhaus.typepad.com/pp/2006/07/its_pretty_racy.html

I'm always rather amused by the fact that it is considered strange for a man to marry a woman who is older than him. Maybe it isn't all about physical appearance? Maybe some guys are able to see inside the container?

I'm always disappointed when I see that people are stuck on physical appearances as much as they are. Some of the most interesting people I've met have been ugly, dull looking, shortish and have often had physically fragile, "unmanly" bodies but with stunning intellects, a wry sense of humor, courage and sensitivity. The container is often very misleading.

Our culture puts so much emphasis on the container. Even when we are adults we feel ashamed for not making our external images "fit the part" so to speak. Hubby was telling me the other day that while he was getting changed from his lunch time workout he happened to notice other guys dressed in expensive gear and suits. They looked the part they worked. Hubby looked rather like I do - street people smart. He said he felt the gap.

I know what he means. The gap is the difference between the way we are and the image we are expected to portray. The outside container must be burnished and not tarnished.

I like to think that eventually, hubby and I will have both the outside and inside containers burnished. It is not just the outside container - it is what is inside too. If you are able to see inside the container as Rupert Pole was able to with Anais Nin, the gap is irrelevent - whether it is a gap in ages or images.

It's about your will

I'm writing late and I've not got to the book reading business yet. I am sitting here with a blank head and nothing to write about but I force myself to keep typing. It is a matter of will.

If you want to write, there are entire days when you cannot write. You tell yourself it is writer's block. There is no such thing as writer's block. The only block- blockhead that is - is you.

Writing is all about will and overcoming you. If you are a cowardly, peer group restricted character, well good luck writing. You will cower in the writing that you generate like frogs among a pile of snakes - you will be eaten. The only way you can overcome the blockhead syndrome as I call it is to just go to your writing place and make yourself write.

This means you will sometimes have to tell yourself that you must write even if your boys are starving to death (so they say), your mother tells you are a stranger to her (all writers become strangers to their loved ones since when we write, we become unrecognizable oddities- even to ourselves), your husband demands his marital rights (despite your servicing the darling man twice a day - the man feels that if you are capable of writing semi-pornographic material on your blogs that naturally, you have the stamina of Anais Nin and can do it one more time) and you, the you inside you is just dying for a day off writing. Well, don't be weak, pussy flavored and mealy mouthed. Get thee to the writing and shut ears, eyes, mouth and vagina to all interruptions.

Life is short. It is even shorter when you don't have the will to do what you are inclined to do. In fact, I'd say work is an interruption of our passions in life. If writing is a passion, hell, get married to a nice bloke and start writing. If you can't get a Canada Council grant to write your first book, hubbies are notoriously amenable to being your grant provider (so long as they get their three times a day shot at the pot).

I don't do the blogs like my hubby does his

Hubby has been infected by my endless writing on blogs. When the number of blogs I'd spawned reached ten, something broke, some wall of resistance to my pathogenicity and he is consumed. He is getting ready to launch his blog. He says it will be ready to go in a month.

When I launch a blog, I don't have the patience to design it, gather material and make it pretty like he does. Hell, when I want babies - I want them now. We barely were married a year, when we had baby number #1. It is the same thing with my writing children. I want, I make, I write.

I get very itchy to make new blogs as soon as I find out that I've been reincarnating the same topic over and over again on simultaneous blogs. Although I'm not got an ordered and precise and preparative mind like the sort possessed by hubby, I have this mad tendency to organize things after the fact. So after I write about love and relationships, I think hey, maybe I should make a blog called "Love Practice" and I do and then I haven't written in it for ages because, let me be utterly truthful here, when you are married - love and relationships are not red hot items like they are in the initial stages of contact. First contact is always loveliest. That is why there are so many divorces among married folks.

Anyway to get back to the topic I started on - which is the fact that I like spontaneous combustion blog creation and I also like writing like a free writer and that everything I write has bits and pieces of me in it (in very immoral formats) then you can understand why hubby's patient, slow style of blog genesis makes me freaky. Every day I ask about his seminal creation and every day the answer is this "Be patient." Why does he do this to me? He knows I'm as about as patient as a fruit fly on a peach and I'm apt to just fly around generating millions of random fruit flies rather than just settle and be.

How is it that the most impatient woman in the world ended up with the most calm, methodical, peace loving creature in Canada? Accident? There are no accidents. It is all prewritten and we are actors who don't know our parts and are utterly doomed to screw up the play.

I'd like to learn the blog genesis method of hubby's if for no other reason than there would be less embarrassing, stupid works of mine on the Internet waters but I'm not going to start his way of working. I'll take the stupid pieces of writing being thrown in my face because the goal of this project, was maximal word counts. I'm not doing a thing of beauty every two seconds. I'm doing word counts. I'm doing word quotas. Hey, this is a word garment factory here and I'm a Third World indentured slave generating products. Mind you they are cheap, junky products destined for WalMart but hey, that's the way it is when you aren't into quality control but word profits.

Doing the word counts is sort of like doing sperm counts to check male fertility but less amusing. I find just writing, just dashing off the lines has been the best way for me to uncoil from a tight basket stance to strike out at the prey in front of me and make purchase of my goal. I just write. Even if the topic is waving around in my head like a section of underwater fronds and obscuring the fish zipping around and I'm not even sure where the dive is leading to - I just do it. I don't do it hubby's neat, precise, organized way but it works for me. Every blog gets material. I get the practice. And hell, this is what it is all about PRACTICE.

Ungravings

It is all stones inside the mind
You work yourself out of the pile
Make yourself get the hammer and break the boulder
Then you are ungraved
You breathe easier for there is no press on your chest or
the burial never happened and you have no nightmares
of the darkness

Or you see bones in the trees, silver fish and hair nets
Where the vegetable garden pearls out with onion bulbs, radishes and heads of lettuce
you see a baby hand and something soft and white
you wonder whether you are going mad or whether these are just the stones again
that were always there in the mud but now that
the rain has come
Monsoons to drag out bones
the bones are also being ungraved

In the night when you sleep beside your husband you see the dead
with their heads to one side, cheeks exposed and the girls flung like beads from a
necklace torn out of your hands
and you wonder since you were just a child
why they were all so quiet as your airplane left for the moon

Sometimes when your sister howls and there is a star in your head that implodes
a whispering cloud meets you in the darkness and wraps you up in bandages
like a mummy
and graves you back to the silent ground
I think stones are like people
we are cold and hard and flung about and
there are burials and
ungravings
we can whisper to but then we turn into
bones

Ten minute time out

Nothing concentrates the mind like anger. I'm quick to cut when I'm mad. I'm quick to jump out of the box and do the nasty castigating of others. I don't even pause. I'm mad. I say it.

So what am I mad about? Hell, it can be anything. The wind blows my laundry line over and it bends. I'm made at hubby for not setting it in concrete. Yeah, simple things like that. I'm a grown up and I've got kindergarten temper tantrum issues.

So I go have a nap. Yeah, a ten minute time out. That does what it needs to do which is get me through the whirlwind. I'm back to calm.

I think it is useful to have a ten minute timeout for every adult who is prone to anger management issues such as the type I have. Ten minutes of napping in a dark room and then a chance to write out hostility on the blog of her choice. That does the trick for me. Of course, bigger problems that elicit greater anger may require greater solitude sessions but the advantage of longer anger resolution periods is that you really get to evolve.

What really interests you is in your writings

I read an interview recently that got me thinking. The interview was with the poet Brendan Galvin. Something he said in that interview stuck to me burr-like and wouldn't be dislodged from the fabric of my thoughts. What was it? Something simple. But true. He said this:

"That's one reason for writing, isn't it? To find out what you're really interested in as opposed to what you think interests you. Study a few years' worth of your poems and they reveal what's truly on your mind."

http://www.poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_galvin.php

Maybe this is what I'm doing on the blogs = searching. I'm searching for what makes me totally absorbed to the point where true learning, true fascination takes over and I'm in heaven.

Most of us spend an entire decade or more erecting monuments to our egos. Some of us do this via work and work related success symbols - raises in salary, corner offices, new and better job titles, recognition and power. Others do it through personal motifs - raising brighter, better, higher achieving children. Yet others do it through creative endeavors but even there there are ego monuments being put up - books, articles, awards and fame.

What happens is that we get sucked into the vortex of these created lives. They may be what we think we want but in reality, without the type of close examination provided by introspection, thinking, contemplation, writing and vivisection of the self - we don't really know if the lives we are living are the lives we want to live. The only way to do it - is to write it out for a writer or to make poems if you are a poet.

But just doing the writing isn't enough as Brendan Galvin has clearly pointed out in his very interesting interview in Poetry Daily. What is required is study of what you have written to find out what is preying on your mind, what is obsessing you and what really and authentically calls to you and makes you happy.

I've got journals to go over. I don't know if I'll mine them to find a group of topics that are going to show me the way I need to go on my life journey. But certainly, they will reveal to me what is the stuff of my life that is really true to me. Not just the stuff that makes me raise ego monuments but the stuff that makes me happy.

Dreaming a life away

When I start to feel compressed - like time is running out and that I've got to start rushing around doing things, I force myself to slow down. I go eat something so I'm not running on empty. I drink a hot cup of tea. I read a thought provoking article. I think about what the writer was trying to transmit to me -what bit of wisdom that he has learned from his own life experiences that I can profitably incorporate into the daily work of managing a life. I don't do work for at least half an hour. When I feel rushed, I do the opposite to what I feel I should be doing -which is using my time efficiently. Instead, I "waste" the time.

Why? Life is short. I will never get through all the jobs I'm supposed to finish in a day. None of these jobs (even jobs I'm paid to do) will self destruct, go missing or even create a lethal situation for me or others if they are not done. What is more important in life is not the stuffing of every single minute with what I call productive activities (P.A.s) but taking a bit of time out of each day to simply relax, enjoy the time and learn. I call these short breaks - learning breaks or more accurately my wasting time breaks.

But I'm not really wasting time during these breaks. I'm learning. I vegging out or day dreaming or contemplating or simply looking out at that reddish puddle of a bush amid all the brown decay of my garden and savoring that burst of color in the darkness. I'm doing something. What I'm not doing is running around, rushing through jobs and being in high gear.

Downshifting several times a day is good for you. Take a nap. Go for a walk. Read a book bit. Think. Dream. Have a fantasy. Drink a hot mug of cocoa or a bowl of soup or simply drink water. Do what needs to be done more slowly - later. Later isn't a cop out. It just means you know what the right priorities of your day are. And if you don't know? Let me tell you what they are: first, you've got to have a life, even if it is in small, tapeworm proglottids of time thrown down in the GI tract of your host. Second, the P.A.s of your life will always, like stones in your shoes turn up and you'll remove the stones as you go on your journey. And third, dreaming a life away isn't a negative thing. I'm dreaming my life away and my life is richer for it.

If I were a coyote

There is a small protected enclave of poplar trees next to the walking area where I glance longingly at the closet of warm, golden pooled leaves. If I were a coyote, I'd bed down there in that hollow and roll around luxuriantly. I'd sniff around for passing human beings but I'd continue napping in the slivers of sunlight that filter through the last remaining web of leaves that stationary sit on the branches above. I'd sniff the berries that are clustered like lips, lip to lip and maybe nip at them. I'd push into the tangle of wild rose bushes, combing my raggy fur with the spiky branches and pull off the hourglass berries and chew on them deliciously. If I were a coyote, I'd stalk, as light as a bit of dandelion fluff in the direction of the dizzy hare with the limp and grab it in one fluid leap and bring the meal home to my children. But I'd pant for a bit, sit in that deep hollow, feel the brown dirt, the razor blades of the Russian olive tree, the whir of the last insects, that tramping woman passing by with her face like a stone and not want to go home. For in that hollow, in that caught moment of time, with the wind blowing madly outside the confine of the garment of trees hanging on the blue line of sky, I'd be alone, deeply and satisfyingly alone, with the hare in my mouth and the endless sweep of time before me. I'd wait there. Just for that caught moment of time.

Garbage and it's collection

I did the walk I didn't do yesterday. It was breezy - there were some parts of the walk where I felt like I was going to lift off and certainly most of our neighborhood garbage bags were in flight, in the road, on the park, in the ravine and bric-a-brac festooned even some of the trees and bushes on front yards. I think it would be so much simpler if we all took our garbage to a community common garbage area - a place with fixed dumpsters and the city simply picked up at one common place in each community. This would reduce labor costs - you wouldn't have to have a guy running down a street with a truck, stop and starting all over and wasting fuel.

Never being one to waste my time losing a good idea I e-mail the garbage department at wasteman@edmonton.ca. I'm waiting for a response.
This is what I wrote:

Hi,

I wonder if the City of Edmonton has ever considered a simpler solution to garbage collection? Right now in my neighborhood we have two guys in a truck going up and down streets, wasting time and fuel and tax dollars doing a prolonged collection process. Has the city ever considered having a section of each neighborhood (especially in new construction areas) where permanent garbage collection areas can be set up? By this I mean not only blue box and recycle areas but actual garbage collection areas. There could dumpsters for all the people in the neighborhood to put their garbage into on garbage day.

This type of collection process would do this:

1) decrease the number of trucks and employees required to collect garbage

2) decrease the number of paid man hours to collect garbage since this method is inherently more efficient than the current stop and grab and dump system

3) decrease fuel costs (idling time of trucks) and decrease pollution (which is high right now with trucks on all the time)

4) decrease costs since the dumpsters would be owned by the City on City land (just like parks are owned by the City).

These waste management sectors of every community being currently developed may not be popular but if they are placed with appropriate landscaping they may be les offensive to new home buyers.

In any case, I do believe this would be a cost saving measure for the City. It would also prevent what happens on windy days - garbage being scattered all over the roads, natural areas near our community and in the water.

The walk into the wind

I'm going for a long walk. I found this delicious red leaf outside my front door when I got back from giving the boys' their home lunch at my parents' place and it whispered to me to go outside and feel the wind buffeting me around like a pingpong ball on a large table and I was seduced by the color and form and whisper. I'm going out. I'm going to eat color. I'm going to slip on the slide of the gray leaves on the pavement. I'm going to wake myself up from the fog of being indoors. I'll come back and write. I'll slip into the laundry mode too. I'll do something of worth, I promise. I'll even make supper. But first, the walk into the wind. The bending into the sun and the rush of blood into face, arms and legs. I'll go out and catch more leaves. I'll pierce the silence with my own inner singing. I'll make poems. I'll dream myself awake.

There is no other way other than to do the work

I've been doing half the training I need to do learn the craft of writing. There are two halves to the apple. I've been entirely working on the writing and ignoring the reading part. I need to do that work as well. But when? By the end of the day, I'm bushed. There is only one time to do it - and that is to just go to the library with the boys and read like mad after school or do this work on weekends when hubby is home and I can just go do it.

This isn't satisfactory. What I need to do is get to the books I have in my library at home and just not fuss about it and do it just the way I am doing it with the writing. Reading supplies amino acids - the building blocks for the proteinaceous stuff I'm writing. Without them, there is no food to eat for the reader and no mind food for me.

Just the same way as I'm doing writing - stop and start, five minute blocks, diarrhea production, don't think about it and just put it out type of practice, that is the same way I will do the reading. With reading it is more difficult to read like a hummingbird sucking out nectar and flirting off but I can at least try. If I start a book, I'll plug away at it and extract useful tidbits and get whatever I can into my head. I read books for ideas, ways to get wise and live life better. I rarely read fiction but I will start now as I am missing an entire vocabulary of literature that I need in order to translate what I'm thinking into meaning. It is not enough to just freewrite, sometimes, the writing must go beyond the surface where the water striders are marching and do the deep pond investigations where lurks creatures unknown and fascinating. It will broaden my appreciation of life.

Helping days

Solzhenitsyn wrote in Gulag Archipelago, "The dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being and who is willing to destroy his own heart?"
http://www.amnestyusa.org/amnesty-magazine/summer-2004/our-heart-of-darkness/page.do?id=1105473


It is not as if I know the meaning of anything. I come here to write about the things I don't know, the work I'm grappling with and the problems I don't want to face and maybe the problem I'm dealing with isn't one involving courage or cowardice but simply one dealing with the dead simple matter of good and evil.

Why do we help others? Why do we give up our own time to make sure our loved ones get taken care of? What makes people give up their entire lives to dedicate themselves to an incapacitated spouse, a broken child or a sibling who just can't manage? I don't believe the answer is entirely one of love. Love itself isn't enough to manage the heroic task of helping other people through their final illnesses and deaths. Love isn't enough to subjugate one's selfish desire to have a life emptied of trouble, toil and sacrifice. Love just isn't enough.

So if it isn't love - it has to be a recognition on the part of the hero or heroine of a personal family tragedy of the magnitude that occurs daily in every hospital - that they are helping their loved ones in an answer to a very personal question. Are they willing to sacrifice their hearts to good or to evil? It is so easy to sacrifice one's heart to evil. Evil is the sweetest drug around. A romp in the bed with a guy you fancy when you are married, leaving your young children to fend for themselves in the tidal waves of a divorce while you go off to wife number two and leave a devastated wife number one to carry the family load or even the simple failure to do the endless medical appointments required to support a sick, obese and disabled sister like my sister -all these are acts of violence to the heart within the perpetrator. You may not recognize the criminal act, but the heart knows and will remind you over and over again of your transgressions.

For most of last year, I've been in some sort of personal hell and was utterly unable to extend the help to my extended family that I had in the past. I'd given up on being patient advocate to them. I was wasted, done in and totaled. It was only with this latest downturn in the health of my sister that I've roused myself out of my antipathy to do any more life restoration on the extended family and made an effort to help out. Today was one of those helping days. I've spent an entire day at the University Hospital being my sister's health advocate, getting her through her cardiac assessment and wondering yet again "How do I get into these type of situations?"

What I mean by this is how do I get elected to be the extended family health advocate? I don't want the job. The job fell to me sort of by birth order rights. I'm the oldest child. I get the joy of being with every sick parent, every sick sibling through their illnesses in life. I'm tired of it. And yet, if I don't do it who will?

The line that separates a person who does good acts and one who does bad acts is clear cut. You do good acts when you sacrifice yourself for the good of others. You do bad acts when you give up the good of others or when you turn away from acting on the evil you see and either selfishly pursue your own good or do not help others. The line is there in my heart. I can give up the doing of all helping days and be alone and write what I wish, live my life entirely free of the gobbling mouths and be able to go on as if there were no parasites on my doggie body. But then, the heart knows. It knows when I'm doing an act of evil. If I am not with my parents and sister in their final phases of their lives, if I do not act on their behalf, if I sit like a waiting stone for the hand to come and pick me up and throw me into the ice of them and break the surface wide open so I can sink into their depths and never reemerge - well if I wait for that magical hand and do not rouse myself to do what must be done then I've crossed the side from good acts to that of evil acts.

The choice confronts me daily and in many ways. I could do a ton of evil acts when I want to because I'm not perfect. I'm as desirous as the next sod. But what prevents me doing this? My children. My husband. Myself. It is strange that a woman who cannot be good can be made to be good by reminders of innocence and kindness. A line is always clear and distinct to all of us. We blur the line. We do this to avoid pain, suffering and yeah, work. We do this to enjoy momentary pleasure, joy and ego stroking. We cross the line voluntarily. No one forces us to do this. It is really, really us who do the business of evil. And in doing evil, we destroy our own hearts.

Working to a state of grace

I guess this blog like all the other blogs I'm writing on is practice in getting to a state of grace. Writing on the blogs gets me to stop and listen to that small tinney voice inside me that I ignore in the clamor of life. Listening to that voice is what will get me to grow up, to make a fine final product of myself and to learn the essential business of mastery of the self.

Mastery of self is not a punitive thing - where you are exerting mind control, boundaries and hardships on oneself. I think of it more as an artistic type of thing where the artist is in full bloom and skills are at their peak. It is sort of like the fine control over one's fingers that a musician has over his instrument or a painter over his paintbrush and a writer over the cascading thoughts in his mind. Mastery of self is the only achievement worth fighting for.

But it is a day to day business involving time and effort. I sit here in the writing space and work on the process of learning myself and managing that unruly, childish being. Mastery of the self is an ongoing thing. I'm in control of one aspect of me one day and on another day, that control is down the drain pipe.

You can work at yourself every day and still be a beginner at the process of learning to just grow up. I'm fifty years old and on some days I feel as vulnerable and tiny and helpless as any infant. Luckily, I've got kids of my own and so they remind me that I'm an adult and they are the infants and that really I need to act like one - even if I'm mentally and emotionally not there yet.

Acting as an adult when most of the time you feel helpless, powerless and devalued is the best way to get to becoming the adult you want to be. You will be a grown up eventually - life has a way of ensuring this evolution to that state. But depending on the person involved, it takes variable quantities of time and variable types of life experiences to effect this transformation. In the meantime, you just have to pretend you are an adult already and crawl your way there.

The blogs are my places where I get to pretend I'm an adult already when, in reality, I'm really this spoiled (yeah, I know I'm spoiled - I don't need you readers out there to tell me so) and immature soul. I'm working hard to get out of the pit and move to the place where I'm at peace and in grace.

What is being in grace like? It is those times when I'm walking, the sun is rippling the waves on the sea of sky, there is not a shred of dissonance in my mind or soul and the world is alright just the way it is. And so am I.

Writing affair

The end of the day writing is the most delicious bread I eat. I come to the writing place. It is dark in the room, the house silent with the boys and hubby asleep and I am alone in the world inside my head. There may be Leonard Cohen singing "Take This Waltz" but other than his voice, I'm in that phase that I call delight time.

If you write and you write every chance you get or you write when you even don't want to write, you will understand what pulls me out of my bed at midnight to savor that last long cool drink of words. You might even understand that I want to get drunk on words. I want to bathe in them. You, who also sit at night, while your spouse is obliterated by sleep, or your kids are snuggled in their blankets like hotdogs in buns - you know what gets a person out of their lying in and gets them to kiss, touch and ravish the words in their heads.

It really is all about passion. Everything in a life that is worth doing is done only because you have an addiction to doing it. This addiction is based on passion, love, adoration and need and hunger and wanting. Yeah, it sounds sick. But it is what keeps a human being alive and interesting and original. Or else we would all be carbon copies of each other and so dull that the words would freeze on our lips.

Writing a life is simple to do but so few of us do it. Of all the millions of human beings who exist, just a tiny portion of us sit at our writing spaces and labor to make our slow minds stop braking and start moving to that tiny point of understanding that is necessary for one to arrive at - if one is to make words form into meaning. A life is full of meaning no matter how humble, limited by funds or ideas it may be. If you are able to love and have life experiences, you are able to have a life of meaning and that life of meaning can be recorded daily in writing.

It is worth doing. Writing is not meant to be limited to academics, to those gifted enough to make literature and to the journalists. Writing is a universal human gift and we could all be doing what we need to do - which is making our own private worlds visible and available as an emotional record for all of us. If all of us would write about the things that kills us emotionally, the hurts in our soul, the failures and the successes of our lives - whether they be internal or external events - we would have a rich history of intimate experiences for each of us to delve into and take learning and comfort from. Instead, we are limited to a few human beings in our own sphere of love - which for the most part is what keeps us going emotionally and mentally but oh, how much richer we would all be if we were all privy to the secret longings, happenings and desires of each other's hearts!

Privacy is a funny thing. What you consider private, I may not. And our world is now becoming more and more paranoid in it's determination to contain our private data. Privacy laws such as FOIP have made their muscles and strength known and now private data is considered to be information that can be sold and bought and therefore must be protected. I'm sure there is accuracy in this stance and our private medical data for example, if revealed to parties such as insurance companies, may have financial implications for us as private citizens. However, this trend to private data being guarded and kept locked has further diminished the possibility of each of us communicating as ordinary human beings. We must now be careful not only to not speak the truth in our hearts but also of not inadvertently intruding on FOIP protected data of others and ourselves.

In the end, I do not see our society moving to greater closeness and intimate connections between solitary human beings. Technology, privacy laws, the deconstruction of community bonds and just the natural persona creation in the work place will prevent authentic communication between real human beings. The only place where we are free to lift the veil, open our hearts and show the tears in our soul will be the journal, the inner sanctum of our writings and for those of us open enough to show their wounds publicly, their online journals - their blogs.

Offline journals and online journals provide a rich personal human history that we are not privy to in even our most detailed pieces of literature. Why? Because the writer, is not bare naked in his creations. Even in his journals, there is a slight dishonesty of internal expression, because the writer is aware that there may be an audience for his works. An audience always tends to rein in the free and total expression of one's mind. Why? It is like this. We are writing our lives. What if you - the reader are repelled by the innermost secrets of our hearts? Does this mean we are like poison pills packed in a prescription bottle and will be death to other readers? Writers are readers convoluted into writers. We write because we read and we don't want reading that will turn off readers - we want to attract them, make them fall in love with us and then carry on a continuing passionate relationship with them as long as we are attractive, desirable, funny and yeah sexy.

So, even in our most private writings we have this awareness that - oh hell, there is a reader out there and I want him in love with me and my writings so I have to be careful that I don't fuck up and turn him/her off and then the relationship is over and the bittersweet regretting begins. Yeah, writers are all about affairs of the words.

In a sense, there is no private writing except the first genesis of thought that we compose into lines in our heads. Then the writing in our heads is edited and purified so that the reader will be turned on by it and then we throw it out the door as our written piece and we hope we find lovers of our words and we are crucified when our words are rejected.

But does that stop us? No. Because it won't matter if there is a reader or a lover of our private thoughts out there. We are going to keep writing because in the end what matters is that we are in love with words. We, the people that write, are in sex with our thoughts, are getting out of beds with our lawfully wedded spouses in order to have illicit affairs with the words that we tussle with in our writing spaces and in the end, it is this - this great affair of the heart with our writings that make us keep doing it. The great addiction. The leap into the song, sway and melody of the poem. The fall into the inner being. What ever it is. It gets us out of bed.

Adopting pseudo-silence

I'm continuing the pseudo-silence project I started yesterday. Life was more peaceful and I was able to do less interventions with everyone around me by talking less. Amazingly enough, other people can solve their own problems, get themselves organized and run their lives without me constantly babying them along.

Internal monkey chatter is harmful to me. Outside monkey chatter or excessive chatter is simply doing me in as well and isn't helpful for others either. I'll confine most of the run on thoughts, the free thinking and free yakking to the pages of my blogs. The blogs can be sort of like a giant vacuum cleaner sucking up the debris in my mind into web bags and I can dispose of them cleanly.

It is not that I've stopped communicating with others. It is rather like my trend to seclusion. I've found these practices are useful and contribute to calm or Zen mind. I'm going to keep practicing them until they are more natural or maybe forever.

The crows

For the most part, I wrote steadily without interruptions. But then they start. The constant flow of calls from my extended family. The oxygen saturation machine had to be taken back to VitalAire my mother says. I call VitalAire and arrange for them to pick it up. Then my father calls to tell me my sister is booking DATS trips to the bank and Southgate. I know she doesn't need to go to the bank. Right now she isn't capable of handling money. Or shopping at stores without supervision. I phone DATS to cancel her appointment. I leave a message to get them to call me back. I want to temporarily suspend her ability to make DATS appointments. Why? Because she is giving money away to people thinking she is buying stuff that is why. Unless she is supervised, she will be out of touch with reality and do these things. Independence is fine, but only if you are rational.

My mother tells me there are ominous findings with her kidney. She has suffered all her life. And now the perennial bladder infections have made her kidneys vulnerable. I know when I saw her this morning she reminded me of death. Frail. Lost, and confused. With the added stress of a daughter who is losing her marbles, is wanting to live but is also fairly sick and confused. Meanwhile my father sits like a rock about to be toppled among all the hassle and noise and commotion. His heart with the quadruple bypass, is getting tuckered out and there is no way he will get another shot at heart surgery. I think the three of them appear like crows on a telephone line, harbingers of doom. I am unnerved by them. And that is why I came home right away and wrote like a woman seeking life. My family is cursed by illness. There is imminent death everywhere I look. Only writing will keep me in life.

And even here, in the writing place there is no peace from the crows. They fly overhead. They peck me to pieces. One day they will be all gone and in their place will be a few feathers and these lines. I wonder what I'll be writing then? Will I be writing about life? Or their deaths?

Speaking less -practice pseudo-silence

Inadvertently, hubby gave me the subject of today's post. The topic is on silence or relative silence. I'm a chatter box. Hubby puts up with it but is glad I have the blogs to yap on. But sometimes, he just wants....yeah, silence, peace and no chatting.

I chatter, because I must. But I wondered, what would a day be like - if I stopped the monkey chatter that I'm so inclined to invest myself in daily? What would it be like for me if I spoke less?

So that's what I'm trying today. I'm not able to do the complete silence bit and I'm actually speaking on my blogs, but I'd have to do that or blow a tire from not speaking. It is impossible for me to completely shut the hell up but if I just confine my chatter to my written pieces, if I limit the amount of talk I engage and if I listen to others for a change - what type of changes would occur in the quality and quantity of my communication? By shutting up, would I be giving other people the floor and allowing me to learn from them rather than just going on and on and not learning anything?

I started by just telling hubby and the kids ONCE to get up and then I left them to their own devices. Usually, I'm like a sheepdog, harrying them along to the breakfast table, getting them fed and out the door. Today, I made lunches, got younger boy up and put his clothes by his bed and was silent. If someone spoke to me, I answered but made no effort to nag or encourage further talk. The breakfast table was blissfully quiet. I was able to brush my teeth, get my hair combed and yeah, even look at my face before eating my breakfast in calm and quiet. I didn't have to manage anyone else. It was a delight.

The younger boy dawdled as usual. I didn't fuss. His older brother nagged him. His dad pulled up some information for his news for class. I merely got his food in front of him and pointed out stuff he might be interested in eating. But none of the usual yapping on my part to get him to eat.

Amazingly enough, even without all my nagging, chatter and directions, the family was able to organize their school lunches, backpacks and outer apparel, get into the van and get ready for the drive to school. They really didn't me all hyper and talking and organizing them to get to this point. It was a sombre revelation. I'd been wasting so much energy each morning doing what could have been a calm procession of kids and hubby out the door. I won't be talking and nagging and sheep dogging everyone anymore. It is more peaceful this way.

As for the rest of the day? I'm going to practice pseudo-silence for the day. If it works that I'm calmer, more relaxed and more untangled, I'm going to continue this as a daily practice.

Fruit

I know that there is no way I can control the world around me. There is no way I can change events. The world is messed up big time. The only sphere of influence I am in charge of is in my family home. Even there, I'm not really able to do more than set routines, nourish and train my boys. Hubby is an mature adult and is very disciplined. He is in charge of himself. So in essence, I can only keep track of myself.

When we get to the point in our life of realizing that we are the only product we are ever going to produce in this world, we can decide either to just let this product be formed naturally or have a say in how we want this product to develop. While the natural selection/development process of developing the self has some positive aspects to it (biologically speaking, it is the way nature decides if we are evolving in response to the external environment), somehow it is far more satisfying to imagine that we can change our biological outcome by changing the way we think.

If we can change the way we think, if we can meet both sorrow and joy with equanimity and not be made disordered by either condition, I think we will have a good shot at a happy life . Happiness, in my opinion isn't wild joy or sexual ecstasy or even continuous satisfaction. Happiness, for me at least, is being able to manage myself and my reactions (both thinking and behavior) in a way to maximize the experiencing of events in a calm, fluid, responsive and engaged manner. I want to meet with both pain and joy in the same frame of mind and learn from these two types of events.

Usually, this isn't the way I meet the challenge of pain. I'm overwhelmed. I'm emotionally killed. I'm useless. It takes a sort of long recuperation before I can extract the lessons out of the primal event. Instead of being overwhelmed by pain, I'd rather like to be able to meet with it, shake it by the hand and get acquainted. I'd like to be rational rather than a gibbering idiot. I'd like to be able to be self disciplined enough to know the steps to get from the first devastating attack to the point of being calm and accepting.

It is the same thing with joy. I'm never able to experience the joy of a present event because I'm rushing off into the future to the next joyful event. I don't experience the present joy. I am always in the future, anticipated joy.

How does one get to the point of meeting both extremes of experience without becoming a basket case? Practice. You get to go through hell once or twice and you learn that the pain will pass and you can be almost stoic about the experience. Being stoic is part of what I'd like to learn.

You go through joy and you learn to sit in the middle of the glow and not waste the precious heat by running around outside the glow. You learn to be in the now.

Experience, past experience teaches us to be calm, accepting and in the now. Experience teaches us that we are only responsible for our own growth in this life task of making ourselves. We are making ourselves as the final products of our lives - the fruit so to speak of our growth in the tree of humanity. We are obligated to make ourselves luscious.

Experiencing chores

I've done my laundry which is the best thing I've done today. Sad. Right? Nope. Laundry is a way for me to actually start the process of unshelling myself. I get out three loads of sopping wet clothing into the plastic baskets. I line them up to the door next to my deck. I go out into the cold with another empty container and decant all the dried, flying, iced clothing floating on the lines. I bring that load in to thaw out and to be put away. I go out with the wet stuff. I'm cold. My fingers are numb and I can feel their edges getting brittle and ready to break off. I ignore the sensation and keep doing. I'm not thinking. I'm just putting up clothes. Watching the towels with their holey bodies fling themselves against me. I'm noting colors. I'm happy with the plain exertion, the start of my day with a productive activity. It is enough just to get the laundry done, to prime my mental pump, to get into the doing of the day with a simple task.

Once the laundry is done, I take my time and wash my dishes. I don't have a dish washer. I do it by hand. I use dish towels to dry the dishes. I put them away. Another productive activity. Simple and satisfying.

My mind isn't totally woken up despite the coffee and now the tea. But it doesn't matter. I can be in this simple skein of loose thought and empty mind and be at peace for the laundry has been gently and gracefully placed on the line in the wind, the dishes have been washed and put away, the floor has been swept and the beds made. Simple ways to start the day but have you noticed how satisfying it is to just have these jobs experienced and felt and enjoyed rather than rushed through?

I used to rush through my chores as if they weren't a part of my life but things I had to do in order to get to the real parts of my life. Actually chores, like raising kids, like paying taxes, like having sex, like going to work - they are all parts of my real life. Each of these aspects of my real life have a place in my entire spectrum of life experiences - some have a more significant place such as the children and some have hardly any significance such as the paid outside the house work. But they are all a part of my life. And it is far better for me to experience these aspects of my life - no matter how trivial or burdensome they are and to get some value out of the time spent doing them than to just attempt to get them done. Experiencing chores such as laundry, cooking and doing the dishes can become almost a sensuous, provocative experience. I'm serious. Have you ever watched the utter beauty of a fabric of one of your dresses float like a cobwebbed dream in the sunlight and wind? Watch. The dress is a kite. The design on it is a dragon. And you, the chore doer- you are a seeker of life. And this life can be found anywhere - even in the most simplest and mundane of chores.

Out of the cage

I find that you have to take a leap out of your regular daily routine and just mix things up on some days. You get stale if you just don't do anything or you do the same things over and over again. The end result is an ossified human being and a daily grind rather than an engaged, interested person and a lively experience of life.

I sit at home like a log in a fireplace. The most I do is read at the library or simmer on walks. I'm no party animal, I'm a reclusive beast. But sometimes, there is a need to do more than this. I'd like to be out and about and dragging the boys to other places.

So today, I've picked the Valley Zoo as deserving of our walk. I think it will do the boys a world of good to get away from electronic forms of entertainment and just go see caged animals in the not-so wild locale of the zoo. I know our zoo isn't as magnificent as the Calgary Zoo but it also does not have the hellish crowds and the difficulties seeing the animals. It is worth a visit and today I've decided that we need to get out of the house and experience something out of our regular bland routine.

A routine is a useful thing when you have children. It provides a structure within which the kids feel safe, understood and can understand their universe clearly. But a routine is also a zoo. Human beings are not meant to be caged animals - at least not all the time. You have to be free of the cages, the restrictions and the boundaries and unlike the wild animals in the Valley Zoo, human beings are allowed to roam outside their preconceived cages. But only if they see those cages, find their keys, open the locks on their mental cages and take their life in their own capable hands and roam free. And that is what I'm off to do today.

The big eraser

So my blog - Life Practice deals with life related matters like love, kids and other living things. But this blog is to help me evolve to the final phase which is the preparation for death.

Now, I've met death before but never got to know him personally and well. I mean all I really remember is being pushed down a hospital corridor at warp speed with hubby holding my hand as I was forcibly put into a surgical room and operated on. Yeah, encounters with death are sort of like a quick train ride and a crash and you don't remember much.

So I don't remember much about nearly dying except it wasn't pleasant before the near death experience and the recovery from it was hell (and well documented in a journal full to the brim of self pitying comments, blistering evaluations about my medical care and other such self absorbed rantings).

But death itself? What happens? I tend to think of death in terms of writing and then being forced to stop writing. I mean - I'm a pencil writing happily away and what I'm writing is visible in life but then, I die and this big eraser comes down from the sky and erases everything I write.

I feel that I'm still writing after death, but darn it, no one will be able to read it (well, it doesn't really matter that much if they can't read it because no one is reading this stuff while I'm living - so hey, no big loss). If I think of death as this type of pencil and eraser thing, somehow I'm not afraid.

I love writing. If I can believe I can be writing - after the physical body is gone - hey, no problemo. I'll take my death courageously and just go face that great big eraser in the sky. It can't be any more horrible than facing writing criticism here on Earth.

Walk related small set of happiness

Happiness is:

1) A row of fleshy, frozen red crab apples skewered and presented to me on a long skinny crab apple tree branch.

2) Dangling black pip-like berries in cherry cascades forming a halo around a tree. In the bright sunlight I feel the tree is a silk screen image rather than a real living thing.

3) The corrugated bark of a tree, white and gray, pushing off the tree trunk, heaving itself into my view.

4) Purple leaves, pink rocks, bright sunlight and the burst of greens - light greens, sombre greens, gray-greens flaunted by an entire garden of conifers.

5) Letters on the lawn. Dried leaves.

6) Bird. Annoying. Magpie. Politician bird. Meddling, loud and intrusive.

7) Sliver of Canada geese sewing in and out of the blue fabric of sky.

8) Water on the grass where the poplars are still waving their small hands at me.

9) A particularly gnarled branch twisted, old and resistant to smoothening out. Rather like me.

10) Good ideas, remembered for my writing. Light everywhere. Sunlight. I am grateful.

Slowing down to the speed of your own life

It took me about fifty years to realize that the reason I was so unhappy is because I was on someone else's schedule of life. I was slow in my life but I hadn't yet slowed down to the speed of my own life.

Now that I'm slowed down to the speed of my own life and not other people's life, I'm far happier. I'm not ecstatic but then who is? Maybe movie stars who have Molly Maid cleaning for them and their food prepared by chefs but surely to god, not ordinary mortals.

Any way the reason I thought I had to (unhappily) follow the program of everyone else was because goddammit, everyone else was on this go fast, go swift, go high and go die program. It sounded right. Work hard, buy good junk, have money and then turn yourself in and get ashed.

But no, it just did not work for me. I suspect it doesn't work for a entire layer of slow Moes like me but who through their plain bad luck in not marrying supportive spouses, have to go to work and have to just pretend to follow the program at work, in order to stay in these jobs that pay for their lives' bills.

Yeah, I'm a slow Moe. I occasionally have fleeting moments where I wish I were achieving scientific breakthroughs in molecular biology but then the feeling, nauseous and ugly, passes and I'm back to being a slow moving creature. I am slow doing the writing. I'm slow in the walk. I'm slowing down in the expectations and worrying of the boys. I'm slow in expecting hubby to move on house projects (I mean how can I expect him to do what I don't expect myself to do?) In other words I've given up on the entire business of measuring myself against the societal measuring stick and I'm just doing what I want to do- at my own slow pace. Which is incredibly slow.

Fact is, no one gives a shit if I'm fast or slow. I'm not being paid to do this work or this life. I'm utterly unable to pull out the threads of my childhood indoctrination to make me work any harder. I'm in the stage or rut in my life where it seems so much more fruitful to ripen on the branch than to start the entire business of mating and making fruit.

Ripening is one nice way to put what I'm doing in life right now which my hubby would define as loitering about. I don't loiter. Loiter means having no purpose. I have a purpose but it is very ephemeral and fluid. I have the purpose of getting to the me that is in me. Yeah, so New Age. But do I care? Nope. I'm at the point where I don't care what anyone thinks. I mean there might be a sting now and then when I get a waspish comment from a near and dear one on my utterly frivolous (to them) existence but really is it so frivolous?

I get up. I take care of small blobs of protoplasm. I make my hubby happy (think breast fetish). I walk. I write. I cook (if you can call it that). I read like a virulent strain of streptococcus multiplying in nutrient broth. I wash clothes. I write some more. I feed small blobs and hubby. I buy groceries. I take care of my piece of land that I like to think is a bona fide garden but is in reality, sort of a natural wilderness area. I frequent junk shops and bring junk home. I get rid of junk. I write some more. So it is slow, easy and empty of any of the intrusions of job requirements, achievement pressures or even the need to be a productive citizen (Hey, I write to the fine Mayor of our city about road deconstruction! I do my part!).

You don't have to be everyone else. You don't have to live like everyone else . You can take control of your life to the amount that you can take control of chaos and do what you want to do (even if you work you can do this). You can slow down to the speed of your own life. Not the life speed prescribed by our society.

Think you can't do this? You can. You decide where you work. You decide if you work for company A or company B. If company A won't give you flexibility, you decide (all by yourself) that you would prefer to work for company B that does give you flexibility. Don't tell me you can't do this. Are you a slave? Nope? Then you can do this. All you have to do is do it.

Work is the biggest regulator of the speed of your life. If you make work slower, if you do one thing at a time, if you decide that multitasking, overworking, doing coffee breaks as work breaks is not what you want to do - then stop doing it. What is your employer going to do if you stop? Fire you? Let him do it. You can get another job. And you should. If you have the type of heart destructive work environment that produces workers that are hamster wheel oriented then you need to get out of such a work environment. It will kill you.

After work, is your after work life other wise known as home life or leisure time. Are you overworking here as well? Stop. Just stop. Make yourself do the work over years rather than months. Don't be a weekend project warrior. Stop doing everything. Let the trades do some of the work. Yeah, it will cost more. So what? You need to have your own time to be truly living. You need to slow down during your own time to experience this time. And you need to stop doing what the entire world is doing which is using your free time as productive work time.

I was guilty of this as everyone else. Free time for me - meant time for productive activities (PAs). The boys were intimately familiar with this type of conversation from the moment they were up and running as toddlers:

Me; "Are you doing a productive activity or are you just farting around?"

Older boy with a whimper: "I'm writing in my journal."

Younger boy, cowering away: "I'm playing with my Pokemon cards."

Me; "Aha! Playing with Pokemon cards is not a P.A. Get thee to thy journal now!"

Yeah, the boys were not allowed to fart around and slow down to the speed of their lives until this last year when I finally got the kick in the groin and woke up to the fact that I was fucked up and so gave up on the crap that I'd been using to get through life. Now the boys do what they want so long as homework is done on time. Which means they fart around.

Often that is just what is necessary to slow down to the speed of your life is to take the time to be bored, restless, uptight and to just fart around. This is incubation time. When I'm farting around, my mind is a sieve. I'm collecting particles and crap. I get to go through it all. And then some of the sieved material ends up in my writing.

Slowing down means that you actually do nothing on some days. I have days where I'm plastered to my sofa where the only things I've done is write and walk. I don't skip these two requirements of my existence, or I'll go batty otherwise. But other than that? Meals are on the fly. The boys and hubby do their stuff. I vegetate. And then, I get back in flow.

I'm a bit happier since I realized I can't be SUPER-whatever. I'm just an ordinary woman. This happy realization has given me an entire second of peace. Now, I slow down often when I even naturally rev up. I tell myself, "Hey, you get more mileage at slower speeds and you can't go on your journey with flat tires." Car type analogies are useful sometimes. You also can't get anywhere without gasoline. Fuel yourself up by slowing down to the speed of your own life and no one else's.

That's all we wrote

Growing up is hard to do. I'm still working on it. Most of the time I pretend I'm grown up. I've come to realize that this is what most adults do. We are all a bit in a muddle, trying to make sense of ourselves and our lives are running faster than a speeding bullet on a trajectory we are only vaguely conscious of. We are all good actors. We pay our bills. We show up to vote. We kiss our spouses and make our private lives immaculate. We stumble now and then and we pull back from our desires. We run through our dreams and we end up in our midlives wondering where did it all go and how can we get it all back and we continue whining in this fashion because we are spoilt baby boomers until we get the final revelation that really "That's all we wrote."

Finally we get to the stage where we still pretend to be adults (someone needs to be an adult when there are kids around) and yet we know deep inside us, that really we're never going to grow up, that evolution does not require permanent banishment from the happy kingdom of childhood and we are all works in process. If we are all works in process, then there are no mistakes and there are no failures and there are no endings. We can keep going doing what we need to and in the end, if we are still not quite there, I don't believe we are going to get a final report card that says we failed in our lives.

So the best thing to do as pretend adults is to just unrelieve ourselves. Just piss some time away and enjoy it. I mean you can't be dedicating yourself to making yourself a Gandhi every second. You have to just take time off the process of growing you and making yourself better or more finished. In fact, I advocate just stopping the self improvement and the results oriented search for self. It is best to just let it happen.

I'll give you an example. I was getting all results oriented with this writing I'm doing right now and I wanted to get a product and make money and sell it and be famous and all that crap. It was sucking all the joy out of my life and introducing tension, requirements to WORK, sweat and unhappiness. So I said to myself "Fuck this." And I stopped the hamster wheel turning effort and just decided to treat the writing as my fun, my joy and my play. Since I stopped putting the medal requirement for this race I'm enjoying the training for it so much better. I'm coming here just to think, meander and be folksy. I get to be myself. I don't have to play pundit crap or I am the expert, or even I'm the blog writer. I'm just a woman who writes daily and gets out crap and makes a story of her life.

Yeah, all this is really a story of a life. My life. Your life may be far more decisive, full of triumphs and victories than my life. That's great. My life is banal, ordinary, boring, painful and sometimes funny as hell. I use the writing to get through the hellish parts and to put my conscious mind entirely into the funny as hell mode of operating. Laughter cures anything and after love is the next best medicine for a hellish life.

In fact, a hellish life is often a source of many episodes of bone wrenching laughter. You just have to find the laughter in vomit, stomach staples and poop in plastic bags. Laughter lurks everywhere and will burst the venom pus bubble inside of you and make you start on your journey back to health, stability and calm. Laughter will keep you sane.

And will keep up the illusion that you are an adult in charge of her life who knows what she is doing and is competent enough to raise two little blobs to maturity. The only way you keep this illusion going is with a trail of confetti laughter thrown at you in the continuing circus parade of life. The only way you can pretend to be an adult is by doing the work of laughing and healing and understanding that you are only in process, you're not done, it will take the entire time you are given to do this task of growing up and even then, you may not get there. But that's all you get to write in the end. And it is enough.

The ego child

When the ego goes to the front of the line, you simply take a longer time to evolve. Of your many selves, the ego is the cry baby, the one who wants attention and gets it. The ego says stuff like "You're already great, you're perfect, you don't need to go through the pain and suffering that everyone in life is subject to, you are exempt from the price of admission to the movie of evolution."

The ego believes in short cuts, not paying taxes on life's earnings and simply getting away with murder because we are simply so worthy. Well, we are all worthy but the ego makes us see, experience and do life very superficially and eventually just being worthy doesn't cut it and we actually have to produce in the job of life. Or quite frankly, we don't get very good life performance assessments -either by ourselves in our truthful moments or by those who are our beloveds.

The ego is a solitary hunter searching constantly for the prey to satisfy it's hunger and it is never satisfied. If you stay just ego being, you will never grow up, never experience the tenderness of a well fought defeat, never love a man so completely that all that matters is the smile on his face and never, ever experience the act of doing good simply because it is you. Ego defeats your growth, puts you down in subtle and demeaning ways and makes you less than what you could be. You - the inner you - can be so much. But if you let your ego rule you, if you puff yourself up like a bird in a mating display, if you seek only the outer and not the deep innermost secrets of yourself, then be aware that your life won't be one of substance but that of decay.

We are meant to have full lives. Full to the brim with caring, love and what makes us happy. I don't believe for one instance that we can't have these lives but I don't believe we can have continuously happy lives and I don't believe we can have these lives at all if the ego stays in the front of the line of all the selves within us that are clamoring to be in full frontal view.

I'm trying to put my ego at the middle of the line. Maybe one day she will go quietly and shamefacedly back to the end of the line, understanding that her role in the beginning of my life, was survival of me and now, she is no longer as essential for my well being. Maybe, she will go to the end of the line in full acceptance that in order for me to grow up, to be an adult and to realize what I need to do to make myself happy - that she, the ego child must go to the very end of the line of the selves I'm creating.

The small happiness sets

I like to write long pieces but being a mum I rarely get the luxury of uninterrupted minutes. I usually have a boy begging me to "Get off the computer mum! I need it, I really, really need it!" Yeah, like they need a frontal lobotomy with all the electronics drugs they do. I rarely get any writing done when the boys are around. They are sticky.

So I neglect the house work and do writing while they are at school. This does make for tiring times at the end of the day where I must run around like a whirlwind cooking, cleaning and pretending I work at home before hubby enters the house and wants supper but the writing requires at least a few hours of uninterrupted (but guilty) time where I can simply uncan my thoughts and spoon them out onto a bowl and stir them meditatively. I mean, the thoughts aren't world class or even particularly original as my graduate school adviser would have informed you but they are thoughts, I'm doing what I want to do and that makes me happy.

It is a funny thing about happiness. If you think happiness is far from you, it is. But if you look right in your own space, in your head, there it is.

I try to write about happiness a little. I find if I concentrate on the real simple things that make me happy I'm less inclined to go to the shops to find my happiness there. I'm able to go to my garden instead and find happiness in a bunch of green, chubby Sedum leaves sitting like baby lips in a ripe corner of greenness in the middle of this frosty day. I'm able to go for a walk and not need an unnecessary garment to soothe my fragile ego. I'm able to simply write and there, in the few lines, I'm calm and at peace.

Happiness is worth chasing after but it rarely comes to those who run after it. It is more of an accidental thing. I find it randomly. I'm most often sure that the world and life is a sad business and that only now and then, a rainbow of happiness appears to magically lift the gloom and rain out of view. A rainbow of happiness comes and you are able to keep going.

When I started my series on happiness - I made the intention to focus on happiness but happiness through small things, acts and pleasures. Not the big happiness sets - love, marriage, great sex, travel and babies. The small happiness sets.

If you take groups of small items and put them into sets and the sets are available to look at you can be happy while you are looking at that set. It is sort of like this. I went to the Gaspe coast in Quebec (that item is part of my big happiness set). I picked rocks, shells and other junk up during my holiday. I have them collected in a clear glass container. That is a part of my small happiness set. I see that stuff and I'm reminded of the warm beaches, the sea entangled with the rocks, the walking up and down the coast, the rain, the liver line of the beach along the side of our hotel, the boys shopping for the Tintin T-shirts, their captain hats and other junk and the nights in the hotel. That small container has a great deal of happiness attached to it.

Small happiness sets is what I'm trying to make in my happiness series. It is really the small, minor encounters we have in life with others, objects and places that seal our memories and make them pointy and sticky. We remember things not because we went through surgery but because we remember the small tiny incidents associated with that surgery. For example, when I woke from my near death experience what do I remember? An enormous vase overfilled with roses - pink ones in full bloom and my husband asleep in the chair next to my bed. Small happiness sets. Being alive was the big happiness set but I didn't think about that. I thought about the presence of my husband and the visible evidence of his love.

Toasters and marriages may be very similar in their functioning

I have a toaster that doesn't work. Hubby and I have discussed disposal of it several times but it is still shiny and bright and except for the fact that you have to push down on the knob to get it to toast the bread, it is in good shape. Now we only use the toaster for breakfast but you would think that an irritating appliance like this would be long replaced in our home. Not so.

I find that appliances in general are built to die after a certain number of uses. This built in obsolescence of appliances makes me recalcitrant about getting rid of them. Why should I make the manufacturer of defective products richer by going out and buying a replacement of his original defective product? No, not me. I'm stubborn. I'll just go on using his defective product for as long as I can. So far we've used the nasty toaster for over a year now. Past it's best before disposal date.

Strangely enough since we've kept the toaster despite it's failure to toast bread independently, it seems to be trying it's best to do it's job. It now occasionally toasts bread without us having to hold the knob down.

I wonder if this toaster is sort of like what marriage is all about? Maybe we all need help with our marriages when we start to go off our jobs. And if we each help each other to do our jobs in our marriages, then maybe we return to the job at hand. Which is toasting bread for my dysfunctional toaster and for the rest of us, staying committed in our marriages.

Happiness continues

Happiness is:

1) Staying calm despite provocation. Being responsive rather than reactive. Burning out all the emotions and getting to functional. Yeah, happiness is not falling apart.

2) Walking for just one hour in the blistering wind or cool breeze of the afternoon and seeing the last fling of leaves before winter snows are due to arrive.

3) Birds. Like plump buttons on the jackets of trees. Chatting with you as you go past. Sitting importantly on the lawn searching for invisible and present insect life. Birds. Everywhere.

4) My boys. Both of the little horrors. One immaculate, the other dirt retentive. Sleeping. Quiet house. Empty time. Writing time.

5) The meals done. Eaten. Finished chores. End of day quiet. No more chores.

6) No one sick or dead yet.

7) Believing the words "It's only money. It's not life."

8) Love before everything else. Believing that.

9) Laughing before and after crying.

10) My garden in the split second of sunlight that hit the plants today and thawed them sufficiently that they came back to temporary life.

Incision

Sometimes I write a poem and I'm done. I've said everything I could say in that poem. I don't want to do poem writing any more. I want to do humor. Or talk about the black death. Or influenza outbreaks. But no self dissection, no cutting into live flesh, no ripping out internal organs, no redesigning one's internal space - because sometimes that is what poetry writing involves.

Other times, it is just babble, like blog babble. Or it is spontaneous chatter like when you meet a stranger on a bus and start a conversation and it goes well and you think maybe not all commuters are axe murderers about to kill their fellow bus riders. It is like a bit of rain falling when you walk and you continue despite the moisture and two minutes later, the world rewards you for your perseverance by ending the waterfall.

But when the poem is serious, you get to the meat and bone and you don't stay on the skin surface. I hate that and I love that about poetry. It is all about getting inside and meeting yourself and often, I really don't like meeting myself.

Poetry helps you to get to know yourself better and maybe in that knowing, you get to eventually accept yourself for who you are and out of that familiarity comes a certain self respect and yes, liking for oneself. I don't know. All writing is a way to the self. Poem writing is just writing to the self with a surgical instrument rather than a common kitchen knife.

If I'm in the mood for incisions, I'll go to my bedroom and sit alone and write. I won't show the work to anyone. I'll make the poem mine. I rape it and love it and make it conform to my will. I'm a poem handler, maker and destroyer. I do what I can to make the reality true. If it doesn't work, I leave it. I leave the entire work in a book. I try not to see the terrible words. I don't really want to do surgery twice.

But if I'm grown past that poem journal, if I can go back, I read the poems and I'm utterly, utterly destroyed. If you read yourself in your poems and you see yourself at a certain stage in your life and you have tried to get past that experience and not done it, then rereading the poems of that part of your life, kills you again.

So why do it? Poems call to you. You don't write them out of free will. They call to you and you have to write them, rewrite them, revisit them, redo them and make them be what they ask you to make them into. Poems are not children that are independent biological organisms that can become mature and leave you. They are parts of you and they were excised from incisions made by you into your own emotional landscape. Poems live but just in petri dishes where you supply the culture medium and you determine if they grow or die.

Real poets - are able to take pieces of themselves and give them to readers and readers feel like the incisions that the poets have made into their personal selves are also being made in readers. Real poets can transfer malignant cells into you in an intimate transfusion of words and you are contaminated with their cancers. You can read a poet's life in her poems and you will understand your own life - a little bit better. Even the tiny events in your life take on freshness, life and decision simply because a real poet has made an incision into her own heart and given you - the reader a bit of her cardiac muscle. Still beating.

Yeah, boys to bed

I'm going to put younger boy to bed. Older boy is surfing. It is like this on the hump day. I think Wednesdays need to be banned. Or is it Mondays that are more deleterious to one's mental health?

Anyway, putting kids to bed is rather difficult. For some reason when younger boy is immersed in his play there is a tug of war that happens before the boy gets to brush his teeth, floss, bathe and get into bed. This often takes a great deal of energy on my part to effect these changes in his oral hygiene, personal body care and yeah, just his bed status.

But off I go. Once he is sleeping the sleep of the innocent 9 year old boy that he is, I will be FREE! I'll blog then.

We are all not who we seem to be

I don't know you and you don't know me. It is as simple as that. It is all a matter of collisions and imagining. I think of human interactions as random acts of meeting, tearing into each other and then reforming oneself after the tearing is done.

It must have been like this when the dinosaurs were around. A world of giants ripping into each other. In the most intimate sense, we are all strangers to each other - even the ones in our own beds are unknown quantities that we measure, define and reestablish the qualities of daily.

Part of the mystery of each of us is that we are able to change and flux and consciously change our course in our lives. Inside of us - we are fluid. It is only the outside persona and shape that is temporarily fixed so we can have a few markers to identify each of us to each other.

I'm sure that if we just spent time with each other, we would be disturbed to find that we aren't what we had thought we were and that other people aren't what we had fixed them in formaldehyde to be either.

We just have to accept this. I don't want to be a static dead insect pinned to a wall for observation and study. I want to be out there doing my own thing. Other people are the same way. And because we are all running around trying to be what we are meant to be - we will always be hard to pin down and determine as fixed elements in some human periodic chart.

The solution? Accept. We are all going to be the way we are. We can't do a damn thing to make people like the way we want them to be. I think the way to live our lives is to simply accept variability, change and flux. It is sort of a survival of the fittest type of rationale in that human beings are programmed to change, to adapt - in order to increase their chances of passing on their genes.

We are all not who we seem to be because dammit we don't even know who we are so we can't display what we are accurately. So we all might as well just give up trying to fix everyone's character and just fixate on ourselves. We are the only people we can get to know accurately and once we know ourselves, well we might stop screwing up so much and this can only have a positive ripple effect on those we love and know. Simple right? Change ourselves and we change others. Change others and voila! We change the fricking messed up world.

Mental fitness

So I try to write before I walk or after I walk but then I'm always trying to do the meals first. Today I took older boy to the eye specialist and I've only just got one blog post written for Life Practice and I've wanted to write about writing. So here I am.

Why is writing therapeutic for me? I think it is because I'm not a social being. If you aren't one of those people who have a lot of friends but who is made into a hostile beast by listening to inane chatter and who simply cannot stomach the litany of troubles that people tend to spill over you if you show the least bit of sympathetic attention to them, then you need to write. Better still you need to write in a blog.

Why write-blog? Well, it keeps you writing. I tell myself the damn blog would just die if I don't do writing practice which is patently a lie since I'm still able to write without the blog but at least with this transparent prod, I'm writing more often. And writing tends to serve as a sort of vomiting space.

Most people have their own problems. They have sick kids, or their pets have died or they've lost their jobs or illusions or both and you simply can't go to them with your list of heartfelt horrors and add to their burdens in this life. What you can do is this - write it all out on a blog. Just pretend you are chatting with a nice bloke who will nod occasionally in your direction and make soft, soothing noises sort of like your parents did when you were feverish and sent home from school. It is very comforting. The only difference is that there is no chicken soup and you have to write.

Usually what I do is write about myself and the family. The boys don't like this and hubby is often alarmed by what I'm yapping about but what can they do? Freedom of speech and it keeps me out of their hair. I mostly write now while the boys are at school since they have piles of inedible homework to digest when they get home and I am sort of like a navigator of school homework for them. They get it. I do it.

So writing is done sporadically thorough out the day. It would be more sporadic today but I'm avoiding housework. I will also go walk soon and then I'll stop and buy the ground pork and just fit in the cooking late. I'll start a salad right now so hubby can't say that I do nothing all day. I mean I made the salad before he got home didn't I? Fact is that right now, the writing does come first. I want to do it all the time. It is like exercising. First your entire body aches, you sleep more and you don't want to do it. Then your body gets used to being used and will remind you "Hey, lazy bones, it is time for my walkies." I know that it is the same principle with writing practice - first you do anything to avoid it and eventually, you need it and you're hooked for life.

I like to think the reward for writing is this - mental fitness. If I walk - I have a ton of energy and I'm happy with my fitness level. I'm able to wear the clothes I have in my wardrobe. I'm not running around looking like a stuffed toy. I'm able to do what I need to do as a wife, mother, daughter and errand runner. It is the same with the writing practice. If I keep this up I'm sure that when I'm eighty and I'm with hubby in the retirement home, there won't be a foggy part of the day when I'm not sure who that old guy next to me in bed is. I'm sure I'll be as sharp and keen for life as when I'm at my best state here doing writing practice.

Why I'm voting

It is just the hour before the polls close. We've had supper and we're on our way to vote. Not that our votes will make much difference in Alberta where it seems like generations of pioneers have followed the Conservative route or not voted. I'm not in favor of not voting. It seems like when you have a right, you need to exercise that right. It is sort of the same principal with reference to your physical body and mind. If you just cease to exercise them, they atrophy and you're toast.

I like to think that my vote counts. It is sort of like hoping that the people I elect understand how hard it is for ordinary people to earn money and that they won't abuse our trust by going to meetings all the time, rehashing the same issues and deciding nothing. I believe it is incredibly difficult for any group of people to decide on one issue because:
1) No one wants to stick his head out and get it chopped when the decision turns out to be a failure.
2) No one wants to fail even though technically, failure is often required in order to become successful at a job and being a politician is just a man or woman in a job in public view.
3) No one likes to be failing publicly.

Failure and publicity are good reasons to stay out of politics. The men and women who decide to go into politics either have:
1) Thick skins and the ability to bullshit well. Are power hungry and out for their own interests or,
2) Actually are trying to make the world a better place.

While I'm cynical and I think it is pretty much impossible for large groups of discrete cells of political groups to make kissy face with each other and decide on anything that will lead to less spending, intelligent direction of my country or even avoiding falling flat on their economic behinds, I have to still vote.

It may be that in the middle of the pack, hidden somewhere in the gristle and the fat, there will be a Gandhi in evolution. And the world needs Gandhi type men and women. We have to vote and hope that somewhere in each party, there are men and women of character and courage and yes, illusions - who still believe that helping their fellow citizens and not their own interests, is the way to live a life of substance.

Appreciate rather than envy

If you focus on what you have got you might be surprised to find out that despite the fact that you think you have very little, that indeed you do have quite a bit. I'm always rather envious of other people. I'm not shy to admit this. I'm envious of their good looks, their pretty homes, their nice furniture, their delectable gardens, their many vehicles .. oh, you get the idea. But I've found the way to stopper the envy is a daily dose of what I call "appreciating what you've got."

I often appreciate what I've got when I'm putting out the wash. Hanging the laundry outside makes this a perfect zone of time in which to focus on what I have that I can appreciate. Usually I appreciate my laundry. I mean that isn't that far off is it? If you look at the simplest item of clothing that we wear - say a shirt - it is incredible that we have such fine fabrics being made into designs dreamed up by some artistic sort in some factory, constructed in some impoverished Third World country, shipped to us and sold in our dens of shopping slime. I mean if you simply admire the pretty things you wear each day (no matter how old and well washed they are or how out of fashion they are) - you have to admit, we are darn lucky - each of us to be able to wear modern clothing.

I often think of my underwear for example as something I'm grateful for. Mind you most of my underwear has been given to me by my mother. I know. I'm fifty years old and my mother still buys my underwear? Well, she isn't anymore but all the underwear I currently own were gifts from her. Why? It is because I never go to retail stores to buy underwear. I therefore tend to have underwear that is decades old. My mother is the fastidious sort. She can't bear to think that her beautiful (to her) daughter is donning cotton unmentionables without any sort of charm, flexibility or shape every day. She prefers to have me wearing bras that fit my boobs, underpants that are not sagging around my butt and yeah, a camisole and underskirt under my dress - so that my obvious charms are not transparent when I'm wearing a dress. Mum is very lady-like (all those years living under British rule and then 5 years in England have indoctrinated her in the importance of underwear).

I am still wearing my nursing bra that I first obtained when older boy was a blob and he is now 13 years old. It fits and the only annoying part about it is that the front portion that detaches when you feed baby is rather loose now and has this tendency to drop and expose my nipples to passing strangers under the tight T-shirts. Hubby finds this a very positive aspect to the garment (so long as I expose myself to him and not all and sundry) but I'm inclined to retire this garment (despite my sentimental attachment to the memories of sleepless, half awake nights when I'd be feeding one or other of the boy rats).

So you see, if you have a taste for appreciating what you have like I do - you can appreciate practically any thing such as a nursing bra that is 14 years old. In fact, you can go even further and appreciate the T-shirt that you wore for 12 years that you couldn't bear to give to Goodwill (they'd refuse it anyway - too decrepit) and therefore got ripped and recycled as bits of rags and is still serving you well. Yeah, appreciate and you can avoid envying.

Count your bits of happiness

Happiness is:

1) The flipping of the cards of the paper leaves on the pavement as you walk in the tunnel of wind that is gaming with them.
2) The red maple leaf - just one - that you find wedged in a bit of dried dirt and grass that has turned sandstone yellow in the hollow of the marsh with the apple red rose hips falling like gems onto the same ground.
3) Your child's face, innocent and open and his smile when he sees you at lunch time.
4) The first bit of gold in the morning sky making metal rims out of the clear glass sky.
5) The nectarine that you've kept in the fridge, cold, juicy and wet on your lips. The liquid falling to your lap. The cold skin bursting like raspberries against your tongue. The taste of summer gone, eaten in the fall.
6) Writing a whole length of time and waking up to find the hour gone, the paper filled with songs and the burst of the invisible sore inside of you and the healing begun.
7) The kiss of your husband and his arms around you at day break and sun down and all the hours in between.
8) The whispering past, the dreaming present and no glimpse into the future. Leave the future alone. It has it's own time.
9) Walking. Slipping on the wet park grass. Following the snaking body of leaves around a trail corner. The robins, fat as grapefruit, chasing down the elusive worms. The woodpecker in the trees. A chickadee eating from a bird feeder.
10) Feeling beautiful.

I need to graduate

It has taken me a while to get to the writing place today. I was grumpy yesterday due to lack of sleep and headed off to bed early. And now I've had my sleep, I'm able to think. Lukewarmishly. I'm sure there is going to be time for me to walk even though I'm still immersed in hanging laundry on the line, freezing to the consistency of ice soup and then coming in to warm up and then go out again. I've one more load to put out (the clothes dryer outside holds three loads of washing) and I'll be done for a bit. Just have to wait for the clothes I've brought in to warm up and I'll put them away.

Laundry washing and drying in this manner takes more time but that isn't a problem. If you stay at home, you will have more time. Less money of course, but more time. I've whined for years that I've not had sufficient time at home to do the writing but the fact is that I did have the time but I was using it improperly. I wasn't organized, the kids were younger and they just took more time to deal with on a daily basis and we did more extracurricular stuff that also sucked up time and life energy. Now that I have the rudimentary housework system up (cook, clean and chuck stuff) things are more smooth. The boys, despite their tendency to depend on us too much are still minutely more able to take care of their own needs (i.e. make a toast when they are hungry, get milk out of the fridge and read to themselves). This tiny bit of independence on their part has given me microseconds of time that add up to hours. I also don't do anything outside of school. This may be bad for my original ambition which was to create WONDER kids but it has done wonders for me. I'm able to write. And the boys still go to the playground, we manage a run with the older boy and they aren't wastelands as human beings. They are still enjoying their lives -albeit utterly unstructured and free of any group or individual sports/academic/fun training. It is sort of like the childhood I had. Children were left to amuse themselves and they did.

So more time.Where does it go? Part of it goes because I'm grumpy. Why am I grumpy? NO products still. I've always been product oriented. Just blogs isn't enough product for me. I want those damn poems. The kid's story sits like the damp laundry in the hallway waiting for me to become more disciplined and write on it. The blogs are easy peasy now and I'm dithering in the institution I'm already familiar with rather than graduating to the next place of learning. So I need to graduate and get into the frame of learning the new things required to make a book of poetry or a children's novel.

In the end it really amounts to this = "Do you really want to do this?" If you really want to do it, if it brings you happiness, you will find a way to do this. Time or lack of time is just an excuse. Oodles of time hasn't got me to the doing of the work yet. What will? If I really want it.

What's the joy factor?

The way you view your world determines your experience of the world. If you think you are a lucky woman, able to do your writing and stay at home with darling children and have the freedom to run bare naked through blogs in an almost childish exhilaration, then you are that experience.

But if you think you are an unlucky woman, prone to major and minor disasters of the heart, crippled by a strong character and an inability to just shut up and work, then dearest, you are that experience.

The conditions are the same for each experience but how you think determines your joy factor.

I'm prone to the "Woe is me, the glass is half empty, nearly empty, and all drained out" type of thinking that is subversive, detrimental to my joy quotient and in fact, makes a normal regular life experience into a panicky and stressful one. If instead, I catch myself being half woeful and decide instead to be half joyful, then maybe I'm still not completely happy (but then who is) but I've positively changed my experience of the same life events.

Let me give you an example. I hate work. But if instead of hating work, I saw it as an opportunity to learn new things (which I adore doing) and if I focused on that aspect, no matter how dulling the work would be I could take it upon myself to make it an opportunity to learn something no matter what. I don't have to learn through the job tasks, but through the placement in the job environment. The job environment provides contact with people and every person can teach you something - whether positive or negative. Most of the people I've met at work have taught me how not to live my life which is a useful thing in itself. There has been an odd duck that have taught me other things that I've incorporated into my life. So it is possible to convert one's gloomy outlook into an outlook embracing joy.

What's the joy factor? That's the question I should ask myself. And hell, if there isn't any joy factor, I should invent one. For in reality, most of the boring, cranky things in life don't have inherent value or interesting aspects to them unless we invent another reality - a joyous one.

A perfect night for someone to die

Younger boy is flagged out on the bed while older boy shifts through the riches and untreasures of the Internet. I rag on him to get to bed. He has to do all the homework he has successfully avoided the entire weekend tomorrow. He avoids eye contact with me and gives me his teenage shake of his hair. It is effective. I am cowed. I return to my writing.

We were on our way home from picking them up from my parents where they were sent to incubate while we were in Calgary and I was commenting on the beautiful, silky black night when older boy chimed up cheerfully:

"Yeah, a perfect night for someone to die."

Creeped out, I thought about his remark later. Is is true? Is all beauty contaminated by death? Or was this merely his teenage black humor? I wonder where that little boy was who sat in his toddler chair grabbing a watermelon slice bigger than his head and smearing his entire upper body with watermelon juice as he methodically attacked the fruit. Where was the boy who played with his pals at Peanut Butter and Jam playgroups, oblivious to anything else other than the toys, the movement and the fun? Where was the boy who when given the first clumps of snow to experience, rolled around in the snow like a puppy in sand? Where was the youngster who made snowmen in Quebec with his aunts? Where was the child in the teenager?

The child in the teenager is still there. And the child in the adult is still in me. And thank god for that because if we didn't have the child how black would be the night and really how many of us are dying.

The right choice

I have to go eat again. I don't know why but every night I have to have a treat of something. Usually it is a disgusting spoonful of Nutella spread and I'm ok. I'm going to eat right now.

I've had my spoonful of chocolate spread and I've got a reheated toast from this morning and my hot cup of tea. I know I'll regret the tea because it is strong and powerful and will keep me up and not sleeping and tomorrow I want to go for a walk early but hey, it is now and I want tea now.

I've always felt that brown bread is something made by bakers to torment consumers because it usually tastes like old socks and dirt mixed with bits of hard rock but I'm getting used to not eating the delicious, white and tasty breads from Sobeys. This is because we have entirely converted ourselves to flax bread from Superstore and it is still hard for me to believe that I've done this after 50 years of white bread consumption but it was simply better for the boys and so now I've made the switch and I'm eating it because I love bread and brown flax bread that tastes like shoes and leather and bits of wood is better than no bread at all.

I've slathered the brown flat stuff in butter which makes it taste a bit better and I've got the wash of hot tea soaked in white sugar to soften it all down in a bolus that I can swallow but oh, I really wish I was able to eat white bread right now. But the boys. I have to remember the boys.

Today I was driving home with hubby from Calgary and I saw this mother in the van next to us smoking away gleefully while her babies, strapped in the back seat were inhaling her second hand smoke and I felt like flagging her down and telling her that she was killing her children. It is the same thing with white bread. I'm killing my kids with white bread just as that woman was killing her babies with white smoke. There isn't any difference.

Our kids don't have a choice in what we do to them. They are born out of our procreative urges and they are entirely at our mercy. I don't want my kids to be fat, obese and barely able to navigate their worlds as adults. I want them entirely competent, kind and able to love freely And so a small change in our diet from junk to real foods, raw foods, home made foods - yeah that was a choice that I should have made years ago but now I've made it and in the end, the kids are what matter.

Private chatter

No matter how much money I have - it is never enough. It is rather like love. I never have enough love. Why is this? Why am I running around like a dry sponge wanting to be soaked in the blood of money and love?

It is perhaps not surprising that I'm so screwed up. If I'm this needy for love and material stuff and it seems I am, then it is perhaps not so strange that I'm off the scale in other ways as well. Such as in the writing.

It is perhaps no wonder I'm writing day and night.Writing practice is sort of like practice with my worry beads. I need, I want, I go write and the worry beads are fingered again and again and I get down to calm again. The calm where I don't want and need so desperately like a child but can be rational and not want and need.

I know intellectually, that more money and more love are not going to make me any more sane. It takes inner work to stop the machine gun of the mind and make myself sit calm in the silence and just think rationally instead of running off in multiple directions, splitting into pieces like cloth being ripped apart by pulling hands.

I feel like that sometimes - like I'm a piece of cloth and there is a crowd of people pulling on me and dragging the corners and ripping bits of me off. I'm sure I'm the only one who feels like this - as if I'm daily losing pieces of myself. Surely to god, I think, everyone else is intact and sane and not broken in pieces.

Yeah, that is how it feels like to be me. Sort of like a train wreck. When I see how normal everyone else is at work and at leisure there is always this nagging voice in my head that says "Hey, under that patina of normal they are just as frantic and lost and screwed up as you are." But then maybe they aren't like me. But who knows? They never split out of their clothing Superman style and I never get to see the superhuman under the Clark Kent suits.

It seems that there are only a few of us screwed up people around who are willing to tell the world that we aren't superwomen or that we cry over things that hurt us and we are wounded and not healed and there is a constant running commentary in our heads that we come to blogs to write out of our heads. I think if you met me in person you would hear this commentary in my chatter with you but would you reveal your inner chatter? Nope. Because that inner chatter is yours alone. It belongs in your private space you think. It is for you and your loved ones.

Bull shit it is. Private chatter can be open, free and intimate. It is just that the danger is this - once you reveal who you are to the other, you leave yourself open to be wounded and that is the real reason none of us really know each other. Maybe once or twice in your life, you open yourself to the other and then you get knifed in the heart and that experience is so damn painful that you learn the lesson of mankind which is this - never reveal what is in your secret heart. Because if you do and the person you reveal yourself to is an inexact surgeon, well you are in danger of having your heart ripped out of your body and walking around dead in your shoes.

I've learned this lesson well and now I don't reveal myself to you in person. I do it on the blogs. For this way, I won't get my heart carved up into little pieces and eaten for a delicious appetizer before the main ego meal.

Drink

I went straight to bed when we got home from our trip to Calgary (rental stuff) and then I did what I always do after a brief nap (write). Of course there are times when I don't get up to write but those times are rare. I feel funny when I've not put the words in. It feels like I've beaten the kids or not had sex with hubby or eaten out at a fast food place. In other words, it feels like I've done wrong.

So I dragged my tired and emotionally worn out body out of bed and came to the writing place to make some meaning out of the day. I am at the point now of wondering why we are doing what we are doing and whether there are better ways to pay our bills.

Would it be better if I just went to work and did the hours like so many others and sold the rental property? It would solve the problem of paying off the current mortgage on our personal residence and we wouldn't have to fart around doing extra work. I know if we did this we would have enough to live on with just hubby's monthly salary but I'm reluctant to do this because of the capital gains on the house sale. It is stupid but I just hate the idea of losing some of the profit to be made on the house sale but hey, I'm not going to avoid this since the house is a rental now so why am I worried about that? I guess the real worry is that I have been looking at this rental home as my retirement fund and once I sell it, no retirement fund. And facing that reality is another one - hey if there is no retirement fund - how are you going to support your sorry little ass when you can't make money from writing and writing is all you do?

Worries are useless and yet I use worries here to figure out the truth regarding my ambivalence with reference to the rental property. Right now - this year, I'm doing nothing - no decision. I'm postponing a decision. Why? I'm at the point this year of nearly getting back to normal - the way I was before I had my kick in my groin. And now I'm at the near stable point again (which for me is still rather wacky and crazy and off beat), I want to just write dammit. I won't give up writing time for stupid grunt worker time although I know I will have to do some of it with gritted teeth and drugged body and Zen mind. But right now? NO, NO and NO.

I don't care if we need the money but until December when I'll do a small contract, I'm just doing writing. It is like this - if you are parched for water - can you face food? No. You want water. I'm drinking right now.

A long walk eliminates excuses to do your joy work

I finally pried myself off the chair where I was limpet like sticking and then got up hubby to walk me like his pet on the trail near our home. We met only two other people as we were nattering about books - a woman with a dog and a man with his dog. I am amazed at the attachment of people for their pets. I don't particularly like dogs due to an unfortunate incident involving a dog biting my younger sister and I've never kept a dog but we've always had a procession of multiple cats in our home but once the last and best of them died - Simon, we stopped pets. No one can replace that mighty king of cat humor and kindness. Simon was that cat.

We walked along leafy trails and I cursed the fact I had not bought a garbage bag with me to collect the nice dried leaves so I could have added them to my garden. Hubby was clearly relieved I hadn't got one (he is always a bit embarrassed by my utter lack of shame in picking up leaves, roadside cast offs or garage sale junk).

I didn't get far. I'm not walking the long distances I used to and I'm losing track time every day. I will get back to walking longer distances starting Thanksgiving day. I'm sure the reason why I'm not walking is because I'm such a wuss about cold weather. I've never quite got inured to the winter with the throat ripping wind, the slash and dash ice and the hellish sliding on the roadways with the car. I think if you can come to Canada after living most of your life in hot countries, then you are capable of living anywhere. You are a climate change survivor.

I find that walking long distances is a great way to get yourself out of any pit. I manage to get myself into a pit on a regular basis (a propensity for difficulties) and therefore I need a therapy that doesn't involve regular psychiatric consults and I find that long distance walking will cure any emotional troubles short of major depression which thankfully I haven't yet been gifted with. A long distance walk over a period of hours won't fail to get you so exhausted that you fall into sleep like into a pit that you don't see in front of you and for me, that is a great side effect because I often have problems sleeping. In addition, a good walk, tramping on the natural side will get you to erase all the crap in your head and start you onto a different set of slides that you can run over and over in your head and get you into another universe entirely. Nature has no ills. At least, none until man screws it up. So when you walk into nature, there is only perfection there And I'm seduced by this perfection.

Finally, a long walk will rev you up sufficiently that it is possible to lose some of the weight you are carrying around that is being a drag on your appearance, your mood and your ability to act out a new you. So when you walk daily and often more than once in a day and then start doing long walks, you will get the energy to do the things you put off doing because you were tired. You won't have the tired excuse anymore. You may have other excuses but tired just won't work because you will have the energy to tackle the housework, the paid work, then help the kids with their homework and finally to do the work you want to do but have been putting off because, well, you told yourself you could not possibly juggle all this other stuff and your joy work as well. Now you can.

Time to go out

I'm on another cup of strong tea. I'm going to have to get off my butt soon and do the walk. I'm not going out because, yeah it takes effort and I'd rather be drinking tea and yakking on the blogs. The day went by fast. I did nothing. By that I mean I did no SAHM type work. The kids, for the most part,disappeared -older boy to WEM and younger boy to his friend across the street. Hubby ran in the morning and stayed stuck to his computer. I am in front of mine. Not only do we all live in our own world in our heads but we live in our own worlds in the outer world as well.

But soon I will get hubby to walk with me. We will go do the trail near my home and yak about the usual things we yak about when we walk- which is usually our kids. I wonder sometimes what married couples talk about when the kids leave the home. Do they have a verbal void?

I don't think it will be a problem for me because I'm able to talk to anyone. I like talking. I just don't like talking with people and finding out that really there isn't much inside the hollow human worth discussing. Most of the time when I talk to people, it is always about their lives for I'm interested in learning new things. I don't think most of the people I encounter learn new things or read or even write. They doodle along.

I think there is nothing with a life experienced in that way for that is their personal choice but I'm looking for chatter about words. I like people who have fun with language and experiment with oddball ways to provoke laughter and who see the ridiculous in the sublime parts of our lives. I don't like to make topics sacred and off limits and boundaried and kept gated and unavailable for speculation and discussion. I'd like to natter endlessly about inner spirit, evolution, writing and just love. Hubby puts up with this type of conversation but he is a concrete thinker - he deals with things in cages and I like to free them up.

But we walk and talk and when the kids are grown I'll talk to him about the kids I'm bringing up in my stories and because he love me, he will listen to my stories and not hurt my feelings and encourage me. That is the safety of being in a lover's circle of understanding. You can't get this type of free attention and arm wrapped comfort anywhere else. Maybe if you have really dear writing friends who are also writing the type of nonsense you are and who use the same figurative languages and can decode your phrases, maybe then you will get the same safety and understanding about your writing as I do with my husband. He has yet to say anything mutilating about my writing, my nattering or even my lack of housewifing skills.

So off to walk. Eventually, I'll think to look for younger boy, put him in the tub with the bubbles foaming and let him soak before the reading in bed. Eventually, I'll unattach older boy from the computer and herd him to his bed. But for right now, they are engaged in free play and I'm off to walk.

Odd ducks

Most of the day has crawled by me and I'm at the point where I'd like a cup of tea so I'll just head down there. The books I want to read are still next to my bed. I'm sure that article I read on Google making us stupid is true. Since I've been writing on the blogs and surfing the Internet, it is almost impossible for me to navigate through a large scale reading project - a bag of books seems almost like a feast of words that is opulent and over done as to make me sick. I'm unable to start and finish a book because I'm tagged by a sense that I'm bored. I want to head off to the next book. A book requires a sort of intense absorption that shifting from one blog to another blog and reading randomly does not demand of a reader.

A blog in fact requires a superficial dip in the waters of the writer's mind. And then if you get too challenged by what the writer has put out, there is always an easier blog to peruse and think about. I'm guilty of this type of practice - I go to a new blog. I'm charmed for about half an hour. I devour the new prey entire. And then, I'm off hunting new prey. I rarely go back the blog I've been enchanted with unless the writer of the blog has a hook. My main hook is this -humor. I'll stand any amount of boring topics if there is humor in there sprinkled like normal bacterial flora on skin. The humor has to be saturated in the pieces so that even the deadliest of topics such as death on the job might be possibly be redemptive and worth investigation. I rarely look at blogs for more than humor since humor is what I live and die by in my reading.

No doubt there are blogs that written by academics and that have serious meat on their bones but most blogs I read are about real people trying to figure out their world and I like the fact these people aren't experts.

I don't believe experts know more than ordinary people except in their area of narrow understanding and even there as witnessed by the recent collapse of the US economy - even there, the experts cannot manage consumer confidence, economic information, financial systems or social structures very well.

I like the fact that real people are just as fucked up as I am and are willing to expose their lack of control over their lives when they chatter on their blogs rather like magpies in my dad's mountain ash tree fighting over the ripest berries. I like the fact that when they reveal their intimate failures, their despair over the knife of love stabbing them randomly and cruelly or their losses - both physical and mental in the aging process, they are affirming that we are all connected by our shared common experiences of our lives. Each of us are unique and experience the world in our heads separately but when we love, when we lose, when we grieve, we are in the same emotional landscape and we can heal each other with our experiences - when shared openly and freely. We are capable of healing others and ourselves in writing over the scars.

Books - in contrast - are more detailed, cohesive revelations of writers' hearts and imaginations and requires a sustained attention to the details and flow and the story line that I'm wondering if I'm still able to do. I get impatient sometimes in a book and I'm grousing "What's the point here? Where are we going with this book?" Often the book meanders gently on and on and I give up. I want instant gratification - I want knowledge, learning and my lesson handed over to me in a cup of hot, strong tea and not a tepid brew that leaves a bitter residue in my mouth. I want what I want now. Toddler style. And books won't give it to me that fast or easily.

So blogs will and I read blogs now more than books. I'm ashamed and I try to go back to my true lovers - my books and make my apologies and say I will be more attentive and be true to them but in reality, I've bagged them all in the library bags to keep them out of sight and I'm here writing and surfing other peoples' delicious true life blogs to find out if indeed, I'm not insane and that the world is full of odd ducks like me. And thankfully, there are a few ducks out there with a different color of feather than normal and they aren't me but they make me glad they are blogging. Here is one of them:

http://www.communicatrix.com/

Starting

I'm going to write freely on the book and if it stops at places, well I stop and wait. If I don't want to continue it I don't continue it. This way it is rather like writing on the blogs. I've even structured the chapter writing like a journal so the character - who is of course me as a younger girl (Do writers ever make new characters up? I doubt it - they use what is in themselves to make up a character and they just rename that character.) I like writing journal fashion because I'm used to this type of stop and start writing and I can introduce characters as I wish rather than abide by a rigid plot matrix. The only thing will be to flesh out these characters in a randomized way - it will be harder but then I can do just about anything I want so it will be more fun. What shall be the conflict? Don't know yet. I like to think that my character will be ornery and rebellious and funny. I like my character to have this strong sense of the ridiculous so that she isn't overwhelmed by life. Teenagehood with it's simultaneous demands for group conformity and individuation is a trying time - sort of like the search for meaning during one's midlife time. I think the time between teenagehood and midlife phases is rather like a resting phase = adulthood. Adulthood is really a time when a teenager becomes bigger but never really grows up. The impetus to grow up doesn't happen in adulthood - it comes when you face your mortality and the mortality of those you love - during midlife.

So if childhood is akin to babyhood and teenagehood is a step towards semi-adulthood and adulthood is arrested semi-adulthood then midlife must be an opportunity to become fully adult.

What happens if teenagehood actually became an opportunity to realize this and to become more mature before your time? What would a precocious teenager do with her advanced learning? I don't have the foggiest idea. I was the dimmest lightbulb of a teenager and I remained that way through most of my life. It is now that I'm finally wakening up and maybe this is the perfect stage of my life to be writing.

So this book, isn't going to be stone that I use to bash my brains in. It won't get me down. It is a trial balloon - it is practice and it will teach me what I need to know - i.e. if I'm a book writer or just a poem writer. It is useful to find out even this tiny bit of information. The value of every bit of writing is that it informs me of my limitations. Knowing one's limitations is useful because I then, don't waste my time attempting to do stuff that I'm not capable of doing. If blog writing and poetry are all I write - so be it.

I'm not sure if Samira - my character is going to do good things with her life. I haven't so why should my character based on myself do any good things? I am going to give her the choice between a life of conformity and one of utter chaos and I'm wondering what she decides to do. If she choose conformity she will be able to live in her set Bengali culture without worrying about her social network because she will have that network for the rest of her life. But what happens if she decides to live like a white girl? What happens if she has sex before marriage? What happens when she tells her father that she wants to be a writer and not a lawyer, accountant or doctor? What happens then? Probably excommunication from the whole system. I think it will be fun to play with this idea of excommunication -whether self imposed or outer imposed. I can't imagine that being integrated into a set role in a society is very hard to do for someone comfortable with this type of role and this type of life. But for others - who don't like to live in a soup of noise, chatter and contact - it would be torture. What does Samira do when confronted by a social world that she feels oppressed with? What happens when she gets depressed, starts eating and gets fat for the first time in her life?

I don't know what conflicts my girl is going to have but I think she will have a few. Love is the final and most devastating conflict for any woman and for a young girl - just starting her journey - it is a foreign and disturbing visitation upon her. Love between different races is also still fraught with anxiety - how will the cultures/religions/families mix? And why should they in the first place? What will the children look like and how will they be reared?

Yeah, it is a soup and I'm making it. Perhaps it takes a whole pile of writing to get to the step of just starting and making a story. I don't know why it seems easier to make this like a true life story (non-fiction) than fiction but I've always had an unease with making up things. The way I'm able to get around the impossibility of making things up (i.e. using my imagination) is that I don't use it. I tell myself this is reality. It is true. It happened. And in a sense it did happen. To me. Samira is partly me and partly someone else and partly everyone. It is impossible to dissociate a character one makes from one's own character, life and experiences. You make what you know.

Icicle Failure

It is almost the end of the year 2008 and I'm in the mood to write about goal setting. I'm pretty good at goal setting but I'm not as good at carrying them out. I think this is because simply many goals are attractive purchases but I need to work in order to buy them and I'm really not willing to do this.

Writing is the most expensive purchase in my shopping cart. I want it terribly, it has a high cost in terms of my failure to earn real money and it isn't getting any easier to find a way to sell this time spent here on the writing as a learning experience to my hubby. I think it is hard to sell this idea to myself. I feel that it probably a waste of my earning years.

But it appears to be the only work I want to do so I darn well better get into work mode and make products to earn money so I can continue to do it. But what? And I hate, absolutely hate the idea of forcing myself to write for money. I've got this stupid, romantic idea that writing should be all about desire.

In any case, I've done enough blathering and it time to get down to butter and bread issues. I've the goal simply of making a book. Don't know what about - I just write and I'll see what happens and if I get anywhere and if I do fine and good and even if I don't get anywhere, well that failure will still be instructive.

Nothing is wasted in my home. Socks get used as rags, old sheets become tent wipes, a bag of old clothes is used just for painting and so on. I think it is always this way because I see the value in reusing. Similarly, even if I write and I don't use what I write the first time around, sometimes, it can be reused in another format and made into a productive item. I think it is reusing that is the most common way writers get to the products that they end up with. They start something, stop and start something else. Then they may come back to the first thing. Or they may just terminate that first project. But ideas, characters and scenes from one book can be recycled in another book. I know this. I do this all the time in my poems. If something - an image - won't work in one poem, I have it stored in my journal. Sometimes, it can be dug out of the original setting and regemmed into another poem piece. Nothing is sacred, everything can be recycled and made new.

And so that is why I'm willing to attempt a book, a story and a line right now. I'm willing to say that this project will end probably in failure but so what? There is failure in everything - my garden every year is a failure as soon as the first frost icicles the land. And yet that doesn't stop me planting does it? So let it come - icicle failure and all. I'll replant.

Realistic fiction

If you are a writer who cannot make up stories - you write non-fiction. But if the non-fiction you want to write is really like sticky insect paper and you get tangled up in it then maybe the next best thing is to make a type of realistic fiction. I'd like to try this. I mean I like writing real life but there are points where real life doesn't well, flow. And when the flow doesn't happen or when a conflict doesn't pierce the lines with needles of stabbing that wake you up from the stupor you were entering, well it is hard to continue -writing that is and therefore it is easier and wiser to invent after this point.

I'm not a good inventor. My graduate adviser found me very unoriginal - incapable of getting fresh, new ideas in my science project and really I think he was right. It is very difficult to plug away at a project you find terminally boring and also try to discover new aspects to an essentially useless bit of investigation. Ideas need some sort of background to germinate in. And that is why I think I'll do better with realistic fiction than just plain fiction itself. I'll start with a sort of non-fiction type label because that puts me at ease for I'm just yakking then. I'm not "inventing". And then when I'm starting to flag in the non-fiction, I'll create a way out of the tedium and that will be the fiction part.

Good fiction is a great deal of work.because you are making up people who live, breathe and exist. They are your children. You have to know a sufficient amount about them to make them believable and lovable. I think it is very hard (at least for me) to read a book and not be in love with the main character. I have to love that main character and be interested in her and her journey or else why bother? What is the point of the immersion into print? It is easier to just see a story in a movie.

Reading requires a certain attention and state of mind. You have to be willing to leave what you are doing in the present and enter another universe. You have to be willing to retain memories. You must be receptive to the emotional range of each character, be willing to believe their acts of drama and their conflicts. You have to be willing in other words to be able to be pulled into the world of created beings who seem as alive as you are because of the writer's ability to translate little squiggly bits of print into a believable extension of your reality.

Therefore reading requires more effort than sitting like blocks of ice melting in front of the light of telly. Writing requires a similar attention but only if you are writing for prolonged works. I think blog pieces require the least effort and time and attention (and that is why blog writers are the lowest caste in the caste system of writing).

I don't know if I can pull myself into this type of writing. What I love most about poetry is that I can start anywhere and finish abruptly and that I am not forced or don't force myself to carry on with one idea for days on end because I know that poetry is compression of emotions, ideas and thought. It is the most compressed emotional and intellectual expressive vehicle there is. In brutal contrast, a book - either of non-fiction or fiction is a reverse form of a poem (although longer poem pieces do exist and can often be book size they are usually not as long as a book). Books require the investment of labor over years usually, the painstaking detailing of the characters in the book and the microscopic invention of a miniature kingdom that I feel right now is simply daunting and impossible. But then so was writing in the beginning. What made it possible was the breaking up or fragmentation of the larger piece into tiny doable pieces of work.

That is exactly what writing a novel is all about - it is about writing a bit here and there consistently with characters you know and get to know better as you write about them and a conflict that reveals to the characters and therefore to us what is the meaning and purpose of this particular story. Every story must have a conflict or it is dead and the conflict must have a core lesson or some sort of revelation or why bother to write the bones and not the entire body of the work? The writer must get something out of the writing of the piece and therefore if the writer gets a reward in terms of a story that illuminates her bit of world or her philosophy of life or something that has worth -then the reader of her book gets something of value for all her hard work in reading the book.

Too many times, the writer doesn't do the digging in the grave, the breaking of the burial box and the revelation of the skeleton and the reader is left bewildered and empty at the end of the book - realizing only too late that the book was simply an exercise in ego and there was only a maggot infested body for him to view. I think that is why I prefer non-fiction - for the writing of real people's lives has great value in itself -without any elaborate enhancements by the writer. But when you get a piece of fiction that shatters the glass between the created world and your own world, so that you are sucked in, fall into the strange new planet where the air is fraught with danger and strife and you, gentle reader that you are, break into a thousand pieces of flesh, blood and bone, ah that is like sex in a hot bed with a man you adore. That is the best high in the world and it can come to you in a dream of book in the wee hours of the night as you struggle to stay awake to get to the end of the story.

Hurtling

An interesting habit of most writers including the one I've just mentioned is the writing every day habit. The ability to sit down and just get on with it is what appears to be the most common trait shared by writers. I've managed to adopt this habit by using a whole pile of blogs - at least three of which gets daily writing. I don't bother about content which is perhaps bad but I just write. Free write. I get out emotions, ideas, brain dead stuff, thoughts, random urges and I scratch what I need to scratch on the blogs. It is a starting point, a race and then the finish line - every day. I make myself write when I'm in agony and when I'm happy. I tell myself it doesn't matter what you write, how you write, whether the writing works or fails - what matters is that you sat at the writing place and did the training work necessary to become a writer.

Every profession or trade or job has a way in. I think for writing - I made the mistake of thinking that you had to have only a talent for language and an ability to translate inner worlds into outer worlds that came naturally to you - and then magic happened and you got books. It is true that you do need a sensitivity to words - a sort of sixth sense about what words can do in different combinations and you do need an ability to imagine a world where these words work well but you also need something else -something so unsexy that I wasn't able to conceive of it - daily practice.

Daily practice at a natural gift? That seems like an oxymoron. But it isn't. Just as you do the rolling over and the standing up and falling and then the step taking to learn to walk - this is the same sequence of events you must go through to learn to write.

Walking and writing are parallel in their skill acquisition. We walk a lot and then we don't fall on our face eventually. And we write an unimaginable amount and we can make sense in our writing.

If we do this work daily, it is like growing a tree. Bit by bit, we stretch out from an acorn and become a mighty tree. We get to that size and heft and canopy cover only when we are willing to grow daily.

For most of my life I've written but never daily. It is only with the blogs that I've had a writing counter of sorts that has visibly told me so that I could not lie to myself that I had done the work when I hadn't - that kept me honest - that got me on the road to daily, multiple acts of writing.

And it is this daily writing - which has taken me off the crawling stage to the stumbling stage of writing where I am now - still a beginner - always a beginner and eager to continue.

I come here with nothing most days to write about. But I tell myself to start. I work on the lines in my head if there are any there. I read. But I don't let myself escape without writing something -even if it is just one line. I know that the first line is the lighting of the fuse to the dynamite and eventually the flame will result in some sort of explosion. But it won't happen if I don't start and light the fuse.

I don't know of any other way to become a good writer. I believe you can take classes, accept the mentoring of other writers, join a writing circle and be warmly nurtured into existence. I've done some of these things but they don't work for me. I'm a solitary soul. I've never done well in groups larger than one other or at most two other writers. Even in such small groups I've felt crushed and unable to write or show my work in public. I work best in a room by myself or perhaps in the company of the boys and hubby. I don't know how writers get help from other writers in classes. I find classes noisy and bothersome and they take the time I don't have away from the writing I must do. So apart from the first year English classes in Early and Later English tradition, I've taught myself to read the books in the public library system and interpret them as best I can. It isn't that I use such works in my writing anyway but they furnish me with an idea of the range and depth and utter loveliness of the works of other writers - past and present. This reading by myself - both exhilarates and depresses me for I know they are the ones who got past the barrier of their self and made it into publication.

For after the working daily - that is really the only thing that prevents writers from writing. Their own selves. We all have one enemy and that is ourselves. It is not the other, the world, the society or the publishing industry that keeps us from our writing practice. It is ourselves. What we have within us - the fears, the dramas, the histories and the lack of confidence - that is what stops the words coming out and kills our stories in mid-gestation. I have already hurtled myself over the barrier of working daily. Now it is just the barrier of the self that I have to take the biggest jump over.

Read this book please

I love reading real life. Here is one piece that I think you will like as much as I do. It is a novel but it reads like real life.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/05/
guardianchildrensfictionprize.booksforchildrenandteenagers


It's a part of a book by a girl dying of leukemia. Read it please. This is real life. In fiction. The best kind of real life because it can be contained and defined. The girl is Tessa. And the book? It is by Jenny Downham.

Before I die

Yeah, it can't get any more real than wanting to have sex with a man before you are killed by cancer cells, facing your death every second because you know how you are going to die (not like most of us who don't know we are dying of something and pretend we are living) and the humor, oh the humor of a girl - who can face her death with humor - that's my type of heroine. I'm going to find this book in the library ASAP.

Here is a link which has an interview with the writer of the book:

http://www.teenreads.com/authors/au-downham-jenny.asp

Pain is a teacher that offers you lessons you should never forget

Life hurts like hell most of the time and you can't escape experiencing this hurting by using the drugs of sex, love, power, money or just plain drugs. I mean you can detach from it as I do and sometimes this works so you don't suffer but the problem is this - the pain is still there and it won't go away. What do you do? Go running for the hills or just stand like a woman and face it bravely?

I choose the facing it bravely option (or even the facing it cowardly option and whining through the entire ordeal) and then, hopefully, getting the darn thing over with. It is possible to do the detachment bit but really, I haven't been able to do this for any significant time -yet. I've detached for a while and then been flung back to the ground with even greater violence. It doesn't seem to work with me but it might for you and many others. I find that men seem to be able to detach from their miseries better than women (life long training I guess). For myself, I find it best to just face the pain, hurting, horror and grow.

You have to just face the fact that some parts of life like sickness, disease and lost love kills you emotionally or physically and you just have to go through the messy business. What helps? For some of us who believe in a higher power - that may be your answer. I'm sure there is a creator of sorts -whether one we make up to help us get us through the hurting times or an actual being of light and I'm being very disrespectful by denying his or her presence but faith is just one way to deal with pain. Another way is to experience the pain in it's entirely and get something out of the misery. I call this the life lesson in hurt. I call this learning a way out.

I don't know if it is possible when you are in the pit to actually use this principle because it just hurts too damn much but once you are a relatively functional human being again and able to not flinch every time you are in that experience or reexperience again then you can try to find the lesson. Maybe there isn't a lesson but a gain - you are stronger for the experience. We all get a random dose of pain in our lives - statistically speaking it is a normal thing. But maybe there is a lesson - such as you were stupid but you got something out of the experience despite being stupid and that has made you into a better and more evolved human being. And sometimes the lesson is stark and unbearable but face it anyway - such as you really fucked up and you need to change and make a new human being out of dirt, pond scum and evil. The latter group of lessons is worth paying close attention to.

Pain is a good teacher but we still have to experience the pain and then memorize the hurt. I can just wipe the pain chart clean and forget it ever happened but that would doom me to redo the process until the lessons stuck in my brain like immovable pins. I think it is far less painful for me to learn from one lesson than many lessons and I try to pay attention and remember all instances of pain. In fact, I remember them best in my poetry.

Some people tell me to forget about my pain and get on with my life but I'm not from that cowardly school of thought. Pain is a teacher that offers you lessons you should never forget although she has let you out of the final graduating experience of death. Learn from the painful times and when the final one comes, be ready and go gracefully, in full evolved form.

Superwriter

I've got a list of people I call the team of "Superwriters" and I frankly hate them all and gnash my teeth in their direction and curl my lip and sulk. I want to be them. I want to write their words and do their books and work like them and make it all seem so damn easy and effortless.

I bring their books home from the library and sift through them and wonder what it is about these writers that called to me and the answer comes back something like this - they remind you of yourself. You see yourself in the writers you admire.

If a writer is able to twinge me - get me to feel emotions and go through a life's worth of experiences in a book or a parade of poems - if that writer is able to write me into existence in his worlds - I am his or her slave forever.

A superwriter catches the common germs of common emotions and in whatever style he or she is known to use - twists memory, emotions, thoughts and experiences into a life affirming piece of writing. I am so damn jealous of their ability to do this that I could have a temper tantrum over this right this minute. But I don't do this. I use my energy in a different way.

I work instead. I know that the fruits of work - daily work - is competence. Not skill, not perfection, not excellence but competence. One day I'll be able to write a piece that stabs someone in the heart and makes them bleed just the way I bled when I wrote the piece and then - even if I'm just an ordinary human being with a competent mastery of language - hey, I'll be just as powerful a writer as my group of Superwriters. Wait. Write. It will happen.

I'm no longer in school

When I first started to write every day, I was in a frozen pudding state of mind and I'd sit here whimpering "Oh, god, oh god, what am I going to write about and what if it sucks and I don't get the Pulitzer Prize and even get a D- grade by any random reader? Oh, god, oh god, writing sucks, life sucks and I can't do this."

I got over this negative mental chatter (well, ok it was doomsday talk) by simply not getting out of my chair until I wrote. I learned that you can write about your cat dying, the car being rear ended, the younger boy's tendency to attract dirt magnetically and the older boy's Superman resistance to any type of grime and it really doesn't matter a whole pile of beans if the entire works sucks. Because you are no longer in school.

The entire purpose of school other than to make us semi-civilized worker drones that have been rubbed down to mere pencil stubs and are unlikely to raise up in arms and overtake our incompetent government is this - to grade you. The grades you get at school determine the label you carry on your forehead sort of like a sign from the devil marking you as a "failure" or one from the angels marking you a "success." Happily, most of us will turn out to be scholastic failures.

Why happily? Because the success you become in school isn't worth a damn. You are learning how to work at a job to earn money to pay for bills. You aren't learning to be a kind, loving and self entertaining (versus self masturbating) humane human being. You are being cloned.

Thus while it is still desirable to be a success in school so you can earn money efficiently and thereby work less and play more, it isn't the beginning and end of your self image, your life or your aspirations if you are a failure.

So with this idea in mind, I started out as a failure in writing and happily continue to do so. When you are already a failure, there are no fears of failing - right? And if I couldn't find a topic to scratch or that scratched me I talked about myself. Everyone knows that we can all talk about ourselves to a nauseating degree and if I turn off all possible random readers with my narcissism and self absorption, all the better. I can write in public without any fear of being crucified for failures in grammar, clarity or intelligence. The best of all possible worlds. No grades, no penalties and yeah, no criticism.

Now that I've taken off the cape and hood of Superwriter and I'm just a failed writer, I can write happily on any minor mishap, problem, child care problem, difficulty or erosion of self and there isn't a dearth of topics, an excuse to not write or even a failure in will. For in the end, writing is joy. Pure joy. We don't give up the chance for joy even in school and now that I'm no longer in school, I'm even less impeded by evaluations and I can write freely, cleanly and directly. I can write close to the blood, bone and flesh of me.

Empty time

My childhood was filled with empty time, slow time and bored silly time. I would come home from school and if this were England, in Yorkshire, I'd be with my pals in the street doing the type of cheap, accessible type things that little girls at that time of innocence did - Brownies, skipping and just plain magpie chatter. When we got to Kuwait, I got my first bike and then it was freedom after school, the beach, scrubbing the streets followed by a motley assortment of Arab, English and European children all sharing the same "foreigner" accommodations segregated from the main Kuwaiti community. There were clashes between Arabic children and non-Arabic children all the time. The kids at the top of the hill (we lived at the bottom of the same hill) were a raucous bunch of Lebanese, Jordanian and other mixed combinations of Arabic lineages and we were the enemy. I don't know why we were the enemy but I guess in any country, the minority is always considered an inferior bunch and deserve to be tormented. They'd pelt us with whatever they had handy - rocks, scrub bush, dirt and sand. We replied in kind. Over the years, we got familiar with each other and outgrew our childish savagery towards each other but it was really only after we started going to the same schools that the effects of civilization tamed our wild ways.

Even then, the moderating effects of school were often transient and temporary. For most of the year, school ended early for the crushing Kuwaiti heat made stone heads out of both pupils and teachers and we'd be sent home. We were kept home for a major part of the summer as well and during this time we'd revert to our original wild ways.

But during the school year, it was always this pattern - be calm and tame at school. And be wild and free when we got home. Each day, was a repeat of the one before it. We'd barely drop our books and we'd be out the door in some mad rush for air, water, light that any plant doomed to a day of deprivation is prone to. We were photosynthesizing our lives only in the after school hours and we did this with abandon.

I'd go out barely letting my mother know I was home and I'd be on the bike and at the beach. One or another of my crew of brothers and sisters may have joined me. We would search for shells, dig up marine life embedded in the sand, slip over the stinky rocks, frighten the sea gulls, rush into the waters and rush out. It was the kind of life that I'll never experience again except when we go to Gaspe in Quebec or to B.C. and I'm still at the Tofino coastline. I want my boys to have this same experience of light, emptiness of tasks and simple pure joy.

When the day's play would be done, I'd tiredly push the bike home loaded with junk. I think my propensity to frequent thrift stores and pick up junk started at the beach in Kuwait where just about anything was considered treasure. Driftwood. A pretty colored shell, white as bleached bone on the outside but pink as the tongue of a baby inside and corrugated like cardboard in one's hands. I'd even have fish to bring back for the ever increasing and ever voracious cats that we had in the back of our home. We would bring all this stuff home in assorted pails, dump them in the front yard or the courtyard and present our steaming, smelly and sandy bodies to our mother. Faced with five disgusting offspring simultaneously on a daily basis may have contributed to my mother's early deterioration mentally and no doubt she must have been overwhelmed at times at the task of cleaning us, getting us into yet another set of clothes, feeding us, getting us to study and not watch Arabic shows on the telly and then marching us all to bed. It wasn't easy to bring up five children and in those days, mothers did it all by themselves. Dads were off the hook.

Empty days like these are gone forever in my sons' childhood. They come home to electronic amusements and comic books. They rarely venture out of the front door unless I make them come with me to the zoo, the museum, the hiking trails and the playgrounds. Something is missing in my boys' life - a sense of the amazing possibilities of a life constructed entirely from one's own energy and will. I wish they would go out on their bikes and forage for entertainment in the wilderness and come home replete with the game they have captured to a feeling of satisfaction and joy that cannot be gained by any commercial game on any synthetic machinery. Nature provides a porous environment that filters children through and they are recreated in a new arrangement of atoms and molecules as competent, creative and content human beings. This contentment, started in childhood can never be erased and lingers even now, at fifty while I sit here at my desk, thinking back to those delicious empty evenings, weekends and summer holidays of my childhood.

Wondering

So older boy is our alarm clock. I get up as slow as water freezing on a sidewalk in early winter mornings. I'm able to just nudge hubby awake and we snoogle (a bit between a snuggle and a google at each other) and he is in the shower. I dress and do my stuff. Get younger boy in the shower where he is resisting the water and the thin patina of dirt on his body sits like chickens on a ledge dropping eggs. I'm sure there is a reason why one boy is clean like sterilized instruments ready for surgery and the other one is like infectious particles emitted by a cold sufferer but I don't know this reason. Perhaps we are all meant to have children that make us wonder at stuff. Wondering is good. Adults don't do enough of this business. I wonder why? Maybe it is all the laundry to do or that tap that needs fixing or the burn of the wind as we are running around buying groceries for Thanksgiving.

The gift our children give us is this - to stop and look at the world with unhurried eyes and keep repeating this process until we really see what we have in our present world that we never appreciate because we are doing our adult stuff. I'd say we need a wondering hour in each day to simply wonder over why the day is so short on the holidays and so long while you are stuck at work, or why the Catalpa tree has just lost all it's leaves in the garden in a flurry of snowflake like droppings while all of this last week it was gaily attached to it's foliage or even why the damn Sedums aren't blooming yet or as amazingly as they did last year (too much compost, overloving, overwatching?) Wondering about stuff is good for a child, an adult and pets. I'm sure if we all did some wondering daily we wouldn't all be so unhappy about stupid things like money, power, job advancement and job politics. I'm sure we would kiss our spouses, hug our kids and give ourselves a pat on the back for dare I say it - being such nice, decent and wondering people.

Done

I'm sooo tired. I've done the word count today and I'm sure I've done every darn entry possible for nearly ever blog but who knows? I may even have written on other people's blogs? I'm going to go to bed. It is enough for today. Thank god it is Friday tomorrow. Hmm... why would I say that?

Am I like my father?

The one thing I've learned to do when my extended family goes into warp drive, is simply go for a walk. I went for a second walk - a short one, after supper. It seems that when you have parents that are aging and tiring out every small thing is a challenge for them. Getting older (for me) isn't as much of a challenge because I'm walking and trying to keep active. My parents are both quite sickly. And yet they attempt to keep doing what they have done for the last decades of their lives - over work.

So when there is yet another family tiff over the clutter in the house, the endless piles of junk in the garage that need disposing or even the ordering of a new bed for my sister - all these events of daily life are filled with drama and interest and arguing because they need help and they don't readily get this help from any of us. So this is the way it is. Perhaps it is always this way. As we age we become like bags filled with stones tied around the necks of our children. They wait for you to live and they wait for you to die.

I'm sure it is not openly admitted but we are all in the service of our parents who despite our love for them are often time consuming, demanding and painful to deal with. And yet we persevere. They help us unconditionally and we help less unconditionally. Why? It is difficult to raise your kids and look after parents at the same time. Something has to give and the things that often give is your relationship with your parents.

I tell myself I won't be like this with my kids . When I am too old to mow the lawn or take care of snow shoveling or mind the garden I will hire this help rather than struggle with the machinery like my father does. Why does he do it? Perhaps it is childhood memories. Perhaps it is the time he spent in England training as a pathologist eating chicken neck curry because my parents could not afford the meatier parts of the chicken. Perhaps it is all the years he spent in Canada as a physician in remote parts of Alberta struggling, always struggling for acceptance. It may be that we never get over the earlier wounds of our lives and we are maimed for life by these early wounds. What ever the reasons, my father is very careful with his money. Too careful. It robs him of his life.

So when I'm in this type of a family drama, small and pitiful, I do the business of writing and walking and try to make sense of old age - very old age - where I'm eventually headed for and try to determine if I'm going to be as thrifty and determined and resilient as my father. And whether my children will be as unhelpful as I am or whether they will come and mow my lawn when I am not willing to hire the lawn mowing company.

I've stopped running screaming into the woods

The problem with life is this - you are going along fine and then you are in a ditch and can't get out. You flail around in the ditch and get mad and blame the world and really, there is no point to this way of responding to life events. I do this all the time. Someone in the family gets sick. It is a regular thing in my lineage. I go deal with their crisis. I whine, I beat my chest and I'm bitter. In reality this doesn't help the people who are sick (sickness is sort of like a bad luck type thing most times although the tendency to get sick can be put in place by the failure to take care of one's health but really then, what are you going to do - refuse to help the person who gets sick because they let themselves get fat?).

Flailing about emotionally doesn't help any crisis whether it be emotional, health wise or physical. What I need to do in these situations is become calm. Really what is needed in these situations is someone who is able to shift through the myriad aspects of the situation and chart a journey out of the storm to safe waters. I'm sure that the best way to navigate life crisis and heartbreak is to be a canny captain of the ship of destruction.

For example - the slow deterioration of my sister who is currently in a big storm with her heart condition. I can just go running screaming to the woods and hide there in my naked splendor or I can take things methodically and do things in a stepwise manner. Let me give you a tiny example of what this involves. Her doctor orders an oxygen saturation test. I call VitalAire to set this up. They tell me I need a requisition from the physician to arrange a respiratory therapist to drop by the house to do it. I called the Medicentre yesterday and they told me they would do it. I call VitalAire this morning. No authorization has arrived. I call the Medicentre this morning and ask them to fax the authorization. She tells me if VitalAire hasn't received the fax today to call her back. Hmm.. how many phone calls does this one test require? So far - 4 and counting. I would imagine that a person with a disability would have a hard time doing all this. And this is just one area of investigation. My sister is seeing a heart specialist. Her pulmonary and mental health physicians each require her to come in on regular appointments because her condition is progressing badly. Her G.P. needs to see her when her legs swell up.

You get the idea. Her state is moribund. And if I abandon her to her fate - which is basically benign neglect by two seventy year old parents who are unable to even manage their own lives - well that is just plain wrong. But there are days when I do feel like running away from home.

What keeps me sane? Loving spouse, darling children, writing, walking and yeah, I love my extended family despite all the terrors of their health problems. I've learned not to go screaming into the woods too often but to just take a deep, calming breath, take it one day at a time and understand deep in my soul, that it is not their fault that they are sick. It could happen to anyone.

Life purpose and the meaning of life

It is the ability to sit in silence and stare into one's inner self that makes writing practice so valuable. I believe there is an inner self - our higher form of our present condition - that manifests itself as a still, small voice that guides us alone our journey. Although hubby jeers at this New Age type characterization of a spiritual being inside me, I am undeterred in my pursuit of communion with this inner being.

It is whatever you decide to call it - god, God, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad and an alien on a space ship who came to Earth and populated it. I find it comforting to have such chatter with someone who I characterize as being wise. I'm not wise. I'm infantile and I know it. I'm selfish. I'm cruel. I can be utterly detached. But when I'm here at the writing space, I can force myself infinitesimally along the evolutionary line I'm slogging along to the next pinpoint place in my development.

I've been writing again in my spiral coil notebooks. I find that my handwriting is becoming more and more illegible and that what I write there is being expelled sort of like a fetus during labor. It is slow. I meander. I take my time. Out of all that blathering I get one or two lines that I pick and that I expand on in the blogs or that I feel yucky about. The ones I expand, I resolve. The ones I feel yucky about, I go on and on in my private journals.

It takes both excision and chemotherapy sometimes to remove a tumor and stop the metastasis in full blown flight. I'm excising here on the blogs. I'm using chemotherapy in my private journals.

What is my cancer? The cancer of a life without meaning. I have everything. Really. I have money, house, husband, children, extended family, love and health. And yet - the world I'm living in is utterly barren and empty of meaning. Life meaning. Why is this?

Part of it is finding out all the drugs that kept me going aren't doing what they did for me in the past. I've developed a resistance to the drugs of materialism, asset collection, money and the idea of a job being the definition of a self. I've become entirely indifferent to any of the aspects of society that I once thought useful - friendship, company with others, parties and even small, intimate conversations. I'm off the entire business of politics. I see no value to being part of the voting process although I vote. I have no religious ties to any Church. I am disfranchised as a social unit.

If you are this way, if you are a recluse and if the only communication with others that you engage in is a limited one with one's nuclear and extended family and you don't engage in social rituals, you find that you are somewhat of an oddity. And what is the meaning of life for an oddity?

My husband chides me for being obsessed with the meaning of life question. He says life is life. You just live it. We are meant to do our biological cycle and then die. Cease to exist. But surely there is a purpose to our existence beyond the simple duplication of and replacement of cells? Aren't we supposed to have some sort of lessons to learn and some sort of evolution to go through in the time that we are alloted or why bother to go through this terrible existence in the first place?

Might as well just slit your wrists rather than suffer all the humiliations and loss of control and wrinkly breasts and skinny legs and falling face wrinkles and yucky old people odors. Why not just be like a fruit? Get ripe and then plop! Fall to the ground and become compost.

There has to be a meaning to this life. And there is an inner spirit that tells us all along what our purpose in this life is. When we find our purpose and follow it, we are able to realize what our life's meaning is.

The value of writing practice is to silence the babble in our heads. We then sit in quiet with our inner spirit. We become comfortable with the invisible and intangible. We are able to find out what our life purpose is. If we are fearless, we do what we are meant to do in our lives - realize our purpose. And then the meaning of life is suddenly there - in front of us -where it was always but we were not able to see it because we were unconscious.

A poem is a fruit

I made two poems yesterday and I tried to explain to hubby in bed last night what a poem is while we were making love. I told him that poetry is like making love with words rather than bodies. But it is hopeless. Hubby is logical and words for him represent methods of containing variation. Words for me on the other hand, are ways to explain chaos and celebrate living in chaos rather than attempting to boundary line it.

The poems I made weren't the sort of poems I've been writing about but they helped me to get over the famine of poems that I've experienced for the last month. They were mostly poems from my walks. I like to be a camera when I walk and record the images in my mind and develop the film in my poems. I like to shovel out the emotions with the images. I simply like to make the structures and then interior decorate.

I won't be putting any more poems on the blogs. Hubby has suggested I just work on them in the spiral notebooks and send out a few now and then for publication. Although hubby has not a shred of interest in any of my meanderings into sound and meaning, he has a feeling for me and he encourages me to attempt selling my words for money. He thinks if they don't sell, I should self publish.

I like the idea. It isn't that I'm not aware of the limitations of my poems. I am. But I like the idea of having a bound book of my poems on a shelf in my house. It means less than nothing to me if the book is published by someone else or by me. A poem is a fruit and why should I care if I picked that fruit from my own tree? And that I boxed it and put it out for market at my own stall? I have no shame.

The conversation with hubby helped in that I know without any doubt that hubby is for me and will do what he can to help me push out the words. He doesn't understand why I sit in place every day while the house gets grimier but he does understand that I do attempt to push back the jungle - once my writing is done. And for that I love him.

Hornet's swarm

This is a game I play that gets me back to reality. What if? What if I'd not got married and finished a PhD? What if I'd not had the boys? What if I'd become a dried up stick of a scientist rather than this disintegrating writer of unfresh topics? What if I were earning bags of money? What if? What if?

Would I be happier? Would I still be jealous of that pretty young thing running off on holidays to beaches with studly men? Would I find what I'm looking for?

Invariably, I find the answers to all these questions to be the same answer - I would not find what I'm looking for in any other versions of my life because what I'm looking for isn't outside me but inside me. What solace, what ego trip and what joy I'm searching for can't be supplied by the drugs offered by the external world (although they are mighty fine drugs and can be enjoyable placebos). Nope, happiness is bred into the bone, skin and cells within me.

I just have to go within and find a few stone words and bang them together and form a rhythm and that rhythm gives me, in moments of jealously - a silencing of the frantic ego needs and wants. I get from the banging noise of the words some understanding that it isn't money, status, power and appearance that make me happy (although it may make you happy). Nope what turns me on and makes my rush is that flow of words like honey in my brain that obliterates that rip of jealously and envy that turns me into a buzzing hive of angry hornets. I don't want the hornet swarm. I want the honey. And the honey is made and produced from the work of writing.

Nothing times

I am jealous of a girl I know who is impossibly skinny, beautiful in a Katherine Hepburnish way and who is running up the career mountain in rapid, gunfire method. I am jealous, not because I am not her but because I am, in my mind, not evolving like her. Also the large paycheck would help to soothe my ego.

In addition, she is swift as a predator in the darkness at catching prey. I am unable to do more than put the prey into view and then watch is saunter lingeringly away. I have no taste for their meat.

I am no longer in that world and I'm somehow, right now, utterly unable to reenter it. Maybe someday, I'll be able to return to the work world and not catch myself trying not to laugh myself into insanity.

I, now do the same type of small, domestic things I told myself as a twenty year old woman I would never go - cook, clean and take care of small boys. I putter around the house which is now my plastic Ziploc bag of sorts. I tidy up. I write. I make meals. I crunch veggies, tear lettuce leaves and concoct raw dishes made from Supermarket produce that seem to be so tasteless compared to the vegetables taken straight from a garden. I feed the family. I walk . Every day I take younger boy to the playground where he is given his time to do nothing.

Yesterday, I took him to the playground straight after he had a simple supper of wonton soup, salad and juice. On the way there, we stopped at a bench. He had his little tearing session where he asked for more free time. My boys are big on free time which is essentially time where they get to do what they want to do rather than time where their mother has decided that they aren't going to be robots in front of a Gameboy but rather do what she did as a kid, which was run around outside. He sat on the bench with his gloved hands wiping away the convenient waterfall of tears while I hard heartedly tell him to get used to the business of getting out and about It is not that I'm not in favor of free time - god, I'm the most free time market mother in the world, but there has to be some times where they are moving bodies, running around, making a dent in the fresh fall leaves and rolling like puppies in the wild. I want them outside. I got him calmed down and we headed to the playground.

Once we were there, he started to make his sand people in the sand area while I snapped pictures of his creations. They were all vigorously admired. He then spent a bit of time floating on the tire or lolling on the swing or climbing the wooden hut where he tends to straddle the roof and look over his small kingdom like some Eastern potentate his harem of females. I snapped more shots of him against the remarkable blue sky studded with gray and black clouds. I watched the long, leggy coltish boy who just this summer seems to have become more elongated and less babyish as he turned 9 years old and will now be a decade in February - do his leisurely perusal, his jump into the emptiness of nothing time. I wonder if he will remember the nothing times when he is a man, taking his own children to the playground and think about the tears he expended in avoiding this time.

We walked home servicing our needs for leaf crunching and destruction by zigzagging through the underbrush and among the bony poplars somehow aware of our need for silence and solitude, even while together. Once we arrived home, I gave him a promised snack, then ran the bubble bath, luxuriously full and foamy and put him in it to soak like a skinny sponge in the heated, sudsy waters. After the bath, he was herded to bed. No time for spelling again. Perhaps we'll do it today. I'm am unrepentant.

A juxtaposition of accidents

The sun is bursting out of the cream on the surface of the sky and it appears that the day while still anxious and worried in appearance won't turn out to disappoint. I went to the boys' school at lunch time. I was looking for younger boy's eye glasses in the minivan when I discovered older boy had left his lunch behind. So I took younger boy's spare glasses to him, left older boy's lunch at the school office so that he could pick it up there and then reminded my sister of her appointment to get her sleep apnea mask replacement. On the way home, I stopped briefly at the IGA and picked up fresh ground pork. I made a few wontons for myself and dedicated a tray for hubby. I'll make the boys' wontons when they are done with school. And hubby may not be just satisfied with the few wontons and soup and therefore I may have to make a few more for him.

Wontons and chicken broth soup. Yum. Even I am able to concoct wontons. When I was working in Calgary (after getting my MSc. at the University of Calgary) I learned how to make wontons from a Chinese lady in the work place. Nice lady. I love people who teach me things. My wontons aren't as delicious as hers were because she was an incredible cook (who was even able to stirfry bland firm tofu and make it spicy and hot). But the hubby will eat them and sometimes even the boys.

If they won't eat the wontons, well I think I'll pull together a quick stir fry. I've got rice already made. There is broccoli and there is part of a cooked chicken breast left over. It isn't going to be something complicated - none of my meals are. Like money, I think of food as something to use and be done with.

If we get done with the mask fitting early enough I will take my sister for her ten minute walk. It is chill out still but it might burn a few minutes of time when she is upright rather than prone on her bed like a vegetable. I often wonder what my sister would have done with her life if she hadn't been cursed with her depression. Depression is a crucification of sorts. You have a reasonably workable body and a defunct mind that sees the world in all muted colors.

Of course, "normal" people suffer from depression as much as "abnormal" people but I think the difference is this - people who aren't suffering from clinical depression are able to function, for the most part in their lives and do the things they are required to do by society. They aren't immobilized by fears, anxieties and moods. They are able to get out of the fog and make themselves act. For that is really, what I think depression is like - a fog, curled around your mind, from the moment you get up to the moment to you lie in bed sliding into the obliteration of sleep.

I'm not sure that I'm not depressed. But I'm functioning. I'm doing writing. I'm walking. I'm able to love and care for my hubby and kids. I enjoy the fall colors. I love shopping. I can dance unself consciously under the wind and stars and moon in my back yard. I can make people laugh, cry or emote. I don't think I'm irreparably stuck in the hole where I descend occasionally. I am able to climb out.

If my sister had been able to climb out of her hole, maybe she would have been a writer. Or a poet. Or a dancer or the worker who never stops. She is sensitive and sweet under all the horror of her body and the disintegration of her mind. When she was a baby, people would stop my mother and peer into her pram and comment about her beauty, her white skin and perfect dimpled body. She was a beauty.

What we all are now is just the cultimation of the accidents of fate. A certain juxtaposition of accidents. Some of these accidents -whether genetic, social or traumatic - send us down a hole and we howl in that hole more like animals than human beings. But then, when I'm in the hole, myself, I know I am fortunate. For the animal in the hole that is me is able to ascend. Not so my sister. She is still in that hole. Prisoned.

Mothering

There is a biting wind outside and I've dropped off the boys in the blustery winds at school. Older boy is defragmenting over his tests and won't be able to return for lunch. I will go provide soup and solace to the younger boy at lunch time and also bring his glasses that he left supposedly at home but I find no traces of them and so I'll take his spare set until we locate where he has misplaced the original pair. I was reluctant to spring for two pairs of glasses at the time I was ordering them but having gone through the lost glasses scenario with older boy - I gritted my teeth and got a spare pair. I'm glad I did. Maybe he left them at my parents' place or at school. I can't remember if he was even wearing them yesterday when he came home from school or if he left them at school with his jacket.

Most of the time when I'm sheepdogging the boys it is all about keeping track of their stuff. Older boy thankfully is learning to manage his materials. Younger boy is oblivious to the trail of hats, gloves, jackets, books, paper and now, glasses. I wonder if the only purpose of mothers is to regulate the environment of their young until they are able to clue into the fact that they are entirely responsible for themselves and their stuff. In fact, maybe wives just take over the jobs of mothers and do what is necessary to keep men going.

Mothering is then not something women ever stop doing. We mother our boys and we mother our men. But who gets to mother us?

We are not the enemy

In the matter of sex, women are always losers for there is a currency we are not aware of and that is the coins men use when they buy us.

I don't know what this really means but it came out of me. It is this: men see us as objects. We are things to be bought. And used. Then discarded.

Maybe this is why it took me until I was thirty years old to trust the man who was to become my husband. Maybe when you realize you are just things to men, it is impossible to believe in love between a man and a woman.

And now? I understand that some men, like my husband, do not look over every female they encounter as things to lust for. That there are men who can see the organ systems, the tissues, the cells, the blood flowing in the circulatory system of a woman and understand that she is a human being and not simply a pair of breasts to fondle, a hole to fill with a penis and a momentary obliteration of the senses.

I understand too that for many men, there is a different universe where women aren't real. That we are just cunts. That we somehow deform men and make them feel less than manly. I don't know why. Then these men, reaffirm their maleness by raping their women, by being unfaithful or beating them or abusing children. Why do they do this? Perhaps in their universe their domination of women is somehow a lessening of some private grief, too deep and too ugly to ever be healed by anything other than someone else's pain and destruction.

The chasm between the universe of such men and that of my husband's type of man is unimaginable. But what I have to remember is that this chasm exists. That men like my husband are real. That they see women as partners, lovers, friends and life companions. And not as the enemy.

No matter

It is night. I have just come back from a second walk. My first one with the younger boy was simple and efficient. We walked to the playground. He played on the swings, the tire, rolled around on the sand and made sand people, their mouths wide open and hands and legs out stretched like the Calvin and Hobbs snowmen. I am amused by his ability - even in sand - to draw out what lies in his imagination. His visual talents are in paper, pencil, line, contour and sand. We return to the home and I send him into the shower while his jeans covered in sand patches rests on the bathroom tile, emptied of his presence. I go with hubby walking.

It is darkening when we go out and I stop to show hubby the sand men and he smiles, I think he is puzzled at my delight. I don't know why hubby can't see our son's genius. I pull him forward like a tugboat to the hidden trail that I no longer walk on alone, afraid of the running men and the silence in the aftermath of the murdering of that child in Edson, the attack of a woman later and just yesterday, the capture of a child on a playground. I hate the requirement for a male presence and when we walk through the dimly lit forest, our feet shuffling the fallen poplar leaves, browned and wet, like cards on some invisible casino table, I'm reminded of another time and another garden where I was a young girl and a man was pulling me up and dragging his hands into my underpants.

I think every girl has this violation once in her life. When you are ten years old or when you are thirteen or when you are sixty, you have the experience of a man touching you and fondling you as if you were property and you realize, to your horror that this stranger, this creature with the penis, the man in the dark shadows - why he is after your body. What innocence you have is utterly raped out of you. No matter if there is just the fumbling in the garden by a man old enough to be your grandfather and you a child, no matter if it is a family friend who is momentarily lusting after you or no matter if it is a young man pursuing you for marriage. It is all false and rapacious and about power.

I am walking with my beloved in the trail near my home but I am also walking in the long ago garden in the house in Kuwait, where I had been grabbed by an Arab and have wrenched myself out of his forced attentions to run like a survivor of war to the bunker house. I am still running. No matter that you have learned to fight back, no matter that you are strong and able to stand your ground and give back what ever is hurled at you, no matter. I'm still running.

Accidents

On the way to dropping off the boys to their school this morning, I saw a three car pile up and two police cars circled around it like other casualties. When I'm on the roads, it seems that there is always an accident on the Whitemud Freeway or on one of the turn off roads. I'm beginning to think that there is no more dangerous a job than to be a professional driver. Bus drivers must go home every night and beat their pillows in frustration with all the less than knowledgeable drivers on our city streets.

It only takes a moment of distraction to be in a car accident. I'm a mum and I'm always trying to stay awake while the boys are asking for a drink or a snack and generally asking for my attention while I'm driving. It is very difficult to keep your mind on the road if in addition to children in the background, you have a cell phone in your hand or are trying to navigate a meal for yourself. I've seen people put makeup on while sitting at the stop lights. What about the drivers watching a show while driving? What is next? Showers en route to work? But let me not joke here, the future of driving is all about making your car like your personal residence (i.e. what you do at home, you should be able to do in your car). The other night, hubby (who is a light sleeper) was woken by two teenagers parked next to our house engaging in rather severe forms of necking in their vehicle. It would have been fine if they were the strong, unexpressive types but hubby insists that they were making enough noise to possibly wake the boys up and so he went down to ask them to move their car somewhere else so that he could sleep in peace without their background music to keep him distracted. They compiled. But that's another example of how the car is just part of your home outside now. You can even make love or variations thereof, in public places in the bedroom of your vehicle.

I'm of the opinion that a car isn't your home and shouldn't be treated as an extension of your personal residence. Phones and televisions belong in fixed, stable locations that don't move and don't provide opportunities for drivers to get their attention taken off their main job on the road - which is driving safely and competently. There are many ways to kill and be killed and one of the least pleasant of these is in a motor vehicle accident. There were times when I was a laboratory technologist in Hinton and the remains of people who were in cars who were unfortunate victims of other drivers' or their own failure to pay attention to the road, came in to the hospital in various states of disrepair. It isn't pleasant seeing the remains. Perhaps we all need to see such remains to remind ourselves that we are driving a weapon and in unskilled, careless hands, like guns, cars can kill people.

Bail outs

The non-whining practice went relatively well today except when I pulled out news for younger boy's class for tomorrow and read about the bail out of the US economy. I ranted to younger boy about all the lies that had made the passing of this bill possible and younger son ignored it all. He is utterly unconcerned with money except with reference to the purchase of Pokemon cards and snacks.

So I did a bit of whining about the article on Money Practice. I could only find one truthful politician who commented that his fellow politicians were basically unable to understand economics and were in essence screwing ordinary citizens to rescue big business. Well, thank god, one person is truthful. It didn't help. And you know what? I don't think that lies in the form of law will help either. You can keep throwing money into the pit but if the pit has no bottom then the money isn't going to fill the pit.

The problem isn't big business or lack of regulations or even greed. It is all about self control. If each of us were self disciplined, if we controlled ourselves, if we used the word "no" and do not live beyond our means (i.e. don't spend more than what we earn, don't borrow what we can't pay back and simply lived lives of ordinary folks rather than movie stars) well, there would be no crisis. Ordinary, grounded people don't do stupid things like buy houses they can't afford and then walk away from their responsibilities when they find themselves in a mess. They pay up no matter what. And when they are made jobless, they work at finding any job to fill in the time. They retrain if they have to. It isn't easy to not buy, to pay up debts, take lower paying jobs and to go back to school. It requires a flattening of the ego. Yeah, this mess wasn't caused by greed, stupidity or immorality. It was caused by a lack of self discipline.

You can be the greatest person in the world and you are nothing if you are unable to control yourself. If you want one way to prevent such widespread economic chaos I'd suggest parents teaching their kids how to be self disciplined, control their wants and learn, early on that if you make a promise, you have to keep that promise. Breaking promises is easy to do. We do it all the time. But in the end, promises - whether to a bank, our children or our spouses will determine if we grow up into adults or stay as spoiled, petulant and chaotic children. You see it is simple. Parents are important. We decide the type of adults who populate the world. We decide whether our world is filled with adults who are capable of overcoming themselves and becoming evolved or whether they simply satisfy themselves and create the type of situations that require bailouts. Of any sort.

The softening of the young body that comes with age

I went to a store yesterday and saw myself on a television screen and was startled. Was I that soft faced woman with the wild hair and the melting of youth? Was I that old? But I feel so young. I feel as if I'm still twenty years old capable of doing the long 25 km hikes in Jasper and then coming home to Hinton to bike again. I feel like I'm in a body that is rusting away.

And then I thought, I wonder if this is how my mother feels? That she is rusting in her body work? But that inside the rotting frame, does she too feel young and coltish? Do she ever think of herself as old unless someone reminds her of her great age? I think too, secretly, inside her she thinks she is still that young girl who played with her sister, my aunty Daya who died of breast cancer their gentle game of "sister come visit me".

The game went something like this. Aunty Daya would come over to visit my mother in her home which was a bit of dirt floor outside my grandparents' home. She'd bring a mud patty and offer it to my mother. My mother, delighted would sing out:
"Sister, how glad I am to see you. Come in, come in."
Both sisters would play the visiting sister game all day long, making mud food and dishes. It was something, a happy memory that sticks in my mother's mind to this day. It made the future events - the loss of her mother (my grandmother who I never saw), the loss of her father's job as tea garden manager in Darjeeling and the arrival of a stepmother and numerous step brothers and sisters and the constant lack of money and insecurity bearable. If you have some happy memories of a close relationship with one beloved sibling, somehow every misery and tragedy can be survived.

My aunty Daya remained my mother's main companion all through their lives. They shared rented homes in England. They shared the care of their children. I grew up with my aunty's children all around me. I never knew what it was not to have cousins underfoot. Then, when we moved to Kuwait, there were visits back to England, trips to the museums, fried eggs and toast at my aunty's house and her wonderful vegetarian curries. All gone now. The last blow in a series of blows for my mother, reeling from the depradations of rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, falls and frailty of her age. It is all part of the coring down of age. You feel the shell getting thinner and thinner and one day it will, you know, break.

But even now, I think, like me, my mother feels she is still young and that child in the village in India. We never really grow out of our early bodies and we only discard our old bodies when we are forced to by death. But when I see my own softening features in the unforgiving eyes of the camera, I too, like my mother ignore the outer shell. I see only that young girl hiking relentlessly alone on the mountain trails of Jasper, determined and fearless.

Poems tell us...

If you think in poems and every line is a song waiting for music inside you to be made, then writing in prose is sort of like making poetry into straight thoughts. It isn't that prose is a poorer version of poetry - it is just the harder version for me to write. For poetry is natural. It comes out in bursts, lines and short dots and curves and arrows. It asks nothing of meaning and it requires very little of containment. It is a wild animal and it won't be caged.

Prose, on the other hand, requires caging like wild animals who have been in a zoo for most of their lives and even if freed to be poems would still sit in their cages to be fed and maintained. Prose isn't wild.

Or if it is wild - then it is a prose poem.

I think if you write poems you cannot really write prose without having a splinter or two of poems running through the works. It is rather like speaking and limiting oneself to formal language when one knows slang and other more colorful versions of the tongue. Somehow the colorful language, the imagery and the music will out itself.

I don't know if this makes any sense. I think if you think in images, it is very hard sometimes to think in prose because prose is more cumbersome and heavy a weapon to support the survival of the fleeing antelope of poetical language. Prose burdens the senses. Poetry infuses the senses.

I can't make a prose bit without the insertion of bits of DNA with poems in them. Insertions everywhere in the entire chromosomal endowment. It would be too boring a creation otherwise.

For poems allow bizarre juxtapositions, random madness and sinister implications. With poems in the prose there is room for careering off the main road into the ditch and then getting out of the vehicle uninjured and getting onto the road and walking. Poems allow for random acts of living and dying.

If you think in images, if you want a life filled with colors, sounds and song, then write them into creation. Don't nap in your day. Sing yourself into wakefulness and gleam the words out of you with a prying wand. Don't wait for the end of your life to make images and sounds and writings. It is now that you must do this joyful work. It is now for prose is everywhere and the world is dying for more poetry (even though, hell, it doesn't recognize this). The world is dying for poems that they will not read and would be pulled into life if they did read it. For the poems hold the secrets of the religions that create murdering wars. The poems tells us what we need to do to live. What we need to do but never do. Live. Love. Sing. Simple things really. And no one takes the time to do these things.

To write is like this

Sometimes when you are dreaming in writing and you are tugged out of that dream into reality, you fight the expulsion. It is so real in that world and there is so much that you feel that is perfect and sensuous and right there that you don't want to come out of the shelled egg and break out into the outer world of chaos.

That is what it is like when I'm reading a book that transports me elsewhere and that is what it is like when I'm drenched in the sights, sounds and tactile sensations of my writing world.

If you have never been zapped into this other world - this created world and not even by the tensing of self in the world of a book you have read, then I can't understand you. You have no significance to me. You don't have any lines that will intersect with me.

The created world - either of the other writer or of my own writing is what fruits the tree of life. It hums inside me all day long. I wake and the first thoughts are of light and darkness, of the leaves scuttling like insects, like grasshoppers over the street as I walk, of the throwing down of the card leaves by the bony hands of the trees as I pass, the yielding of the bodies of the poplars to the caresses of the wind. Every first thought is of language, words and the music.

I wake to music. It starts up on the radio. I feel the sounds in me as if I'm bathed in water in some womb that I never want to come out of. Then the first stirrings of thoughts. Lingering touches with my husband. I see the faint light outside like a gauzy threaded beaded cloth. I'm ready to get up, wash, go to the computer and say something about the day and the light.

I'm in love with words and they feed me and keep me alive. If I could, I would be immersed in the bath of words like an alcoholic with bottles of wine being decanted over his open mouth. I wouldn't feel addicted. No doubt nobody who has a weakness for a drug ever feels addicted. They all probably feel what I do -this incredible joy, this return to rightness from wrongness and this sense that finally, they are doing what makes them function as alive human beings - be that drinking, drugging, whoring or writing.

When you eviscerate yourself in writing, nothing is secret or anonymous or can be contained as not possible. You can write your hidden shadow self into the visible light and see yourself and not like what you see but learn to deal with her. You can watch that hidden self and say it is evil or just say it is part of you. You can do what you like. Because writing makes you able to meet all parts of yourself and encounter possible future variants of what you could be and writing enables you to fish out these embryonic, growing creatures and grow one to full term and release her to the world.

To be a person who writes can be alarming for the spouse. My husband often is disarmed by me. He thinks he knows me and then I grow a mutation in character and he can't figure if that new mutation has erased the woman he married. I know it hasn't. A mutation isn't always lethal or even deleterious but may be necessary for one's survival. But it is still disturbing for the spouse. Marriage is after all a bottle and we are told to bottle ourselves and age perfectly. But sometimes, we break the bottle and new wines have to be prepared out of the aging grapes of self.

To write like this - to question everything, to face the ridicule of writing about the self and to become hardened to the ridicule - that is the most important part of learning to write. You can write for years in secrecy and you can't write the way you want to really write because you are still soft and afraid. But once you learn to harden your shell, once you fight out of the self loathing and the self abasement to get to the point in your writing where you will write no matter what, no matter who laughs or ridicules you - then you are a writer.

For most of us are writers. Ordinary writers of course without that sting of the tail that makes a writer of gifts. But we are still capable of going out into the dark night, with the Shelley West Wind blowing, with the reddened cheeks of every tree puffing out with the gusts and the dropping of the demure letters of the leaves to us as we past, and we can take these images and paste them in our journals and when we want we can darn the holes in our hearts with our paper images and the thread of our thoughts. Writing can do what other human beings cannot do for you and writing can make you into who you must be and cannot keep you from what will be required to be this person.

Poetical intimacy and making a poetical life

Sometimes when the boys are squabbling in the background and the rising crescendo of screams gets to the supersonic levels, I'm momentarily distracted, adopt my stern mother look and dispense rough justice. Then, silence restored, I go back to writing. Hubby is sleeping. The older boy is avoiding test cramming and younger boy is stalling on homework. Potatoes are boiling on the stove. I ask older boy to check potatoes and he asks younger boy to do this and younger boy refuses. I let them boil for a bit more.

Younger boy drags himself to me for homework reinfusion. We did a bit on his requirements for news - an article on the historic bailout bill that Americans are hoping will reverse years of casino banking and credit extrusions by citizens. All that will happen is the citizens that manage their money well will pay the bills of those who manage their money badly (whether as private citizens taking out mortgages/loans or as banks giving out loans to clients who never should have been given these loans).

I'm going to go out for another walk soon. Supper is all done. Baked chicken,mashed potatoes and salad. I don't have anything for lunch tomorrow so may have to use some of tonight's chicken to make chicken sandwiches for lunch for the boys but that is ok. Monday is grocery shopping day. I'll refuel with reference to the food.

But this blog entry wasn't supposed to be about family. It was supposed to be about writing. I was supposed to write about poetry and delve into the reasons I haven't written any. For the last month, entirely, I've been offshore and unable to get back to the port and write.

Don't know why. Perhaps it has to do with energy levels and desire and wanting. I write poetry best when I'm in wanting.

The fall is supplying enough visual feasts for revving up my wanting so I could write about spider webs floating across barren tree branches like electric lines and the slippers of many leaves falling to the floor soundlessly. I could expound on the variations of the color red, from the orange red of the leaves in most parts of Edmonton, to the reddish pure lipped maples here and there or the blackened decaying reds of wild rose hedges. I could tell you about the birds like buttons on the twigs or the hemlines of bushes meeting the milky white frosted morning lawn or the shine and gleam of the sun through the opaque fog horizon. I could in fact, write a great deal of poetry just on fall sights and be passionate about each word and I am but there is still something else that needs to be there - some sort of penile thrust that takes these images into the creative hole and makes friction.

I haven't got the friction set up. I can't write poems without that rubbing, that fun and pleasure. In fact, I think poetry is all about pleasure. If I can't get that pleasure, well, I don't write it.

And when I don't write poetry, I'm here writing whatever, whenever. Writing about writing. Cursing the failure to work at the poems but then how much work do I have to do to get from blog writing to the poetry journal? Is it just so much easier to hemorrhage here than on the poems?

I think so. Poems require a certain set of data, a willingness to think deeply and make some sort of sense out of chaos. I mean good poems require this. You can write crap and call it poetry and I do but you know the difference and you get turned off then. Poems require a different mind.

That different mind is often a random line sent to you by the creator that lands like a rock on your head and you are flattened. "Where did that rock (line) come from?" is your plaintive query. You, the receiver, have only one job then. Get off the pavement and write out the line. Sometimes that one line will link with another and chain you to a place until it is all written out.

Or more often, the line peters out. You sit at the writing place and you pound at the one or two lonely lines and think why didn't you just become a bricklayer or a carpenter or an egg sorter for all these jobs have defined job descriptions. And defined results.

Poem making comes with no instruction manual, no training (other than life) and no beginning/middle or end. It is sort of like traveling endlessly on a road to some place you don't know yet but imagine into existence. You pass markers on the road and you jot them down and make a map of your experience and you give it to everyone who will accept this crude map. And most of the receivers are mystified by your instructions.

"What is she saying? Why go like this to this place and what is the purpose of this journey?"

Why ask me? I don't know. I was called on this trip. I did the best I could. I wrote down what I saw. I gave that poem to you so you would know what to do with it. And now, you tell me, my instructions are not interpretable? That they make you hate poems?

Yeah, that is what it is like. Poems are personal and unique and mystic and I don't know what my poems say or what they reveal to anyone. I write what I feel. I write what clobbers me daily. I don't write to make you hate poems. I know most of you don't like poems because they are in an alien tongue. God knows I know this. I read poems written by poets and I don't have the foggiest idea what the poet meant and I don't care. What I feel from the poems is what I need to learn. I don't care if the poem is technically perfect, crammed with all kinds of references and learned texts. I don't care if the poet has won prizes and is a language master. All I care about is what that poem tells me about what the poet felt when he wrote that poem and how he translated his feelings into universal lines that I can embed myself into and feel his feelings. Poems give me the human intimacy that I'm starved for.

Most of us are starved for this human intimacy. We have people we love and people we live with and people we are friends with and yet we are all strangers to each other. We are rockets propelled to destinations that are random and chaotic and myriad and we don't know that silence in each of us that is populated by individual fears, lusts, interests and hungers. We don't know each other intimately - like maps of roads we have all traveled and made our own. We know each other and we don't.

In some ways it is impossible to be intimate with the other because we are all so wounded and afraid of being hurt again. Perhaps we can be most intimate with our spouses but this depends entirely on how open and fearless our spouses are. If they are constrained by their upbringing, their religious bindings and a conservative view of the world, then perhaps we can only be partially open to our own, our most dearest people.

But in a poem, I can be as intimate as I want to be. I can tell you that on this day, I was madly in love and on this other day, I was broken into a thousand pieces and then hundreds of days later, I packaged up the pieces and mailed them to the post office and they were never returned. I can tell you this because in poems, I'm allowed to be intimate and true and brave.

If we were allowed to be like this in our real life relationships, if we did it in practice, I'd have no need to write poems. I'd be making a poetical life. I'd be doing what I could to make a life that is most congruent to my true needs and wants. I'd be making a poetical life.

Severe simplicity

I went for a short walk with younger son in the misty foggy morning outside. It was short because the playground was damp and wet and so younger boy did not want to play there and he wanted to walk even less. Still I managed to do half my regular walk.

It was wetter than yesterday but sort of a filmy moisture over everything than discrete, pointed arrows of rainfall randomly scattered. I watched a crowd of red leaves for a bit. There were tiny drops of water beading them in some lace pattern and I pointed this pattern to younger boy, along with the smattering of fat rosehips and the stilled yellow poplar coins on the trees and nope, there was no "wow!" of excitement just the flattening of body on a pavement and the urge to lie there forever.

I got him unplastered from the sidewalk and we continued our way home. There was a chance for him to spot a lone slug stuck on the sidewalk and the question of "Why is he there?" Mine "He's traveling." And then the searching for more of his brethren. "No, that's a pine cone not a slug." "No, that is just a bit of wood." I think he should wear his eye glasses all the time.

We saw a church meeting at the community hall. It was a small church and most of the members look rather like new believers - young adults and the like. Maybe there is a revival in the need to believe in our generation's kids who never got the taste or indoctrination into a religious path as children and are now, voluntarily searching for the creator. I think they would be better off going for walks, hikes and tramping in nature and they would find the creator inside themselves in these fertile settings.

But to each their own. I took younger boy home as he was fairly drooping towards the end of the walk. I think if he walks daily after school, we won't have him petering out so early in each walk. Either that or have him run around in a playground for a while after each school day.

As soon as I got back, I came to write and I put on Simon and Garfunkel on. I'm listening to "The Boxer". Do you know how many years it has been since I heard this song? I have records (yeah, I don't have a player but I have my records still in the basement. I've told hubby I can't bear to part with them JUST yet). I think I even have a Simon and Garfunkel record or two in the box stored in the corner of the basement dedicated to the stuff I am still attached to but never use.

I've got attachments still. Hubby was telling me about his eighty year old uncle in Quebec while we were cuddling last night in bed. His uncle lives without electricity in some remote place in Northern Quebec. He has to buy his gas in containers. He has water. He chops his wood for his fire. He lives on fish that he catches and meat that he hunts for. He owns very little and lives on a small government pension. He has a girlfriend in her seventies who lives with him. Wow! I'd like to meet this guy. Apparently he has been living a life of severe simplicity for decades. He is healthy, enjoys life and yeah, he doesn't spend his time in the mall, shopping his time away.

As for me, I'm still attached to stuff. I'm slowly disengaging from some of the stuff but it is hard. It simply not the product itself but the initial investment I made when I got the product that makes me feel that it is bad to give it away, get rid of it or simply give it to someone who wants it. It isn't selfishness. It is insecurity.

And how do you get rid of this internal security? There is first the intellectual recognition that stuff won't keep you safe, make your life interesting or even enrich you. Stuff is just stuff. And second there has to be an actual visceral type of emotional untangling of octopus hands from what the stuff represents to you - inside of you. You have to make a deliberate conscious decision to pare yourself down to the bone and this means getting rid of stuff. Then you do it. You go room by room with a garbage bag and you put stuff in the garbage bag, put the garbage bags in the van and then take it immediately to a donation bin (such as the one near the YMCA) and you put the stuff in. If you leave it around, you have second thoughts.

As for the stuff in the basement - let me do the upper floor first and then this Christmas before we buy new things for the boys let us empty out their past Christmas presents and give it away. We can't keep it forever and certainly we don't have any space left to store this stuff for another decade.

Artists and courage

I've not got to my cup of tea yet. I'm soaking up Jann Arden's voice right now. I'm drowning. So delicious. I can't imagine how many amazing artists there out there. Every morning I'm woken up to a new line of undiscovered and unknown artists on the radio. Where they get their fortitude to persist in the sucky arts funding world of the Tory government is beyond me.

Most of us laugh at the artists starving slowly on their minimum wage jobs as they attempt to keep their lives intact while doing their life works. I can't be one of them. It is just too bloody hard. It is far easier to dabble like I do and not go out and get repeatedly mugged by the world. It is simply a kinder, gentler world not attempting to make a lfie as an artist.

Of course to be successful you do need talent. Even if you have talent, it is a long, hard, unrewarding slog. No money in the whole endeavor. No security. No pleasure sometimes because you have so many failures. And no one gives a shit. So why do they do it? God knows. Maybe they are genetically driven to express these talents and they are mutated if they don't express them and mutated negatively.

It takes a whole pile of determination, persistence and guts to be an artist. Bravo to you all!! You all have far more courage than I'll certainly ever have. Yeah, it takes courage to go out naked into the indifferent crowd and not be swayed by their derision and harmful comments. It take courage to expose oneself in song, word and acts. It is a wonder to me that so many attempt this route of naked self revelation to the other.

Not complaint free world but a do more world

So how did the 24 hours of non-complaining go? I lost $5. Yeah, I made a bet with older boy (who has the complaining gene from his mother) that the first one who complained today would have to pay the other one $5. I lost. Yeah, not great. I lose a bet with a 13 year old boy.

Yeah, it is not so easy to stop complaining. But I'm not giving up. I'm going to take it day by day. There was a church I read about that stopped complaining. Rev. Will Bowen of Christ Church Unity asked his church to stop complaining, gossiping and being sarcastic for 21 days with the added attention getter of a bracelet to keep them reminded of their challenge.

See: http://www.christianpost.com/article/20070503/
pastor-stop-complaining.htm


When they succumbed to the negative habit they had to switch the bracelet from one hand to the other and start the challenge again. I liked this idea. I've got two dollar store plastic bracelets on my right hand. I use them to remind me of my negative habit. And now I'm going to follow this idea by switching the bracelets hand to hand until I get it and start a un-negative habit. I don't yet have the guts to call it a positive habit. I don't think I'm constitutionally built to be positive so I'll not bother to go to that extreme.

I don't believe I will be able to stop complaining because I do use griping as a way to get out things that genuinely piss me off and I believe, in moderation such expressiveness is better than hoarding all this negative energy inside me where it will simply eat away at me. But I don't think this bracelet and attempting to extricate myself from knee jerk negative responses is useless either. It will decrease the amount of whining I do and it will force me to move from a position where I'm just talking and maybe move me to a place where I'm forced to do something about the cause of my dissatisfaction - such as write a letter of complaint, take action, motivate myself or exercise.

I have to admit I can't visualize a no complaint world as Rev. Bowen can. I think there is lots to complain about in this world and complaining is the first step to taking action. But I also think just complaining is basically saying
"I'm helpless, I'm weak, I'm incapable of changing this paradigm." Do I want to be that way? Nope. I want to do what I can to change my world. Complaining less and doing more makes perfect sense to me.

Luscious, luscious and more luscious

Utterly luscious walk. I only did an hour straight after a pasta and sausage supper but it was still wonderful. It was just beginning to wet outside and I went forth with the dark night blinds coming down on the gray clouds. I walked briskly just enjoying the feel of my feet hitting the ground and looking up at the passing skeletal trees with their sparse clumps of almost wispy, hairy leaves left in certain spots. I noticed more birds and their nests. It is so much easier to spot their tiny nests now that there are spaces and voids and emptiness in the trees.

The wind was caressing. I mean usually when it blows, it is like a slap and a tug on my long hair but today it was if there was a motherly hand pulling back my hair so it didn't cross over my face like a net as it usually does. I met very few people out which surprised me considering how mild and warm the weather is. I saw a man with his wife, an umbrella protectively placed over his head despite the fact that is was merely spitting out and not deserving of any head protection or rain gear. There was a short man with his Sheltie dog. I see them often. The man is shy and reserved and speaks very little. I wonder if his Sheltie understands Chinese or is as confused as I am by his accent in English.

There were a few young boys outside walking and a wedding party at the community hall. The bride was dressed in a long white gown and was standing on a balcony framed by her new husband and assorted guests. I wonder if she realizes how brave she is - to attempt the journey of love in a single, monogamous relationship - committing her entire life to the one decision of this man over all others? But then, none of us really understand this pact we are making with our spouses do we? We only come to the realization that we are permanent occupants of the same piece of land somewhere in our second decade together and sometimes, this realization fills us with fear and disorder. It takes time and maturity to understand that the marriage vows one made in a passion and a fever can also remain true in friendship, humor, yes, still that same passion and fever.

When I headed back, I went to my cul de sac where I have my best garden. I admire it so much. The rocks are placed just so, the little plants are arranged artfully to fall over the rocks (although they are currently much disguised by fresh droppings of leaves over them) and there is a avalanche of greenery behind them. I wonder what my best garden will look like in winter with fistfuls of snow clutched in the fir trees and the sliding, dropping fall of snow flakes like buttery whiteness in the sunlight? I can't wait.

When I got home, I put the kettle on immediately and started to write. I've learned that I can wait for my cuppa tea but I can't wait to put down the words. If I wait, they fade like ice films in the sunlight. So I write first. I then go brew my tea. And afterwards? Back to the words.

Not entirely assimilated

I love going to Millwoods mainly because I feel I'm in a place where I can see all kinds of brown people. When you are an Asian being among Asians is like fitting into a quilt that never ends. I mean I'm married to a white guy and I am perfectly home with white folks but I am myself in the loudness, the complete and utter devotion to communication and the almost unnatural directness of Asian folks.

There were wives dressed in saris or their trouser/tops with their gold bangles and jewels and I was one of them except I was dressed in jeans and tight top. There were men in loose fitting pants and tops as if they had just got off the plane from Pakistan. Hardly anyone was dressed in white folk clothing. I felt I was back in the old country and that out of the crowd, my aunties would descend on me in a yapping, yipping crowd and embrace me and scold me for taking so long to come out and visit me. Hey, what is going on here? Am I getting ready to go back to the old country? I haven't been back since I was 13 years old and I'm 50 years old now.

Maybe there is a time in our lives when we must look back with nostalgia and affection at all our linkages with the people of our blood. Despite my continual efforts to assimilate into Canadian culture perhaps I haven't been entirely successful in becoming white.

My boys are half and half. They are more white than I will ever be because they have no memories of mango trees, my grandparents yelling at teach other, the begging people at the door, my aunties like fading roses in a bunch in the same house as my grandparents - three of them spinsters and alone together in that great big two story house. Perhaps you can never excise yourself from the body of your family and your heritage. And perhaps it is not wise to do this.

What stories I make come from the immersion into a culture I know nothing of. And perhaps, now that I'm older and more relaxed about life and longing for a glimpse at the Bangladesh I know nothing about, perhaps it is time for me to go back and rediscover my roots.

Aloo Matar

While older boy had his hair cutters at Unicutters, I took younger boy to the Spice Centre store next door. It is located at 9280 34 Avenue and I've always wanted to visit it but you know how it is. Typically, I don't cook Bengali curries and rarely need to buy spices or other Asian dishes. Besides which my mother is a master cook and any Bengali meals she makes are from scratch, are yummy and she buys her spices from all over the place and does some sort of alchemy of mixing to have a master spice mix that she uses that I could never replicate.

Recently though, due to tiredness and age, mum has started using ready made curry mixes. I had looked for the kind she used at Superstore and had no luck finding it so I thought I'd check out the Spice Centre. As soon as I entered I was enveloped in curry smells, lots of Indian sweetmeats on the shelves, lentil bags, rice of all kinds and freezers full of meat and vegetables. It all looked so good. But I refrained from buying anything except the curry pastes.

They are made by a company called Ashoka and I buy one type - Aloo Matar. It is a mixture of potatoes and green peas in sauce. Really, the amount in the containers for $2.99 are minuscule but what I do is I extend the product by adding a bit of water at home. Then I put in more boiled potatoes, frozen peas, cut up tomatoes and already cooked chicken breast made into pieces. I make this sort of hodge podge curry because the curry itself reminds me of my childhood in Bangladesh.

When I was sent to Bangladesh for a couple of years, the most endearing part of the entire stay was my contact with my aunties and grandparents. One of my aunties - Aunty Baby really babied me. She would make this wonderful aloo matar made up of fresh peas, potatoes and tomatoes and I relished it. When I remember my time in Bangladesh I don't focus on the end of my stay which was the blood of killed Bengali women, men and children in the streets in the war of liberation but I focus on my aunt making her meals of love.

And that is why, unable to scratch together a curry of any kind despite many attempts by my mother to decipher for me that language of Asian curry making, I take this prepared curry made by workers in India and I eat in full awareness that I am eating memories of my childhood.

Adulthood can be the childhood you never had

Adulthood, for many of us is spent compensating for actual and imagined deficiencies of our childhood upbringing. We imagine that we weren't cherished enough, that we were poor (and we may have been), that we lived lives of unbearable monotony and restriction in perhaps a less than urban center of commerce and once we leap frog into adulthood we are able to assuage our egos by fulfilling every dream we never got serviced in our childhood. In other words, adulthood is a study in childhood deprivation reversal.

I'll give you a minor example. As a child, I was frantic about reading and wanted books as desperately as any heroin addict. Unfortunately, at the time of my childhood passion, we were stuck in Kuwait where my father was working as head of a pathology department and the entire country was full of Arabic books while a few censored English books were sold at great prices that even my education mad parents were not thrilled to purchase.
I got a few comic books once in a while but I was parched in a river of Arabic script for the English language. And this parching of the soul didn't get quenched until we arrived in Canada, destitute and rebounding from the aftermath of the Bangladesh war of liberation. As you can imagine, my parents who were expecting to return to Bangladesh, well educated and with sufficient funds to provide for a reasonable lifestyle were utterly unprepared to arrive in a rather frosty Canada, with it's less than amiable introduction into the still mostly white physician block that occupied Edmonton in the 1970s. In addition to the culture shock (for despite residing in England for 5 years, my dad is still basically a traditional Bengali man and my mother a hodgepodge mongrel of Nepali descent), they had no money. I think they may have had $500 but I'm not sure. So they were unable to buy me books.

Mind you, as an adult I now know that they did not have the money for indulgences like books. But as a child I didn't understand this. The only thing that saved me was the wonderful public library system. I spent all my times in the downtime library like some sort of crazed lunatic, wandering the stacks of poetry as if I were a real poet rather than a maudlin teenager. The library system saved me from utter bitterness as a child but it did not prevent me from feeling deprived.

The consequence? As an adult, I'm overcoming this terrible sense of book deprivation by purchasing as many shots of books as I can snort. I think of books like many think of alcohol. Alcohol may loosen other people up, get them mellow and relaxed and happy. I don't need to buy a 12 pack of beer. I just do what I did today and go to the thrift store and pick up a few books for 50 cents each and I'm in heaven. I've overcome my childhood handicap. In addition, I'm fulfilling the mandate of adulthood which is to massage one's ego and overcome childhood deprivation at the same time.

If you are feeling blue about being denied stuff as a child, well get over it. There are plenty of ways to overcome the actual and real miseries of one's upbringing. One of them is action. Go buy books if you, like me, were book deprived. If you were brought up by a mother who ignored you, sort of like the mother I am, get over it. Mothers have a lot of stuff on their minds and children are low on the list. If this doesn't make you feel better, go for a run or a 2 hour walk. I find that when you are physically exhausted, any maternal trauma you have suffered tends to recede to the background as you try and keep your heart beating during and after the period of intense exertion. If you were beaten as a child, abused and actually damaged - I've news for you. You can recover. If you find a psychiatrist who is not mentally ill, you should consult with one. It is difficult to get over such traumas - which are far more indented into one's psyche than superficial neglect - but if you are determined, you can do this work and often you can do this work by yourself.

Adulthood is an opportunity to pick up the pieces of childhood and glue them into a whole human being. Our parents were doing the best they could. You will do the best you can with your own kids. Think of this time as a second, third or endless chance to do what you want to do to make your life happy. You don't have to relive your childhood again. You can be free of it.

In fact, adulthood can be the childhood you never had. If for example, you came into my home, you would find every single room wall papered in books. I've learned that adulthood can indeed reverse the past. Indeed, I've gone beyond reversal into projections. I'm projecting that my boys will reverse the ill effects of their childhood spent in a library type home, by never buying another book as long as they live.

A non-whining practice

I'm going to try something just for today - no complaining. Yeah, it's going to be tough. That is why I'm only doing the 24 hour bit. If I can stand it - I'll extend the time to another 24 hours.

Why do this? I've found that one complaint leads to another and then I've wasted time. In fact, I think my blogs are entirely devoted to complaints disguised as writing.

So if I can perhaps do this abstinence from whining for 24 hours maybe I'll have the guts and determination to eliminate this pervasive behavior or method acting from my repertoire. This daily doing bit is in fact how I made my walking practice reality. I walked every day. I did not look beyond the 24 hour period. I focused on the day's walk.

In the same way, I'll focus on the day's absence of complaint. It may be that the joy and abundance the takes the place of the negativity and self centered behavior may last and become daily practice.

Nothing wasted. everything used

Nothing you ever do is wasted. I've spent most of my university life doing science and then chucked it all to do mothering. Most everyone I know is in academia right now. I'm in the elementary and junior high school trenches. Whatever science I remember and can rejuvenate out of my neurons is being used in science explanations for two young boys.

The time I've spent writing, according to most of the free world, has been a complete waste of time. But when I'm helping the boys with their LA work, when I'm writing letters to corporations or when I'm simply sounding off to elected idiots, I am using my word sense and work experience.

The time I spent reading in the stacks of every public library has also been considered to be a misspent youth, a misguided waste of middle age years and now, a fraying of the brain in my dotage. But certainly, I have been well entertained by the finest minds in the poetical world and I've gained so much emotionally and experientially that I'd never have been able to acquire in one single lifetime.

Science, writing and reading have all been utter follies. I've not used them to their finest extent. They have been tools I've picked up, hammered around with and not completed full blown projects. But my experiencing of these areas of life have not been wasted. I have made them into particulate dust and blown them into the eyes of my children where they now irritate and inflame their vision. I want to be the insect in their constant steady climate of childhood, biting them into an awareness of how many different worlds it is possible for them to live in - of which the worlds of science, writing and literature are but a minor grouping.

Yes, nothing is wasted. The words you exchange with a stranger may just tinge the fabric of his world for just a tiny second or it may change his entire day or two. It may be that your words are corn scattered to hens and after gulping them down, eggs may be laid. Or not. But again, you learned. You experienced. You savored. So nothing is ever wasted.

Enzyme

I'm going to stop blogging right now as I have homework to supervise with younger boy. He has his eye glasses now. He looks a bit like a nerd but cute. I'm sure we all look nerdy because now we are all 4 eyed in our family.

Hubby is working on math with older boy who barely passed his test today, and in fact is doing a requiz tomorrow. Apparently the entire class of academic wizards performed below expectations and the current response in academia is to retest and raise the learning curve (in other words ensure they understand the material by doing the test again). I think this is a fallacy on the part of the school. I don't quite see how retesting a kid right after he nearly fails the test is going to improve his comprehension of misunderstood material. Would it not be more useful to spend a certain amount of time reteaching the work, then offering them a week to incubate the information and then retesting? But then I'm just a confused parent. Teachers are gods and goddesses.

Tomorrow, I'm taking younger boy for his hearing test. No doubt the reason why he never listens to me is that he has wax plugs in both ears but finally, I can be assured that he isn't deaf but he is merely ignoring me. Oh, happy day.

Everyone in the extended family looks moribound and near death. My one sister is burnt out with the renovation drama of last month. The other sister is off with her heart failure. My mother is in agonies with the ravages of rheumatoid arthritis. Dad is in the final stages of his quadruple bypass operation. Yeah, they are all dying fast.

I know that sounds cold blooded but I've been in this family drama for the last twenty years and in that time you get plenty of time to develop mental and emotional calluses which is what I've had to do. I've learned I cannot save the world. I can barely save myself.

I can help but I cannot make people do the healthy, fit or even right thing. People decide their own lives. I'm sort of like an enzyme, speeding up the reactions and getting substrates to products.

Right now, I'm off to get my younger boy fizzing over spelling.

Road way construction

I took the boys to a nearby playground since it was better than being canned and heated in the construction at rush hour. They played desultorily on the playground equipment. They sipped their Slurpies and they soaked up the heat. It was amazingly relaxing. After that short playground break we were able to recan ourselves and enter the world of the traffic jam caused by construction that never ends.

Finally I got so fed up I sent this e-mail to the Citizen Action Centre (other wise known as the black hole for citizen rants).

Hi,

I've recently commented on the Bridge Deconstruction to the Mayor of our fine city and asked him to pass on these comments to the transportation department. But then I thought, hey why not ask the Citizen Action Centre (CAC) to pass on my concerns to the department itself? I mean the Mayor (or his poor overburdened administrative assistant) probably read the comments I made and promptly discarded the thoughts I'd whipped up (in the aftermath of being stuck in traffic on the bridge for the thousandth time) into his electronic trash and that was that, but the CAC, ostensibly serves the befuddled citizen in her quest for justice or just a plain response (such as yes, the damn Paving company is going to be finished the paving after devoting two years to this project and that sluggish Construction company who is probably responsible for the project disintegration will not float this project into 2009) and will be less likely to dispose of my commentary in a frivolous manner and might pass on my e-mail of restrained fury to the powers that be at the Transportation Department who obviously aren't in control of any of the transportation roadworks in our city.

While I was rather irate in my last e-mail to the Mayor (I generally am with him), I will be more restrained with you and hopefully this will lead to some one in the transportation department actually listening to my concerns and actually doing something about my complaint (although I am not optimistic since in general public complaints by concerned citizens tend to be treated rather like the whining of spoiled infants rather than the righteous indignation of grown ups who are fed up with the waste of tax dollars on road projects and don't actually feel such overruns of the public purse are necessary if the said projects were adequately monitored by the construction companies themselves as well as the assigned manager in the transportation department).

Today, as I have for many previous days before this one, I spent many precious minutes of my life with my two school age boys stuck in the bridge vicinity, on the bridge itself and hurray, just over the bridge and temptingly close to my home but not quite there yet. As I waited, I spent the time counting the number of stuck commuters in my lane alone and I got to about 40 of us poor suckers who have no other way to get back to to our area of town (other than try to merge onto the turnoff on the Whitemud Freeway where I have never been voluntarily allowed entry). We were stuck. And we have been stuck for almost 2 years now. The bridge is the reason we have been wasting precious life energy. The bridge from hell.

I am quite understanding of construction delays throughout the University area, the Heritage mall area, the downtown area and the like, but I'm not as understanding of the delay or even the length of time required to do this bridge deconstruction. Surely there is a plan? And surely this plan does not require innumerable lane closings, lane markings, lane changes so we are playing a game of kill the commuter in the other lane, and repaving of lanes? Surely to god, there is a reason why all through the summer I have seen two men loitering around the bridge area and now, suddenly that we are into October and past the project completion date, these same two men are blocking a lane on my return to my home wearing a sign that says "SLOW". Why have these men waste our tax payer dollars with this sign? With forty cars going one way on the lane, we aren't going beyond 10 km/hour anyway?

Besides these two men (who may or may not be the same two men I'd seen earlier this summer) there have been an assortment of up to six female workers also bearing signs like "STOP" or "SLOW". Then there have been an assortment of men who tend to be smoothening concrete, standing near cement trucks or just sitting on the bridge and grinning at all the commuters that are stuck and irate on the bridge. It must their idea of poking caged citizens and having a fun time about it. In addition to these infrequent visitors to the bridge area there have been these two men with tape, marking every square inch of the unpaved, paved, repaved and broken roads. Surely to god, they have better things to do with their lives than dance across a bridge marking lines on the roads?

So what do I want from you? I want the road and bridge finished. They told us it would be done SEPTEMBER, 2008. It is now OCTOBER. Surely they aren't confused about the end dates as well as their project management?

Please refer this e-mail to the city manager who is overseeing the companies that are working less than feverishly to get this job done. If he even tells me that this project won't get done by this October I'm going to start a petition on the bridge and incite my fellow stuck commuters to march on city hall.

P.S. the new website is unnavigable. I can't find the e-mail address of anybody. Where is the contact section? I had to use search to find CAC.

Chapin's life

I'm listening to Harry Chapin sing "Story of a Life" and I'm crying, god knows why. It seems that the stories of our lives are so bitter sweet and Harry captures it so perfectly in this song. Wonderful man. I love the "ghosts of glory" bit in the song.

I never got to see him in person but from all the comments on his videos there isn't a single negative thing said about him. Unlike Leonard Cohen, his songs are far more direct, emotional and often inspiring. Cohen is more remote.

His character shines out in every song and I love his chatter before the song begins especially where he says:

"I hope you like it. If you don't screw you."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHBb2zm7ago&feature=related

Meander in the sun

It is one of those summer days that come in the fall and is entirely unexpected and enjoyed. It is hot sun, cool wind and leaves drifting lazily down in a spiral cascade that never seems to end. There walks the shimmer of light through out it all and I'm in the flood, drowning as I walk, barely aware of anything other than that clear, obliterating light.

When I go out at noon, the sun wraps me up in a gown and I'm clothed fully. There are so many things to marvel over as I regally walk my queenly route - the rose bushes are turning from their green/gold/red color to the muddy browns of decay. I heard the birds in the bush in full chorus and wondered why I never hear them except near the ravine. Why is Samesville so empty of birds? I'm waiting for my trees to find themselves and perhaps when they are large and sturdy, the birds will come. We get a few visitors because of our massive sunflower heads but they are usually these black, disgusting crows that also like to stab at our garbage bags with their beaks. Those birds are definitely unwelcome. I also heard a few Canada geese but did not sight them flying off in their zipper of black for warmer climes. Maybe they are going to delay their departures for a few more days. I can't imagine why they'd want to go off on a long burdensome journey for the sun when the sun is right here.

I walk pavements in the community near Sameville. I never walk Samesville for the pure and simple reason that I have no attraction for all the concrete, glass and rocks that seem to be the current fad in house and garden design. The older community near Samesville has matured, has that gentle look of lots of love put into their gardens and yes, there are rocks but certainly not massive boulders but tasteful spreading out of the slate and smaller rocks to make a more natural environment. The trees are pruned well and form brackets around the simple, calming garden spaces. I see lots of bushes that are full size and not the $5 Superstore add ons that are common in Samesville. I'm always amazed that those small potted shrubs are capable of becoming steroid forms.
The houses in the community near Samesville are pretty expensive when they were built but what I like about that community is that there was some effort made to make green spaces available to residents - not just in a central park but right in their back doors. There are walking paths and places to sit and places to stroll and think. You can take your dog here and not be bothering anyone. You also have space between neighboring houses unlike in Samesville where the developer maximized his profits by squeezing as many megamansion into as tiny a space as possible. It is amazing how a couple of decades has changed the paradigm of community development from that of sensitivity to indifference to the consumer's needs and wants. Now we have houses so close to each other that I can see my neighbors BBQing and if their BBQ catches fire I can be assured that at least 8 houses surrounding him will also go up in smoke before the fire department will arrive.

It was simply a wonderful hour in the sun and I'm never quite sure why it takes me until noon to get out of the house to do the meander in the light. I am off now to pick up younger boy and do the trip to the optometrist. Maybe I'll take him and older boy to the playground after.

Sister stuff

Today has been one of those days where you want to just slow down and stop for a ten minute break and have a cup of tea and so that is what I'm doing here.

I took my sister with the heart problem for her echocardiogram this morning, requested the sleep apnea mask that she needs be replaced through VitalAire, did some shopping at Superstore, canceled the DATS ride for my sister since her yoga class is not happening today, deposited the Calgary house rental cheque which I hope will not bounce and I've just got a load of washing in. The supper for today is going to be reruns. I'm hoping at least to make a fresh salad before I head out the door to pick up younger boy to get his glasses from the optometrist.

It is always like this - either the boys or hubby or the sister needing transportation, help or assistance. Sometimes I wish that I could just be on an island - left alone for a weekend. That is the height of bliss, no one needing services.

The fact is - I run a hotel. I pick up after the boys and hubby daily. I literally pick up. Their clothes are everywhere. I wash their clothes, do their beds, change their sheets, clean the house, cook their food and make sure there is back up food (grocery shop). They don't even change the toilet paper. Why is this? Because I do it.

You get the hubby and children you train. And I've got the ones I've not trained. I wish they were more considerate but I know it won't happen until they (at least the boys) wake up to the fact that someone else is doing everything for them short of wiping their butts. It is unfortunate but I'm leaving this training to their future wives who will no doubt blame me for spoiling them. Yeah, they are spoiled. What else is there to say?

But enough of the frustrating whining. Most of the frustration of life comes (in my case) from this expectation (is is unrealistic?) that people should be able to take care of themselves. My sister - no matter how badly she is doing - should be able to phone DATS and cancel her ride but I can't depend on her to do this. I have to recheck every time when she says she does something and invariably she hasn't done it because her memory is so bad. Ditto for my parents. They could be more responsible but hey, they have me - older child to take care of my sister's problems. So they basically relegate parenting duties to me which they have difficulty doing such as ensuring her medical workups are done. I mean I understand that they are old but why can't this work be parceled out to everyone in the family? Why is the SAHM daughter the one who gets everything? Well, the short answer is because no one else gives a damn and if I don't do it, my sister will fall through the cracks.

It is not that my other brothers and sisters are jerks. It is just that they have dissociated themselves from my sister's care as you would when faced with a load of rotting fish. No one wants contact with rotting fish do they? So they disengage, remove their contact, yak alot about what could be done about this situation but in reality they don't do anything because they already have someone doing the dirty work for them.

It is always like this in families. Sometimes no one will help out. Then you have a social worker come in to manage the disabled person's life. I don't know what to do really except try not to do too much because it makes me bitter.

I don't want to choose bitterness. I want to chose helping but not being consumed by the needs of my sister and parents. My parents are oblivious to the future problems that will be present when they die and leave my disabled sister alone. Who will be responsible for her care? But then my parents will live forever and ever and my father has made no arrangements. When you are in unreality, life is simple. You ignore the problems. You just live day to day.

Tomorrow I'm taking my sister to the Medicenter for blood work then - I'll be free hopefully unless we have to go pick up her mask. I'm going to take the boys to the zoo on Saturday and then I'll focus entirely on my garden and leaf collection. There is a word for the sun that I'm thinking about and it is luscious. The sun is entirely luscious and I want to be walking outside with the leaves scrunching under foot. I'll quickly gulp down my tea and I'm off.

Diarrheal writing on blogs

I like reading other people's blogs but not obsessively. Usually I read them because of something in a blog entry has given me a taste of the human being behind the door of the blog post. It isn't often that I sense there is a living breathing sod behind writing posted on blogs. Most of the time I get the feeling that androids have written the piece or that the high school students in my part of Samesville are all making copies of each other's grade 12 essays and posting them randomly on the Internet. Yeah, the writing sucks.

Why? Because it is all diarrheal in nature. When we write on blogs we don't have a teacher checking our work, we don't get grades, there is no censor and yeah, we just don't care enough to make it perfect. We write to get expressed.

Sometimes our expression doesn't make for very interesting, informative or even entertaining reading. But no matter. The real purpose of blogs isn't to keep you the reader on the edge of the seat, palpitating with excitement. It isn't to generate AdSense revenues so each blog writer will retire in style (or even retire at all). The purpose of a blog is to provide people who write with a place to store their writings.

Yeah, that is it. I practice writing here. I store my practice results - my writing here. Most of it is garbage. But so what? It is all done. I have proof positive that I am working daily on my master scheme which is to get better at the craft that I love. I don't love a whole bunch of Earthlings. I love just a few of them. I don't love a whole bunch of concepts, things or products. I love just one of them - the writing.

So what I do here is to make me a more fluent thinker and a more skilled words organizer. I don't pretend to do a great deal of other stuff here. On many occasions I just rant. It is liberating and since MLAs, MPs and other assorted folks don't actually do anything when I write to them about my concerns why should I worry if you - the reader - don't do anything either?

In fact, writing a blog is an act of political activism that is on par with marching on the streets denouncing the current massacre of the average citizen in the US with this futile bailout of corrupt or very stupid corporations. I think the only way we can empower ourselves is to speak out and the one great way to speak out - is on a blog.

No matter how little you know - you can write about that little you know. Why? Someone knows even less than you do. Don't worry about your petty store of knowledge. You have enough experience in a life time of living to write about a small topic or two. And just one of these topics - such as buying a new home - will provide you with material that will be useful to a truck load of new home buyers.

Fear is the main reason we don't do things we want to do. Writing on a blog is fearful because you are stepping out of the safety of the crowd and making your own personal unique views known. But really who cares? Most of the world is busy with their own ego management and don't care a hoot about your exposure. Just write and get the words out.

Walking to peace

I went for a walk by myself which did a lot to unkink me from negative thoughts. Then I went with younger boy to the playground near our home. It was already dark and spooky when we got there and then, with all the creepy shadows, younger boy was easily convinced that there were ghosts around. We left after a bit of swinging and sliding. I think we will try to go to the playground straight after school rather than late in the evening.

The trees were all a medley of fine colors running Monet like into each other. I must be the only person in my area of Edmonton outside enjoying the free movie show of the fall colors. I don't know why more people aren't standing transfixed at the power and glory of gold leaves in their front yards. I saw some rose bushes that were all shades - the green leaves turning yellow and then the yellow leaves turning red. The rosehips were bunched and heavy, plowed down only by the birds. There were some leaves that had only their rims tinted gold. It was as if some heavenly painter had patiently taken each leaf off, dipped their rims only in acid and then replaced them back on the branches.

Some trees of course were naked. They looked vulnerable and skinny compared to the fat bustling skirts of the poplar trees next to them. There a few dead trees in the ravine area slowly decomposing but now it is difficult to tell these dead trees from the fall streakers. The entire valley is golden now and it is not due to wheat fields. I wish I could have been here when the first settlers were arriving. I wonder what this place had been like in the times of the Indians and the buffalo. Magnificent no doubt.

All the miniwalks have done the trick of helping me finish my walking practice. It is getting harder to do the long walks with the demands made by the kids and extended family. But with the short walks - there is still the ability to add up all the smaller walks and get the total number of hours I want to walk each day.

The walking keeps me going. I think without it the world becomes so dried up and flattened that I get negative and grumpy. With the walking, I'm outside, watching the birds and noting the subtle changes in leaf and fruit on the trees I see daily. I get to watch the drying out of the bushes, the slumbering of the perennials and the simple coating of each part of land with the deluge of leaves. It is all very beautiful and I only remember this when I am outside in my sweater and hiking boots - wading through the ills of the day to arrive at peace.

Seduced

The walking practice is needing doing but I'm still here at the writing place to mutter strange utterances about the wonderful shook gold of the leaves that I've been seeing. The copper color. The golden green blighted leaves. The paper rustling of the dehydrated sheaves of grated leaves under me as I walk. I went with my sister on our lovely ten minute walk and my eyes were fixed on the gorgeous old trees in my parents' neighborhood. There was this elongated ash tree spread like honey between two green slices of fir trees. I wondered how it had got that thin and tall but then I'm sure it must be about 30-40 years old. The lining of trees on the ravine next to some of the houses were multicolored and variegated and shawl like. The material of leaves formed a pattern of indescribable intricacy. I was walking with my sister but in my eyes soaking up all this sensory brew I was utterly alone.

I don't actually like walking with other people. I prefer to go at my own pace. I stop when I come across a beautiful little shrub all clustered over with white blossoms and dried fingers of stems. I like to spot a single late fall Oriental poppy dancing in the wind among the Sedums that cluster like clucking motherly hens around her. I think they tell that pink blushing bloom to be more modest, to guard her charms, to not fling her petals away upon every passing stranger but I'm seduced. A pink poppy. Why do I love that more than a thousand red, pink and orange poppies that I've had all summer in my garden? Because it is the last one left? Or because it is so brave to decide to bloom no matter that the winter is imminent?

Who knows? All I know is that the people who make such lovely gardens give me presents daily when I go on my walks. I am soaked in the abundance of their generosity. I am disarmed by their originality. I never would have thought to have a palette of all variation of pinks and then to submerge a bush with yellow and orange flowers somewhere in the mix. I'm not a fan of yellow and orange flowers but today, in the background of yellow and orange leaves, they picked up the same hues and echoed them harmoniously. I was, again seduced.

And of course the wonderful leaf scrunching. Because I have so many pavements filled with leaves to scrunch in my parents' neighborhood, I take my time to do that ten minute walk and like a child splashing in a puddle, I jump into the mess of leaves and just enjoy myself. I don't care what my parents' neighbors think of this 50 year old woman playing in their fountains of leaves. I hope they take the example I set and do the same thing when they are fifty as well.

If not? Well, we all have different pleasures. I saw a lovely seat in the middle of a front garden, ideal for tea and scones and I imagined I was there in the middle of the weeping willow with it's long flowing tendrils and the urns full of white flowering Sedums and tiny Bonsai geraniums. Such care and placement went into that small front garden that I'm curious about what the back garden is like. Such a talented gardener will not neglect her back garden.

That is the pleasure of being a SAHM and most of Samesville is filled with my irk. I am sure that at least some of them like to garden because I've seen some of them puttering around. But it takes decades to groom a garden like the ones I walk through in my parents' neighborhood. It takes decades for trees to grow big enough to make rivers of leaves down city roads. It takes decades to make a world that is ripe and juicy and wonderful and yes, seductive.

Journal for learning

Journaling is the process of writing one's daily life down. I use journals to document what I'm thinking about and I use it as a tool to change the way I'm thinking. A journal can be used for specific events in your life. Say you get sick. You're in the hospital. You are at the lowest point in your life. You can hold all the bad feelings, the sense of powerlessness inside you and this won't help your recovery any or you can write it all out.

When I was sick in the hospital I wrote even when I was throwing up, crawling around the ward on my hands and knees and when I was ready to just cry all day long. I'll tell you what saved my life. Words. Little words that I scratched out like curses, benedictions or prayers. You can write to yourself or to a creator or just write to the book. But the act of ridding yourself of all the helpless feelings - empowers you and makes you able to face the present and clear dangers.

Writing is all about truth. You may start with lies. But you cannot keep writing and lie to yourself without a sense of dissonance and ugliness pervading your spirit. You must be truthful - if not with others - with yourself. Don't like your extended family members? There is no point hurting their feelings by revealing this. Just write it out in your journals and get unattached from the bad feelings. There is a purpose for bad feelings. They tell you when your life situation needs changing and the simplest, less traumatic way to change your life is to write it out before you can make it reality.

Writing down your life as it is and as it could be makes it more possible to make the leaps needed to go from now to the future. You are planning your life on paper. You are telling yourself that this is possible and even if the future you have wanted - doesn't come true - you still made the attempts to achieve this possible future. Attempting is just like achieving - but without the fixed outcomes.

In reality, fixed outcomes do not make a life more meaningful or interesting or happy. The attempting makes the life authentic. I thought this was all a bunch of crap until I hit 50 years old and I realized that I would have to give up on a lot of things I'd thought I'd do in the future. But I was able to give up on them without dying because, I knew I was still attempting and it was the energy of attempting that was making my life vivid.

Having a vivid life depends entirely on you. You can sit in front of the telly and live in the present climate of other people's lives and not feel too worried or sorrowful or unhappy. There is nothing wrong with living a telly life. Many people do this and as far as I can tell, they don't seem anguished or disappointed with the way their lives are progressing. For them, this is enough.

But if this isn't enough. If the daily sojourn in front of the mesmerizer isn't enough to satisfy you and you need stronger drugs - then do the journal writing and find out what drug gets you high. For me, it is enough to write on the blogs, to make a solid poem once in a while and to love my family. For you, it could be a trek to the Himalayas and marriage to a Tibetan serf girl and a gaggle of brown children. Or you could simply be the person who lives the telly life. But you don't know until you write out your life and make it clear to yourself what most pleases you. And don't focus on outcomes. As I've learned. They will never satisfy you. What will satisfy you is the working for these outcomes.

words for writing

The hardest part about writing is this - actually ignoring other things you know you must do and just sitting down and making the work start. I know that this work isn't useful for anyone else but me and I know that I may not get any better at writing just by writing here on the blogs but I also know that I'll never get proficient at writing by NOT WRITING.

Practice. That is why all my blogs have practice in them. I don't believe we can advance in any area of our lives without daily practice. Even the simple act of stilling our minds and bodies and breathing for a short period of time without wanting to move, scratch, think, go off on a tangent and hear that constant stream of garbage in our background mind - that stilling, well, it takes practice.

I can't simply write and make words mean something without doing a daily effort. I can come here or I can go to the hardcover journals or the spiral coil dollar store books, but in order to go forward, I have to make the word quota.

Similarly, I have to think about what I'm writing. It is not only just words gushing out from the cut vein of my brain. It is also directed cutting.

I think the reason we don't like to write, is because we also don't like to think. Thinking would cut through all our delusions and self massaging and ego traps. If we write we get through all the crap and we face ourselves and if we face ourselves truly then we can grow as human beings.

Ways to get motivated to exercise

I've been reading how much money people make from AdSense and I've decided to just forget the idea of earning a salary from it. I'll just focus on the writing practice on the blogs. If I have to I'll work casually during December to pay for the kids' Christmas presents. I will also start some work next year to pay for taxes, RRSP and insurance bills which all seem to float down on us at the same quadrant of the year.

I've just got back from dropping the boys off at school and my return car drive was slow as usual due to the City of Edmonton's transportation department's constant attempts to kill commuters on city arteries by their practice of redoing roads for years on end. While I was stuck on the way back to Samesville I got a chance to look, really look and appreciate the foil metal gold of the leaves that lined the sides of the roads. The poplars are magnificient this year. I'm sure they have been wonderful every year but every fall they splinter into gold dust and I see that dust floating down to the floor and I'm dazzled. I feel so rich.

Yesterday, younger boy and I did our fall practice of wading through a river of leaves, back and forth, scrunching. We scrunch through piles of pine cones as well but we find leaves have the most satisfactory scrunching sounds when we're bounding happily through them. Older boy is just too teenagerish to do this type of scrunch work anymore and I've only a few short years before younger boy morphs from the gangly ganglion child he is currently to become the fashion besotted child like the older one, who would not be seen wallowing in dead leaves in his finest gear - so I'm going to do the scrunching practice as often as I can before these days are forever ended by hormones.

Scrunching practice has the added benefit of getting me to just do nothing. I was going on a walk yesterday - a productive activity - but then younger boy wanted to play and so we headed to this toddler playground and younger boy went swinging on the bars, floating high on the swings and sliding on the slides. It was rather difficult for him to fit into some of the equipment since he has shot up in height but he managed and we got home, scrunching leaves all the way, to get him in a bath and put into bed. Fall days with heat and golden leaves aren't to be missed.

Today I'm taking younger boy for his glasses and also to see the retinal specialist at the Gimbel Eye Center. No doubt that will eat up the entire afternoon but what to do? I can't avoid life. And the eye problems need to be checked. Tomorrow I'm taking one of my sisters for tests on her heart. The physician thinks her heart is failing. Which no doubt it is. The fact is - if you are overweight and I still am, you are at risk for a heart problem. In the daily business of life we think we are immortal but it is productive to sit calmly and reflect on the fact that we aren't machines and that we need upkeep. Walking is what I do and I'm still trying the ten minute walk practice with my sister. Ten minutes of anything is really better than nothing.

If you think you can't even walk ten minutes, try just sitting in a chair and walking in place. Pump your legs. Or go to your bed and lie down and move something. Start. I know it is hard. I'm still working on the motivation. This is what has worked for me:

1) I buy smaller size clothes from the thrift store (yeah, I'm not into expensive inducements to exercise) and I visualize myself in them.

So far, I've not made it into the size 4 but hey, that is my imaginary goal - and just the sight of the very cute size 4 skirt is a seduction of my senses. I think, "One day. I'll be a size 4. I'll be gorgeous. I'll be skinny. I'll be able to walk down the street without feeling tired. And even if I'm not a size 4, I'm still wonderful and cute. But getting to fit is going to be worth it."

2) I eat a lot of tofu desserts
I like sweets. Usually this meant cakes, pastries, donuts, candy and junk food. So now, I don't do that and I eat tofu desserts. I don't know if tofu in excess is bad for you and I don't care. I think it is better to eat tofu than die of a heart attack.

3) I reward myself with books
Yeah, I know. I shouldn't be shopping. As if I need more books. But when I've been exercising for months on end, and I'm needing motivation, I reward my efforts with a thrift store purchase of books (like I said, I'm not into retail credit card purchases. I take $10-$20 and buy books or other junk. They can always be donated later.)

4) I make tons of salads
I don't eat a great deal of these salads but the rest of the family chows down on them. If they eat, I tend to nibble on the salad a bit (just to give a good example to the kids) and I find that just nibbling on greens will fill some of my hunger.

5) Fruits are everywhere
I keep fruits in the fridge, the table and in dried format. I make sure we have no excuse to eat junk. I cut fruits for the boys every chance I get. Hubby gets 4-5 fruits in his lunch bag.

6) I walk
I can run but I walk. Why? I'm lazy. Walking is right for me. Sometimes, it is even hard to walk so I do miniwalks. I read walking articles. I read walking books. I go and walk in new places. I walk in the zoo. It is all about getting off your butt and doing the thing for whatever time you can, at whatever intensity you can (slow, striding, fast walk). You know how your body feels. Don't over do it. And yet, be smart. You can walk fast - on days when you have the energy - so do it.

7) When I don't have the energy - I nap and rest
Sometimes your body is out of juice and you need to just rest or nap or sleep longer at night. You force your body to do stuff it cannot do and you are toast. Forcing leads to lack of enjoyment, overuse injuries and yeah, just plain exhaustion that won't be repaired by short rest periods. Take a few days off if you need to. Then get back into the workout.

8) Walk with your beloved
I love to have hubby walk with me. Walking is less peaceful with younger boy. And older boy just wants to run. Pick a partner that suits you and do it together. Mostly, I prefer to hike or tramp by myself - on public roads. If I walk on the trail system - I now do it with hubby.

9) Think
Yeah, that is right. Think. Are you happy fat? I'm not. I'm not happy dragging the weight of a second person around. It is hard on all my body organs. If I get demoralized, I stop and think -five years from now, I can be thin or I can still be fat. When I think, I make the move.

10) Be kind to yourself and everyone else
Being fat isn't a permanent condition. It can be changed. It just takes time and effort. Be kind to yourself and everyone else. No one wants to be fat. It hurts hearing the fat jokes, the fat commentary that is so prevalent in families and among friends and being part of the fat underclass. Be kind. It costs nothing and it will motivate you to become fit. Notice I said fit. Not thin. Fitness may not make you thin. But it will give you the energy to do all the work of a human being and to still be around when your kids have their kids.

11) Make the change to whole grain breads
We were going back and forth on our breads because we were addicted to white bread. But now, I've switched the family to sunflower/flax brown breads and we won't be doing the white bread thing. I notice this bread costs more but we eat less because we fill up well and stay full longer. Yeah, it took me almost 13 years, but we are brown breaders now.

12) Soup it
I have problems with eating my veggies. I buy Soupworks soups (yeah, I know I could be a back to earth type creature and make soups from scratch but no, I want to write as well). I add cut up broccoli, carrots, kidney beans, barley, corn (from the cob), pea/beans/pea pods and diced chicken breast that I've baked and stored for this use.
I find the boys and hubby will eat this soup and so long as there is other dishes such as rice/chicken/salad, the soup is a filler before the main meal and everyone eats less of the heavy stuff.

13) We still eat some junk food
If you deprive yourself of junk food, you will eventually binge and eat more and do more damage. I take the kids to the Superstore once in a while and they get a fix of stuff they are craving. And I've always got granola bars and SunRype dried fruit around so the kids are able to snack on less junky but still not decent stuff when they want to. They have juice boxes around that they make use of. It isn't encouraged but at least - it is juice and it is in small containers. We make up orange juice and keep it in fridge and they drink that for breakfast. The rest of the time it is milk for a drink or just plain water.

14) YOU
Fact is I could talk about this topic until I expire and you'd not lose a pound until YOU decide to do it. My brother yapped at me for years to lose weight. I got resistant and thought to myself "Who the hell is he to tell me what to do with my life/body/weight?" Fact is, no one can change you or make your life decisions or make your life fun, beautiful and happy. YOU decide what you become, what weight you carry around and if you are going to adopt happiness or misery as a life pattern. YOU decide. Decide, folks.