This life

Writing done daily feels like a job. You come to the same place. Perhaps you come all through the day. You work on your tiny bit of reality. You shine it up, you polish it and make it serviceable. You think, I'm done. You do the work again tomorrow. You work on the same bit of reality. You think it is done again. And yet, there you are the very next day working away at the same material. When does it become tired?

I don't know. I write about my life. I have a very limited life. It isn't filled with exciting travel, world class research, endless forays into the minds of supernatural earthlings and certainly the life is mostly a chronicle of taking care of children. It is the story telling of an ordinary woman's life. It is not tired stuff to me because it is my life and I think it is worth recording. But surely to god, there must be other topics I want to write about?

Write about what you are most comfortable with and you will always have something to write about. But if I write about things I know nothing about - won't I be stretched and made stronger in my writing muscles? Won't I be made to write fresh, interesting stuff? I don't think so. I mean I write mostly poetry and non-fiction. I'm not the maker of unreality. I like the daily regular facts of life. I mean I'm a scientist of my ordinary life. I don't want to make it into a star filled universe but just a small sector of land with a family inhabiting it and then perhaps the extended family meshing with it and very few external tentacles reaching into it. I don't want to make my writings what it is not - an untrue series of stories.

I like to think there are human beings all over the world who once wrote in silent, closed journals and packed them into trunks and we never got to hear their stories of heartbreak, pain and joy because they were ordinary folks and never had a chance to make their writings heard. Now, these same people can take out their musty writings started when they were children and record their thoughts on their blogs and make their ordinary scenes available to anyone who is in search of wisdom. The wisdom of ordinary folks.

I mean there is a surfeit of wisdom in poetry but so few of us read poems. We are afraid of our poets because they are unflinchingly truthful and will face their truths and ask that we not turn away our faces when they face them. Their courage in facing their truths requires us to face our truths as well. Which is damnably hard to do folks. And that is why we squirm away from poets and poems and their knives in lines. We are going to be hurt and hey, who wants to be cut open in such a way? We would prefer our surgery when it comes, in a clean, antiseptic hospital without pain.

But now, we can face the truth on our blogs. We can do it slowly, hesitantly and we can do it less bravely than our poets. We can step slowly towards the unsightly cowardice that lies inside each of us and ask ourselves to face our own shadows and make ourselves courageous. We can write these travails and others can learn from our ordinary battles with pain, sorrow and desires. We can learn and so can others - simply by writing out the scenes of our lives and trying to make these scenes clear and explicable.

All it takes it this - you go to the writing place. You sit down. You write whatever is in your mind. It may not be the wound. It may just be that the boys were bugging you and how you wish they were grown up and then suddenly in that wish comes back the memory of when you had a round faced, moon child in your arms, his head flopped over your shoulder, his milky limbs like damp shadows on your breast as he lay heavy in sleep and you realize that time has already fled and you are just in the tiny gap between childhood and manhood and that child will be gone into his own world. Then what will you do? Will you come to the writing place still waiting for the boys to come and put themselves in your world? Or will you not be able to write because you are so acutely aware of their absence?

Once you start, the line will pull you forward or backwards and you will wiggle and fight and try to get off the hook. But you will be reeled in. You will write your life out. And then the stories are available to everyone. They will be read. Maybe not the way you intended them to be read but they will find homes and another will understand that they aren't so strange or off beat or weird and that there are others out there in the wilderness of their lives as well seeking, yes, seeking the meaning of it all and not finding it. We are all seekers. We are all on interminable journeys that we do not know the richness of until we are face to face with our final hours. And then, it comes back, just like the memory of my son's heavy body on my shoulders and breast, that this is all there is - this memory, this moment and this one life. Ah, it is so good. And that is the reward of writing. You learn it is all so good. Even the hell, the breaking, the desires unfulfilled and the torments - this is all so good.

The only task

The dingo air is all around me. I'm not sure whether I should do laundry first or simply sit and write. I choose writing or writing chooses me. The sun hits me warm on my back as I face the empty space. I'm still thinking of the laundry to put away that is scrunched like rolled up balls of parchment in my clothes hamper and the defrosting ground pork in the microwave that is to be made into spaghetti sauce and the still swooshing clothes in the washer that need tending and the younger boy wiping his wet eyes at his glued in stance at his working place and the older boy belligerent and unwilling but forced off the YouTube sector and into the working on his homework area. I'm distracted. I want to be multiplied, cloned and made into multiple mothers and then each mother could single task each job that needs doing while the original mom could write.

But it can't be. I leave my laundry in the container. I let my coffee cool again next the laundry for the second time today. I let hubby handle the younger boy's struggles with math. I ignore the posturing of the older boy who hates me and is now watching his rebellion in the mirror as he puttys up his skin. I hear the microwave chiming that it is done the defrosting and I struggle not to get up and make the sauce. I have to stay here, distracted and wild. My hair is uncombed. My loose gray top is like a banana skin unpeeled around my sagging frame. My jeans hug too tightly. I think I am going to have my period soon. The walk is not yet even prepared for. I've only done one poem but it made me insensate to any other task but this. Write.Write and the day will unfold like the simple unfolding of a flower from the tight, unyielding bud. Write and you can take first one calming breath and then the next one. Write and you can turn your face to the sun and not just feel it massage your back. Write and it doesn't matter if none of the other tasks of life get done. Writing is the one task that must get done. First.

The whirring sound

If you can spend your life doing what you really love to do - no matter how humble and quiet is your work - that is the gift that no amount of money can ever top. I think if I can write my poems in the solitude of my small house in my Samesville community and walk in the forests and ask the tree gods for good health and high spirits -well, how can I ask for more than this? To be free - that is the greatest gift of this life.

I owe this gift entirely to my husband. He pays the bills of my life. He keeps me at home. He doesn't push me to reenter the world unless I want to do it. When I can, I get myself out of the pod and into the world. And then I run home. I can't say I can't stand it but it is close. The noise, the dissonance, the falsehoods and the shameful lack of any intimate connections -all of this makes me more at home in the forest than in the world. I can go to the world for short sojourns. I can smile the smile of unattachments. I can do work. I can make a bit of cash. And then I'm done. I'm utterly squeezed out of tooth paste. I'm flattened.

How do you all do it? I know how. You do it because you must. But is there no other way? Is there no way to make work an experience akin to the joy I feel when I enter the shadows and light of the forest? Is there no way to make the experience of earning money a good one? Is there no way to clean one's body of the fakeness and become authentic?

Unfortunately, I don't think there is any way to become pure in a radioactive dump site. And that is what the work place is like -contaminated. It is best to work as little as possible or to do work that involves very little contact with others. It is best to not work at all if one can.

Of course some work doesn't tear you to ribbons and can be tolerated and endured but it really is best if you do this work in a cabin in a woods far from everyone else or just with a few souls around. If you find work you love to do why do you need others? Why do we all need to be a part of a human machine - a team machine? Why can't we just be solitary robots?

Perhaps, I too, will have no choice soon but return to the great machinery and insert myself like a bit of a bolt or a screw into the system. Maybe, I will whirl around in constant motion or vibrations making the machinery strong and productive. Maybe that is the only way to make money to pay for the bills of life. But it is very depressing. I can't separate the work from the life. If I think of such a colorless, painful work life, I can't reconcile myself to it. I can't make myself think that such a life is worth the endurance. Even if the rest of the non-work time is mine, every day I'd have to grit my teeth, put on the plastic Barbie doll smile, contort my soul into the program set out for me and then become that whirring bit that makes the sounds that I'm asked to make. I'll be the voice piece of the doll of work.

What a shame. It could be so much more than this. It could be more than the sucking up, the posturing, the meaningless meetings, the inane banter and the cliques for power. I think it could be almost like a real life - the life after work but instead it is a fake life - the life at work. Sad. Really sad.

Making friction, if not fire

The main idea behind blog writing is this - you have something to say and you want to say it now and you don't give a shit if the writing is crap or whether it is good or even if it is mediocre. All effort that leads to product on a blog is fruitful work.

The idea that you must be a good writer in order to write is stupid. You can never be good at anything without a great deal of time, effort and brain cells being expended in the task of learning the business - no matter what the business is. In fact, even the smallest task may take more time than you can possibly think it will take simply because we underestimate the time it requires to become proficient, we forget about our struggles in getting to a state of proficiency and we are almost oblivious to the agony of it all when we get to victory. In my case, every fricking advancement was accompanied with an incredible amount of repetition of the task. Proficiency never came easy to me.

Why should writing be any different? Writing is one of the most difficult of tasks to learn because it involves thinking and thinking as we can all ascertain by looking around our world, is in short supply. Even the people who ostensibly are supposed to be our thinking heads - our government leaders - are stupid and fail to think before they open their mouths or do their acts of government. But no matter, just because our appointed thinking heads are dolts doesn't mean that we need to persist in this type of state to keep them in sync with us. We can think or learn to think all by ourselves. One way to learn to think or to take baby steps at thinking is to sit in a quiet room and write.

Doodling which is writing with free will and free heart, is the best way to start the writing practice. Pick up a line and let it take you where it will. Once you have exhausted the possibility of the leader line, go to another line and follow it down the road it is taking you to. Once you have ended the lines and the paths, stop. Then start another story. You can do this over and over again until you are simply wasted. It will be good for you. A brain that is exhausted is a sign that you have actually rubbed a few neurons together, made friction, if not fire.

Making friction, if not fire is a wonderful way to learn to write. I do it all the time on my blogs. I know the writing is idiotic. I give myself freedom to be idiotic. I allow any kind of fall on my face type of word congregation. I allow myself to look stupid, be stupid and write stupid. I am always in the process of making friction, if not fire.

Sometimes, I do catch fire. I get into the topic. I am myself. Utterly passionate and flaming. It is such a great feeling. It is like great sex after a period of abstinence. It is like being on top of a mountain and cross country skiing down it without falling. It is like getting to the top of Mount Robson with your beloved and making love in a tent after a meal of wine and meat. It is just the best feeling in the world to make fire with your neurons in friction.

A spider bundle

I've gone back to doing 1.5 hours of walking per day. What this means is that I am still walking but I'm not utterly exhausted as I was with the 3 hour daily marathon. I get a chance to meditate during the walk, to enjoy the birds, to savor the gorgeous sunny day. I sat simmering in the sunshine. I yakked with a fellow walker about Ukrainian traditional folklore - an area where his wife is an expert. It was a great chat. I learned a bit about Ukrainian culture and I visited the website at the University of Alberta (www.arts.ualberta.ca/uvp/).

I came home and made another cup of the delish Darjeeling tea my brother sent me from the Thunderbolt tea company in Darjeeling, India. Yum. I'm just waiting now for my sons to get home from school and to pick them up. I've learned to just sip tea, wait and grow. It is a very laid back way to exist. I don't understand why people have such difficulty with retirement and such pain over not working. The real pain is working. I think once you learn that work is just a way to kill brain cells, you prefer not to work. Of course, if you work is something that keeps you happy then you're really not working - you are doing what you love which is what I do when I walk and when I write and when I love hubby and the boys. Work that you love isn't work it is joy and life affirming labor. Work that you hate that kills the spirit and makes you watch the clock is soul destructive and punitive to the heart. Most work is unfortunately of the latter kind.

But right now, I'm savoring the joy work. The walk that is done but not destroyed me. The small puttering at the working space while I wait for the chicken to bake. The salad I'll put together. The small meal. Then bringing my boys home. The sun is lighting up the cigarette trees and making them flame. I wish I could be back in the forest right now. The squirrels have their question mark tails up against their fat behinds. There are wishes in the air. A noisy raven caws away at the logs like a saw. I found two small black woodpeckers about the size of my nine year old son's fist. They didn't have the red markings. I found a few chickadees calling their usual dee-dee-dee to me and asking for handouts but I wasn't able to oblige. I had my two oranges and I ate them. They were sweet and juicy and fragrant and clean. I wish I could be a bit of funnel cloud in the inverted blue bowl of sky and have my spoon trees stirring me all day long. The blueness of the sky envelopes me when I go out and I'm posted to another world where the trees call out to me and they snake their roots all over the pine coned floor. There are branches like pointer sticks everywhere and a dream comes to me of the children that lie in the forest like eggs waiting to hatch. I wish I knew that the river unfreezing comes to the hatching of these children and melts away into water. I saw a log flat on a ice block like a chopped head A gush of water under the bridge spurted merrily like the cut veins of a child. I washed my mind clean of the debris of my worries and scrubbed the screen white. I wish I could run through the forest instead of limp along. I wish I could dimple in the sun and dry into a plum. I wish somehow I could just be and not think of the thoughts that crowd themselves like cans on a shelf waiting for hands to reach out and buy them. I want to be empty.

The walk does do what it is supposed to do which is remind me where I am in the ordinary scheme of the universe- in the right place for me - tight in the web of home - a spider bundle. I'm sure there are other spaces I could occupy but none as closed and tight and swaddled as this one. I am happy here -no matter the restrictions. And in any case, the restrictions are all in my mind. In reality, I am free as those birds, those squirrels. The tress intersect their branches and weave a fabric more dense than the dendritic connections in any human mind and once I enter their cloth, I'm free of the chores of the day, I'm emptied of requirements and in my small spider web, in the corner of Samesville, I am here, snug, warm and happy. In my own way.

Prewalk chatter

I'm pretty much in a coma today. Last night was restless and random sleep and so now I do my writing practice in the glow of an impenetrable fog. No matter. Groceries got bought, kids got sent to school. A bit of cleaning got done. Older boy went to the dermatologist. It was all done. I'm going to make a spaghetti for supper. But not now. Right now I'm floating though the mental fog, I'm going to write up a few blog entries and then head out to feed chickadees.

I'm not sure why I need to even get out because I'm still sore and my feet hurt. But again no matter. The walking is necessary and can be done in a mental stupor. I'm just hoping it won't take me four hours today. I would like it to be some sort of running walk because it is just so yummy outside. Apparently this entire week will be golden. I'm happy because when I'm in a coma, it is at least nice not to be drifting through snow banks. In addition, our winter tires will be installed on Saturday so it is perhaps a good thing we won't be knee deep in snow before they are changed and before we acquire a new snow shovel.

If I use the excuse that I'm tired and not write, hell, I'd never write anything. I used to use the excuse of too busy shopping to write and too busy raising kids and too busy working grunt jobs to write and naturally, there was no writing. But now, I don't use excuses. I find that even five minutes can be put to profitable use. The mind is an amazing sheet of good old fashion carbon paper. If you imprint on it, voila! It writing will happen on the blank sheets. It is a carbon paper but you must do the writing on it.

I'm also tempted to use my standard excuse for not walking - which is that hey, I was not walking yesterday so what is another day off? Days off are good for you. Your body rests. Muscles build. I'm sure there is a reason for athletes to rest but not for ordinary Janes. If we did as much exercise as an athlete, I could justify taking a couple of days off to repair worn out bodies but hell, there isn't much wearing down happening in my body - just a failure to continue. So I'll finish the writing - quickly. I'll harness my flagging energies. I'll mount the mental saddle and ride off to the chickadee paths. I'm sure once I get there I won't be able to convince myself that I'm to just walk a tiny bit but that I need to do the entire hike. A daily hike is better than medicine for the mind. When I'm about to doubt that I'm going to ever get to writing proficiency, I lace up the old hiking boots and set out with my sunflower seeds and just vegetate among the chickadees. Feeding sunflower seeds to cheeky birds is entertaining and liberates me from my general malaise and the steady one step in front of the other rhythm assures me that I'm still on my path - even though I've had a day's lapse from the walking practice. I don't like lapses. I'm so stuck on the word "DAILY" that if I miss one day I get all frothy and out of sorts and it is a real strain on everyone around me. I'd just rather do the daily walk and write and forget everything else because I know it is what my mind and body needs. If I don't do it, I'm simply off.

Tomorrow I'm going to be taking my sister to her doctor's appointment so my walking will be done late - almost later than it will be done today. Not happy about that. But what can I do? Family has to be taken care of first. Then older boy wants his hair cut straight after school. I'd like my hair cut too since it looks rather African right now which is fine except it tends to buzz in front of my face in an annoying fashion. I'd not like to do much with it since it is so lank but maybe layers strategically placed will make it appear that my hair actually follows a head shape rather than simply floats into space. So tomorrow's day is already rather shot. I'm not going to think about it. Maybe I should try and do walking practice as soon as the boys are dropped off - at least I can do half of it before I take my sister to her appointment and the other half when I get home. I'm sure it will all work out.

I've always used that thought in terms of the writing. I'm sure it will all work out. All the days where I've collapsed myself on my bed and beaten my chest and called myself a typical useless parasite of a writer, I've still managed to collect my scattered wits and return myself to calm by simply recalling these words. It will all work out. And if it doesn't work out ? Well, even then it works out.

The past in paper

I went through the papers today. At least four boxes of papers. I collect paper. That is - I collect everything but I collect paper obsessively. I can't let go of the writings on paper. I have pared down the paper from eight boxes to about 4 boxes. I've kept sundry work by older boy and younger boy. Pictures, paintings, art work and writings. I have poetry that I've recovered and put in my writing box in my bedroom. I've put some papers I want to read for their random musings and see if I can recover the past - such as that piece I wrote just before older boy went to kindergarten. I like keeping my past. I can now put the writings in one place - the blogosphere and hey, I won't have to keep the paper copies. It is a relief. The paper has been with me for almost two decades and by writing it all down here on the blogs and in my poetry journal, I can finally get rid of some more boxes of paper.

I'm glad I kept the papers. I can see where I wrote our monthly budget out in 1991 that we were living on about $1,000 per month. Now we can barely survive on $5,000 per month. I can see how little I had in savings - I was putting away $100 into Canada Savings Bonds. But at least I was saving. I have pay stubs from when I was at university with pathetic sums of money on it - most of them under $100. I have my first pay as a student technologist at around $12.00 per hour. I have bank books where the cash I put in were in the $50 range. Yeah, it really helps to have the past in paper to remind you that you are really making progress - at least financially.

I also have all the work I did with the boys and I can see that I really did work hard with my boys. The Peanut Butter and Jam work, the play schools, the dance, drama and music sessions. I took them to museums, art classes and libraries. I was a playground haunter. I did everything possible to be the best SAHM I could be. Dammit, in retrospect I can now say that I was a fine mother.

Finally, the past in paper gives me my traumas back as well - the birth of older boy and the hell at Foothills hospital in Calgary where I almost died. The loss of my job. The months of surgery. The return from the dead. I can think over the bits of writing and review them again - solely because I kept my writings.

But mostly, I'm glad I have the past in paper because I have my poems. I have poems written out cleanly and carefully as if I knew somewhere in the future, I'd come back and excavate the writings and redo them and make them over and keep them in yet another place. It is this why I keep my writings - for me to remember. The memory is a softening, decaying thing. But when it is all put down on paper, when I keep that paper, when I rewrite the past to record it - the memory can die but the writing remains. The writing remains in all it's terrible beauty and agony of the spirit. The writing will remain in all it's ordinary condition of life.

Living the erotic life

Reading a poem is an act of erotic involvement. You are tasting, eating and digesting the flesh of the fruit of the poem. You are absorbed in the juices running down your face. You sense the heaviness of the peach-plum-nectarine poem in your hands and the tenderness of the flesh as it yields to your teeth, tongue and lips. Reading a poem is like making love to a man - intensely enjoyable, arousing and fulfilling.

Making a poem is also an act of erotic involvement. You have a line that arrows into you and you are lifted out of the mundane world you exist in most of the time and you pull the arrow out of your heart (or where ever else it lands) and examine the damage. Are you mortally wounded? If so, how can you describe the arrow's circumference of injury? What are your after effects? Will you survive? If you will, how will you do this?

Because making poems is so intensely arousing, this arousal spills over to regular life. Even when I'm not in poem making mode, I'm more sensuous and awake to the pleasures of the flesh, the senses, the emotions and the mind. I'm awake to the delicate, small, winged seeds on every living thing that helicopter their way to the ground to my feet. If I go for a walk, I can see the row of plastic red Santas with their anonymous smiles as some sort of yearly welcome into a season or the efforts of some woman behind the facade of a concrete house to show that she is still a child at heart. I can see the wreaths, the red ribbons, the star dusted Styrofoam snow flakes as similar expressions of the child in each of us and be seduced by the loveliness of human beings. I can enter the forest and see the dried up piles of leaves rustling in their long graves and wonder at the bodies that they hide. There are simple red wreaths of berries on the trees here and I touch them to feel their frozen goodness. I am not afraid to touch, and hold and feel the parts of trees and bushes and plants. They are good to touch.

If you are poet, you will have an immense hunger for such scenes and such touchings. You will want to go out each day and soak yourself in the liquid sunlight, in the skinniness of the starving white birch tree limbs, in the horrid shadows of each collapsed fir and you will want to slide like a snake into these shadows and make for yourself a small lean to and hide out there while the winter winds blow. You will want the touch of those winds in your hair, the slide of the snow on your naked flesh and then, the melting of the white as the pallid sun penetrates the heads of the poplars to reach you with it's warming arms. You will want all of these things because you are in the erotic stream of life and of words and you cannot swim out of it.

A poet is always swimming in the erotic stream of life and words. It is a dense way to live because sometimes you need a time out as I took one today. I simply did nothing. I shut off the words. I slept. I wrote desultory complaints. I fussed. But out of that day of drudgery (as I call my non-poetry days) came this sense of the goodness of my real life (my poetry life). I cannot imagine how I could live without the textures, the colors and the deep breathing in of the images of my life. I cannot imagine how sparse it would be if I couldn't put them out as remade life in my poems. Life can be reconfigured erotically and lived deeply - if you want to or if you can enter into this type of life. Wanting is a great start to this particular journey.

Intimacy charge

When it is late afternoon and I've not done the walking, I feel like dying. I have to get OUTSIDE. It is windy and howling and I'm just got up from the bed where I was unrolled like a bit of dried fruit leather. I am better now for the nap. Sometimes all you can do when you are trashed physically, is just give into the body and sleep.

I slept. I woke up. It is better. Now the walking practice. I haven't finished the writing practice but it will get done. I know if I do the two things daily - I automatically feel that I've accomplished something even if nothing else in my life works. I know I can tell myself "So what if you were in a bad temper from the moment you got up, so what if you spread the contagion of your dislike for yourself to everyone you encountered, so damn what? You have written. You have walked. It was good."

When I'm able to be intimate with myself, even if the rest of my world doesn't conform to the myths of our society - happy family, good children, obedient daughter, success, money and power -well really - it doesn't matter. Really it doesn't matter anyway and it shouldn't matter to me but somehow, it still does. And that is why I need the done writing and walking to keep me afloat.

Intimacy in my words, intimacy in my walks and my need for intimacy is satisfied and I don't need to plug into anyone else for my intimacy charge. I'm fully charged up from these practices.

Right now, I'm feeling just so much better just from the nap itself. Sometimes when I've had my sleep and I've dragged myself out of bed - I think I should be less tired but my body won't let me be energetic. It pulls me into the "tired, I'm so tired" spiral downwards that is only solved by taking myself into a dark bedroom, pulling the covers around me mummy wrap style and getting into the darkness. I love that time away from the thinking mind. All I do is shift into nothingness. Maybe a good nap besides the walking and writing practices, is a way I recharge the empty batteries and get me functional.

The eternal question

I take frequent writing breaks. I find that if I just write I get stale. I won't be able to make the word quota. I need to refresh my mental screen. I don't let myself get caught up in too prolonged a reading break but I do take that break.

I also take music breaks. Man, is there is a pattern here? A pattern of staccato breaking? Maybe. I love not doing writing for a ten minute break and then coming back with a new image, a new thought and a new line. I'm not pilfering from other sources. I'm stimulated by the other sources into thoughts of my own. Refreshed, I can continue writing for the entire word count.

I also take tea breaks. I don't actually need the tea, the cookies or the extra calories. What I'm doing is just getting away from thoughts.

Most of writing is really thinking and most of this thinking is superficial, painting over the surface type jobs. We cover the surfaces of what we are and make it pretty. When the writing works, we aren't painting, we are doing a demolition job. We are taking a construct apart and remaking it. I think much of our lives is spent doing this type of construction work on our lives, ourselves and our particular life stories.

It takes time to do this deconstruction and making up again. Most of us don't have time for this type of thinking until we just stop doing other things and come to the decision to make the time. We are all so busy. Doing stupid regular works of our daily lives. Cleaning toilets. Working. Making money to pay bills. Cooking, making love and rearing children. We are all endlessly occupied and we do not have the energies left after the doing of all these tasks to do what is necessary in our lives to make ourselves plain to ourselves - thinking, writing, pondering and defining.

When we decide to spend time with ourselves, to define ourselves and to write some of these definitions out - so that we can recognize who we are by writing it out - then we are liberating who we are to the exterior. We are revealing our inner selves to ourselves first. That is the most important part of the business. The revelation of ourselves to others is always optional.

I don't believe this is being self absorbed. I think the world could do with a lot more of this self absorption. When I go on my tramping trips in the forest, no one is alone. They are all with a human being or an animal. On rare occasions, there is a person walking alone, with something in his hand such as a camera or binoculars. I rarely just see someone just walking in his own world. Sometimes, I see a runner is running into his own world. It is important to be in these solitary, individual worlds in order to learn about ourselves. I'm not sure why there aren't more of us individuals doing the solitary thing of finding ourselves in the wilderness out there. Maybe we are doing it in the isolation of our little locked and padded rooms at home.

It is a good practice to go outside away from the dark and shadow spaces in one's home and into the light outside and read the stories of one's life to oneself. It is wise to sit with them simmering in one and learn to accept them for what they are - stories that made you and influenced you and still shape you. It is important to write your stories down. I do this on my Life Practice blog. I'm recording my stories. For myself. Sometimes, our memories are funny and lose events easily and so porously that we never get them back unless they are written someplace. I record anything I remember about my past (which isn't a great deal) and the present events in excruciating detail. Why do this? Well, the present events and the past events are my stories. They explain me. And it takes a lot of such stories to explain even one woman to herself.

For that is what we do all through our lives really. We try to learn who we are. We try to reveal ourselves to ourselves as clearly as we can even though we are plagued by our own weaknesses, lack of courage and doubts. We try to learn our history and our characters. Every day we work, in one way or another, to some extent or another to make sense of who we are.

Some of us do this work in poetry, some of us do this in our songs and yet others struggle with this task in our jobs. Whatever the medium we work in, the motivation is still the same -we are all asking the same question - "Who am I?" and we work daily in the job of trying to find the answer.

The forest cure

I am in the warm glow of after exercise energy. I feel emptied of any negative emotions. I think if I just do the walking practice, I can stay sane. I feel that when the walking is done slowly as it was done today, and I get to savor each bite of nature I'm taking, there isn't anything in the world that can satisfy me more than being out and about. It was warm in the microclimate of the forest. The sun was painting the tops of the fir trees with light and then, underlighting the poplars so they stood like golden limbs and naked trunks as if they were swimmers in the sunlight. I was utterly entranced. It was like being in a burned forest and here and there, there were new fires lighting up.

I think if I go to the forest every day I won't go mad with the utter banality of my life. If I read the poems of my favorite writers, if I write daily and if I walk, I'll be able to stay sane and calm and present. That is all it will take to make a fortress of myself and hide me away from the world of chaos and meaningless that lies just outside my mind.

Writing will make a foreigner into a known entity

When I'm unable to communicate something to my husband and what I'm unable to tell him is revealed indirectly, I feel disordered. I feel I should be able to tell him the feelings in my heart. All of them. But there is a foreign country in me that I am only navigating myself. How can I tell him what I'm only just discovering myself? Does the fact I keep some things to myself mean that I'm not being upfront? Or does it mean I'm not there yet?

He is not a muddier of waters. When he thinks about things like death it is in a brief way like -it will happen and there is no point in going on about it. In contrast, I'm always going on and on about things like death. My dad is sick right now and I've already extrapolated into the future demise of my dad, the funeral, the mother breakdown, the stuff in their house I have to get rid of, the lawyers and god knows what I do with the taxman. Hey, this is my way of dealing with permanent things and things that happen to all of us. And yeah, I'm a worrier and he is an acceptor.

I worry even about the fact we have nothing in common. We used to have science research in common but now? I don't know. I love poetry, writing and books. He loves books. He says he writes (on his computing blog). But I don't know, I just don't know. After 18 years with this man, I wonder who he really is and who I am and where is our common ground.

So I come to the blogs and talk about what I'm grappling with inside in that still being discovered territory in the middle of nowhere and I'm not sure that I understand what I've got in my mind. I don't know who I am or where I'm headed. How will I know who I am or what I stand for until I write it down?

How does anyone know who they are until they put it down in a journal and go back and see what they have written and then say "Aha! So that is who I am! I am the person who believes that the skin of a person is not the real person, that there is something dying under the skin that needs to be revealed so that the new soul can be born." You must write out unknowns and knowns and then realize who you are from the writings.

From the writings come the definition - no matter how temporary of who you are and what you stand for. This definition will change as you write more and more and the writing will be your map - revealing more and more uncharted spaces. And the you that you make with the tools of the writing will be someone who won't be a foreigner to you but a known entity -as much as any of us know ourselves or anyone else.

No kids, no wonder!

It has taken me over an hour to get through the reading of one chapter (Jeremy Fink and the meaning of life - yeah, we're still reading this wonderful book by Wendy Mass and we will probably be reading it into December) with younger boy. He had to go to the bathroom. He had to chat. He had to complain. He had to play with his glasses. He had to tell me he was just too tired to continue. But we continued.

One such conversation, midway through the book:

Younger boy: "Mum, I've got a neck pain. What do you call it?"

Me: "Um, neck pain?"

Younger boy: "Neck spasms."

Me: "It's because you sleep at an angle on your bed all the time."

Younger boy: "It's the seat at school."

Me: "The seat at school? What's wrong with it?"

Younger boy: "It doesn't have a headrest. And when I go to lie down on the seat, the teacher tells me to sit up."

Me: "That's outrageous! What's wrong with the teacher?"

Younger boy: "And when I put my feet on the foot rest under my desk, she tells me to put my feet under my desk."

Me: "My god! That is cruel! Doesn't she have kids of her own?"

Younger boy: "What do you think? She's not married. No wonder."

Me: "Yeah, no wonder."

Ownership of self

I've made it a rule for myself to work on the writing before I go on my three hour walking practice. It is a practical rule because once I'm done the walk, I'm pretty useless for the rest of the day. The body for some reason, is trashed. My mind gets all fuzzy. I'm in some sort of limbo where I'm functioning at only 20% of normal energy levels. Walking daily is necessary because it is the way I right my world, but it also sucks me dry of energy. I'm tired physically right now because my body isn't used to physical effort of this kind and it just wants to stay sessile and static. I don't want it to stay this way. I want it moving and active and engaged with life. I want it fit and healthy and an animal body that can hunt, bring down prey and eat it.

When I consider the deer I saw yesterday in the forest, they were healthy, wild animals. I want to be like them. I do. Passionately. I want to be able to be limber, fast and wild. I don't want to settle down and be a senior citizen. I want to be the way I was in my twenties climbing up Mount Robson. I want to be mountain girl again.

And there is nothing stopping me from this goal except my mind and willpower. If I train my mind to make my body move then I can go back to the healthy, wild animal I used to be. I can go back to being myself.

Really that is all I am trying to do here. I'm not trying to be a marathon walker or an athlete or a super model body. I'm trying to go back to the past to the healthy animal I was before the last two decades of being a SAHM decimated my strength and faith in my body capabilities. Once you get into a body rut, it is hard to get out of it. But hey, dying is even more unpleasant than doing what I'm doing. Dying often is painful, prolonged and miserable an experience. We all don't die guillotine fashion. Many of us die of chronic diseases caused simply by the fact that we did not train our minds to force our bodies out of seats and into movement. Sometimes the easy life is the wrong choice.

The hard life - where you get yourself moving- out of the door and making your body strong is hard when you are doing it but it is the right choice for yourself because you are treating your body like the precious instrument it is and giving it a daily, necessary tune up. We treat our cars with far more dignity and attention than we do our own body vehicles. Maybe what we need to do is shift our consciousness from ownership of stuff to ownership of self.

If we think of our bodies as expensive products that we need to take care of and maintain, I'm sure we would be more inclined to walk, eat right and do right by our own bodies. But if we think of our bodies as accessories and not very important accessories at that, it becomes very easy to ignore the fattening waist line, the huge butt, the tubby legs and the ballooning chest. We get to think we are not our bodies. We are our bodies, folks. Our bodies are us.

We need to think of our bodies as something beautiful, precious and desirable. If you see your body as desirable, you will want to keep that desirability right? You would not want to inflict undesirability on yourself would you? Let me be clear here, I don't equate desirability with being an anorexic, bulimic underweight soul with the body mass of a splinter. I think a healthy weight is essential. But what I consider desirability is this - the ability to use your body - to the extent you wish to use to it -for work, love and sex. The way your body is determines how well you can use your body in all these sectors of life. If you feel you cannot work well in any of these areas, there is a reason for that folks. It may just be inactivity.

We may eat right but we may not take the number of steps we need to keep the body healthy. Steps. That is all it takes folks. It is hard making the energy and motivation available to do the steps but think of it this way. Would you rather do steps in the freezing cold outside or would you be doing steps in an ICU ward after open heart surgery? It is really your choice. I'm making the choice to have my heart attack in the forest.

That flying thing

I've got a few minutes to write. I've only got to shove older boy to bed and I'll be alone with my words. Report cards are in. I've learned not to freak out about marks which is a good thing.

And really that is all I want to say about the report cards. What I wanted to write about is that theme I was writing on before I got interrupted by the boys - about why other writers write books and I don't. Or least I haven't.

I am at least writing. Quite a bit. Which makes me confident that I will eventually end up with a book. Maybe a book is like a poem? You have to be gifted with one?

Oh, well, I'll just get on with it. I'm not sure what a writer is anyway and whether they are any different from anyone else. Really I think sometimes a writer is a person who lives with an obsession to record things down in books. I think what I'm doing on the blogs is some sort of online journal for my family. I don't know that they will ever read it but it is there if they ever decide to do it. Most of the time, I'm recording things for myself. I mean I used to have a baby journal on the boys before our last computer bit the biscuit and I lost everything. But I doubt that this will happen on the blogs. It will hopefully be backed up. If not, I guess I can make a copy of what I've written but maybe that would have been useful to start doing when I started two years ago.

Writing is time consuming. I have to have time to make myself come to the writing place, fidget, ponder, goof off, go eat something, write junk, write nothing but doodles and then get the word quota for the day done. I usually try to write first thing in the morning before walking practice. Today, I went to walking practice earlier than I usually do - and I found I enjoyed not having to rush home. I had enough time to meander and fart around and play on the walk and I still made good time. I'd like to try and get out even earlier tomorrow. It is just that I didn't get around to doing housework today. I spent too much time outside and then I came back, got supper ready and then went to do the reading with younger boy. Laundry is still in the washer/dryer and the house is not cleaned. Ah, tomorrow. I'll do some of it tomorrow.

Right now, all I have to do is practice. I wanted to write about how the ice seizes up the river so that it seem like bubbles are caught on the surface and how the sun shines on the bubbles to make them into alien worlds trapped there. I get to see so many strange people on the trail. Bird watchers. Bird feeders with their hands out to their sides and rotating like wheels to offer seeds to birds in a 360' offering of selves. I see dog people with their dogs tied respectfully to them or bounding uncontrolled and ignorantly. I hate dogs loose. I'm afraid of dogs, especially the really large guard dog types. I keep my stick handy just in case. I don't feel any dog is quite safe. My sister got bitten as a child by a dog who chowed down on her face. I never want to be in face closeness to a dog.

The river is like scum has filled it right now. I don't know why it is so oily looking and miserable. I think of the birds that are pooled in the trees next to the half frozen river and I wonder if they are getting poisoned by junk being dumped in the river, just as we are getting poisoned by it. Whatever it is. I see the trees all crooked and bent and hunched over and the old men with their canes and curled bodies and they look like mirror images. I saw an old lady curved like a half circle almost trotting down the path the other day. I see quite a few friends chatting together and dragging their dogs or a mother with her three kids (homeschoolers?) or I'll see men in their tights running down the trails making a loud noise as they stomp past me. I wonder why these men aren't at work.

The walking practice feeds my writing practice. When I walk, I feel that nothing can be as hard as walking and doing that three hours of physical movements. I think, that in comparison, writing is simpler, easier and crikey, so much better to do than forcing one's tired body to move. I do think of it right now as forcing. I haven't got to the point of physical comfort where it is a pleasure to walk fast along a trail and enjoy the looseness and easiness of the movements. Right now parts of my body hurt. I don't think about them hurting. I just make the parts move. I wonder when you stop hurting or whether the hurting means that you are getting stronger. I wonder if hurting is necessary to evolve in other ways besides the physical ways. Do you need to hurt to grow emotionally as well? Is that all growth really is? Hurting? Or is our perception of our life experiences that designates them as painful? Maybe the aches in my legs and feet can be perceived positively as signs that my body is getting good at what it is doing and therefore I should be pleased by these indicators of my growth?

In any case, writing practice is currently much easier than walking practice. I am pushing myself in the walking practice because I know December will be a slow month for walking as I will be working for part of December. Consequently, I won't be doing trail walking these work days and will have to make up for the lack in November and January. But no fear, I will. I pretty much have an iron determination where the walking practice is concerned. I'm less tough with the writing because I know I can fit that practice into any slot of time that comes up. That is the beauty of writing. It is a good traveler. I can take it with me anywhere and do it at any time and for as long or short a time as necessary. It is a good fit for my short attention span.

Older boy is still up. I don't know why it takes him so long to get to bed (he has no writing practice after all). When he gets to sleep this late - what happens is that the next day, he is grumpy and wanting to sleep in and he can't. I wonder if there is an insanity gene in our family. Why doesn't he understand that if he went to bed early that he would be able to get enough licks of sleep so he would not be comatose in school the next day?

I'm no longer tired. I'm getting to the point where I just want to get the words down and head to bed. I'm not sure even if I could sleep right now. It is funny how, if you just work through the tiredness, you no longer feel tired anymore but you feel you can stay up all night. Maybe that is the way it is with anything you want to keep working at versus something you just do because you have to do it. Maybe that is the difference between play and work - choosing to do it even it you don't get paid because you love it so.

In fact, that is the reason for parenting. We love our children so much we do it even though we don't get paid to do it. Parenting is a metaphor for play because bringing up children can be a self and other creating experience. It is play at it's finest because both the players (parents) and the toys (the children) get to grow from the interaction and evolve. I mean the boys are teaching me more than what I'm ever going to be teaching me. Kids are actually the finest stimuli for evolution - far superior to romantic love and sex in this regard.

If you love your kids, you learn to sacrifice yourself to a minor or major extent - depending on you. And when you sacrifice yourself, you essentially teach your ego that it is no longer top dog on the stage. Teaching your ego it isn't number one is a good thing. Because the ego always tries to make it to the spotlight and this detracts from the process of evolution. Evolution most often happens behind the scenes and happens when you least expect it - sort of like a kick in the groin type thing.

The boys have been very educational for me. I've learned to be less selfish. They have helped me to put someone else first. Hubby should have taught me this but he has been unbelievably unselfish with me and so I've not learned this lesson from him. I've had to wait until the kids came along and bless their little hearts, they took very little time teaching me that they were top dogs from henceforth.

Losing one's ego is not a painful process. It is actually rather like watching a butterfly come out of a chrysalis. It is a natural thing. Part of the biological stages we need to go through. But if we cling to the ego, to our chrysalis, we never morph to that flying thing that could experience so much more of life. That is why being ego bound is bad. It breaks the normal developmental cycle. It traps us. It keeps us stone.

I'm not in my chrysalis anymore. I have learned that staying in the shroud isn't good for a person. What is good for a person like me is this - the long three hour walk, the writing obsessively and continually and daily. The reading of books. The telling of stories. The immersion into the rearing of children. Occasional work. Seclusion. Tidy house. Empty basement. Less junk. Fewer shopping trips. A big garden. A passion for the natural world. Yes, my church is a forest, my people are the trees and I worship the tree gods. Deities are outside in the forest, in every living thing and I don't give a shit if there is a real god beyond this because the tree gods are more worthy of worship than all the Santa worshiping gods around.

Walk the walk folks,

When you are going up the exercise curve, you feel the exertion of the challenge of doing more in every cell in your body. My body feels as if a truck has run over it back and forth until every single bit of moisture has been squeezed out of it. But am I going to stop? Despite the fatigue and aches, I know this is a necessary state before I get to the next plateau. This upward swing is necessary in order for me to keep interested in being fit. If I just sit at a plateau, I'll lose interest and stop working for fitness.

Effort is necessary to become fit. Effort is necessary to become a writer. Effort that is not just at the plateau level but increasing effort, self imposed effort and effort that is driven by your own desire to do this. If the desire is someone else's desire (for example - family telling me I was fat) - I'd never be able to keep up the fitness program. I'd eventually give it up because I wasn't committed to it. Personal commitment is necessary before you invest in the time, energy and pain of making yourself over.

Every personal make over of oneself involves not only an inner painful ego reevaluaton of oneself, but a physical, mental and emotional reevaluation. If you get through these evaluations intact, then you won't do the change. You have to make the evaluations and break your current evaluation of yourself in order to make the efforts to change.

A constant evaluation is a killer. You don't grow. You stay unhealthy because why would you change - there is nothing the matter with you right? But when you face your current evaluation, and see you are sucky fat and you hate it and the current evaluation is killed, then you make changes.

Right now, I'm exhausted. I'm in the upward swing of a change. I'm walking as much as I can force my dead body to march. I'm engaged in the total transformation of myself. I want to get out of the "I can't do this" mentality to the "I can do it" mentality. I want to do it. Because I'm tired of being that way - the way where I am fat, unhealthy, tired all the time and miserable. Good health is the most important factor in determining the quality of life we live. If we are sick in our bodies - just due to the simple fact that we eat junk and don't move enough - then we will never be able to be happy in any other area of our lives.

The body is the start of everything. Once the body is a fully functional human machine, we can get the mind and spirit up. We can train our mind and spirit to work better. We can progress faster in our personal evolution. But if the body is trudging along just barely able to get it's butt off the seat? Hell, good luck. You'll be lucky to make it to fifty without a heart attack. In fact, you can just look at our playgrounds full of obese, sedentary children, products of the absence of physical education teachers in our educational system and see the future. The future of these children is this: diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, cancer and obesity related disabilities. Do you understand what I'm talking about? I'm talking about the foundation of our society - our children - doomed to live like parasites physically just because parents like you and me are unable to get off our own butts.

It is simple. If I am sitting on my butt, fat, lazy and unable to do my daily hike - do you think my boys are going to be out there exercising? Nope. Kids are remarkably good at detecting dishonesty, hypocrisy and parental inability to do what they say they are going to do (follow throughness). I think my kids are the best motivation for me to keep upping the bar on my own fitness. If they see me doing what I want them to do, maybe, just maybe they won't have arteries clogged with cholesterol in childhood and won't die of a heart attack in their thirties. Maybe if I walk the walk (literally) - they will walk the walk too.

The last moments of the day

I'm headed to the last section of the day where I write until the brain shuts off like a light switch being put in the off position. Hubby is peacefully reading a book. Older boy says he is doing homework. Younger boy is eating downstairs. I'm going to give him his antibiotic and then I'm going to put him to bed. I'll read "Jeremy Fink and the meaning of life" but he won't get it. He is only 9 years old You don't start searching for the meaning of life until you are almost dead.

Well, maybe some of us search for the meaning of our lives in the first half of our lives. Maybe really bright people wake up in their toddler beds with the idea that they are going to be the President of the U.S. or maybe they start writing poems and get praised as five year olds and become published poets at eighteen (careful now, ego, we're getting jealous here). But the fact is that many others of us, less gifted (definitely jealous) are stuck finding the meaning of life as we are getting shoved off the cliff of life, into the abyss below, where there is a stack of other lemming human bodies.

But at least, if you do get to do the meaning of life quest, make it a good one. Don't just sit around like I do, beating my chest and hoping that writing obsessively will part the muddy waters in my brain and reveal fish. Instead, do something magnificent. Maybe run off to China with a stranger, make love to him on a sandy beach (using appropriate protection) and have a wild fling. Life sucks most of the time. Why not do some of it in a gay mad way?

I need a subject

The main part of writing that I don't get is this - when do you get your subject? I mean I've been farting around for a book idea for a year now and I've not got anything I'm even remotely interested in writing. Do I just start and stop like I've been doing for the last year? Or do I carry it on even though I'm gritting my teeth and wanting the agony of writing about character X to be over? Maybe I'm not a book writer. Maybe I can just make poems and assemble them into a book?

How do you find your characters? How do you get them to yield you a story? What do you do to make them likeable? I don't know. I'm still making my poems. Hell, at this rate, I'm afraid I'll be eighty before I get a story into a book form. But even though I don't know how to get the subject, I do know how the book gets written now. It gets written in the same way I write my blog pieces, day after day without interruption and loss of discipline. You write a book in installments, in pieces and in disjointed fragments often when you are tired, discouraged and empty. You just write.

Ah, but that damn subject. The reason why the character exists. What is her problem? How is she going to deal with them? And in solving or not solving that problem what will she teach us that will give us the motivation for the reading of the book? These are the parts I don't know yet. All I know is that I start. I continue. I finish or don't finish. It is all a matter between me and myself. If I am determined, myself will continue.

I need a subject, a problem and a battle. But I also need characters and setting. I need them all to mix and make a story batter. It is all so damn complicated and demanding that I wonder that writers of books don't go insane. Making a world and running it and providing dialogue and life histories and futures. It is so damn painful. I wonder whether I should just go to bed and pretend that I'm a dustbin person. Or a Molly Maid employee. It is far easier to clean toilets than empty one's brain.

Liking is everything

I'm only now getting used to doing blog writing. I wrote in the beginning in a chatty way but I'd be stumped to find a "good" topic to write about. Hell, it had to be something interesting, witty, delightful and hook even the most random reader. I had to be what I called "A BLOGGER". Now, I don't give a shit. I just write. That is what I call being a comfortable writer - whether I do it on blogs or in my journals. I just write - and try to keep the damn ego down like a particularly savage guard dog that I have to tie up with chains, contain in a cage and muzzle.

The ego destroys everything. Once you start to think of yourself as pretty, you go out and start laminating yourself with makeup, dressing to impress and all the external appearances crap starts to mess with your head and you become a model for other people's fashion ideas. When you simply take yourself as a plain, ordinary woman - hell, you can dress any way you want to, not wear crap on your face and body and not spend a fortune on blings and clothing.

The ego is necessary to start writing. I mean you have to think you have something worthwhile to say to start saying the stuff, but hell, after the ego has done it's job of making you feel good about yourself (even if this is utter rot), kick the dog ego in the side and send it whimpering back to the cage. You don't need it to write and you don't need it especially in blog writing.

This is because blog writing is not formal writing. I'm talking to you. I'm direct. I'm emotional. I'm whining. Blog writing is sort of like Ophrah yakking to everyone on the Ophrah Winfrey show. She is friendly, nice and not a bull shitter. She gets you to like her. Liking is everything. Reading a book by someone who is less than likeable is painful. I don't do it. I prefer to like the person doing the writing I'm sucking up. And so that is the first order of business on a blog - be yourself and no matter how wacky you are, you will be honest and therefore trusted and yeah, liked.

It is a line of character events that lead to good writing. You are yourself (cut yourself open and you reveal your innards - a painful process, believe me). You show you are insane as a consequence but so many of us are insane that readers aren't as turned off as you'd expect. Then they find that you are honest for being a streaker in writing. They trust you. And eventually, they get to like you.

If they like you, you get read. Simple as that. No funny business on blogs with editors, publishing and all that crap. Just get readers to like you and what you are saying and hell, they will read your junk even if it isn't as good as writing by a fifth grader.

Actually getting people to like you is perhaps the secret to everything. If people like you, they will want to be your friend. They will offer you work. They will help you when you are in emotional pain. They will be there for you - whether it be when you get a flat tire on the an actual highway or a flat tire in life such as a marital breakdown. You will get everything you want or need in life simply because people like you.

And how do you get people to like you? Hey, didn't I already tell you? Be yourself, dammit. And write yourself, dammit. That is what I do on my blogs. I'm writing myself. And if you don't like me and my writing? Screw you.

Work, faith and persistence

I could not get to sleep. I tried putting younger boy to sleep and it was no go. So hubby has the delicious task of telling younger boy a story so that I can drink tea and try and write up the quota. I know, I know - I should let hubby have time off and let the wretched boy drive me nuts instead but I can't do it. I might hurt him. So hubby has taken over the job. It is always wise when you find your fingers curling into talons to hand over childcare to your hubby.

This is the third cup of tea I've had today and probably now, I'll not be able to sleep. But I don't care. I was in some sort of drugged torpor all day and I think it was entirely due to the fact that I had to put one foot in front of the other for my tramping practice. I was darn tired. I still am for that matter. Yeah, the blog posts get progressively more apathetic the more I do this program but surely to god that isn't a reason for me to stop? I don't see how three hours of walking very, very slowly is going to make me horse meat. I used to do 6 hours of exercise in my twenties and I had tons of energy. Maybe it is because I'm fat that I feel so tired after the walking. But no matter. Even if all I do now is play Britney Spears singing "Piece of Me" while I write self pitying blog entries on the tramping practice, I'm not giving it up. It is just like the writing practice. When I started writing practice, it was exhausting just to do one damn blog post. It was a pain in the ass. I felt constipated. Now, I've got the posting business down to a science. It just boils down to writing what the fuck you want to without getting your knickers in a twist about all the comments that boil down to one monolithic opinion "You suck!" So what? I suck. Who gives a hoot? I still write. Same thing is true for the walking. I walk. I suck walking. I'm exhausted. But again, so what? It is just a matter of doing it - persistence - has saved many a student from failing a course at university and certainly, has saved me from failing a whole pile of projects.

Really, anything in life that you really want, you have to keep plugging away at it. You have to work until you are sure there is no way you can work anymore. You have to work even when you have no books, no poems and no thoughts. You can just make babble like I do on the blogs. It counts. You have to have faith in yourself because no one else will. In fact, your near and dear ones will tell you that you are being an ass, that your writing is deplorable and that perhaps you should just get a job with benefits that will enable you to at least buy a new car before the old one dies. Work, faith in oneself and just doing (persistence) will get me through the walking program. It will get me to the point where I can stay upright after the 3 hour walks without feeling that I'm dying and gone to hell.

Time to go

I'm waking now. I'm listening to Leonard Cohen sing "I'm Your Man." God, I wish he was. He is just amazing. And the crowds listening to him in his concerts are as madly in love with him as I am. What creates this type of affection between a poet and his readers? A kind, authentic human being. That is what connects poet and readers. With his heart and guts honestly and vulnerably exposed to them.

I don't know how he does it. I think it takes a pile of guts or lots of alcohol. To lose all the walls around a human being - man that takes courage. To be yourself. To not bull shit. To not simmer in crap. Maybe it takes daily writing for decades before you strip yourself of all the personas, the armor, the weaponry and the lies. Maybe it takes visits with a therapist. Or again, alcohol.

I don't know what I'm babbling now. I'm going to herd boys to bed now. I'm going to read to younger boy. And maybe tomorrow, I'll be able to write without a guillotine cutting the head off.

Where is the Zen?

I have nothing to write about. Zip. I'm also tired. But there is a gift in being tired. I write very slowly. My sentences are shorter. Usually my sentences go on and on and on like a tapeworm with endless proglottids. But today, I'm brief.

Man, I'm so tired now. I could fall asleep right here at the computer. I'm supposed to help younger boy get his homework done but instead, I'm going to put him to bed early. The three legged stool of parent-child-school is actually a two legged thing at our home. I am unable to do the work of cultivating learners at home. I'm more inclined to cultivate anarchists.

So the boys are glued to their computers. I'm here trying to do my word quota before the program virus kills me. And tomorrow, I'll be doing the same thing I did today. Walking, writing and being an half squished human being.

So where is the Zen in this life? When I say Zen, I don't mean Zen as in the Zen religion because I haven't yet determined what the fuck this Zen religion is all about (I've read books and left mystified and lost) and so I self define Zen as the joy, the calm, the utterly passionate state. Where is the Zen in a life dedicated to words, walking and trying to stay awake at the wheel?

Damned if I know. I think maybe Zen happens when you are asleep, after a day of doing. Maybe Zen is the time when you open your eyes and realize that you are still here on the planet. Or maybe Zen happens in the sweaty moments after particularly active sex. Who knows? I don't know. I'm not a Zen acolyte. In fact, I worship trees.

Worshipping trees is a very peaceful sort of religion. Trees don't ask me to kill fellow trees or fellow human beings. Trees don't ask me to love everyone in sight (especially the people I don't particularly like and have no intention of loving). Trees, in fact are very reasonable deities. They grow. They shed leaves. They stay put. They don't pollute. They use up CO2 produced by human beings. And they don't make war, ask for sacrifices, achievements, asset collection, endless striving for status, power and money and they certainly don't ask that I dress, act, buy or work a certain way in order to be a tree lover.

I don't even have to worship them. They don't care. They are quite happy doing their own thing in the forest without any interactions with me. What more can you ask for in a god? I'm sure Zen cannot match tree worship. So where is the Zen? Man, I'm sure there is Zen in the trees. I'll check tomorrow on my daily worship walk.

Been swatted? Get moving

So I got up this morning feeling rather like a prisoner that had been tied to the train tracks and who had been up all night listening for an approaching train (but unluckily none came by to end my misery). I'm sure there is a reason why I was so fagged. Being fagged is treatable only by two methods:

a) go back to bed
b) get out of bed.

I chose to get out of bed, have breakfast and do the walk thingie with younger boy. This did not make me any less fagged but at least I got a walk out of it. Then chores were done. I went out again with older boy and walked some more. I was still fagged. In fact, as I write this right now, I'm even more utterly fagged but I've done all I wanted to do and right now, I'm pleasantly fagged rather than grumpily fagged as I was this morning.

So is there a moral to this story? Yeah, sometimes, you just have to keep doing stuff even when you don't want to do anything and it works out that you will feel better later in the day. Just because you start your day like a dead or rapidly decomposing corpse, doesn't mean your entire day is committed to further degradation. Acting in the opposite manner to that what you feel is what makes the bad feelings go away.

I mean, this morning what I really wanted to do was to go back to bed, pull the covers over my head and whimper under them like a newly bought home puppy from the SPCA. But I didn't do it. I curtailed the whimpering. I did something active. And when I wanted to whimper in the evening, I did something active again.

Whimpering has a purpose. If you whimper, you get soul stuff out of you that needs getting out. But sometimes the damn soul has a surfeit of whimpering and just wants you to get out and run. I didn't run. But I hiked. It did the trick. If you are as miserable as a fly about to be swatted or have already been swatted and are flattened beyond repair, then make yourself get up off the fly swatter. Get up. Move. Do it. You will be better. I tell you it works. Something in you is strong enough to make you walk, jog, hike or run. That same strong something will save your life.

Been swatted? Get over it. You have no idea what being swatted really means. When I was a laboratory technologist, I used to pass by a burn patient's room frequently. He played "The Rose" by Nana Moukouri. Day and night. I think that song kept him alive. As long as I will live, I'll always associate this song with suffering. You have no idea what suffering is until you see someone recovering from being burned almost to death. When I get depressed, I think about that man. I think of his endless determination to survive. I think about him and I get off the bed of sadness and I walk.

Pre-walking psyching up

I'm in prewalk mode. I'm drinking cups of coffee. I'm stretching my neck which is aching a bit. I'm taking the weight off my left foot where I've made some sort of a dent in my side. I'm going up and down the stairs to get into some sort of flexible arrangement of the limbs so I don't seize up later on. Yeah, when you are fifty, it takes about a good hour of solid putting off the walk time to get into the walk itself.

Then I get to eat a couple of packages of tofu dessert, chow down a whole wheat toast, eat banana bread, pack a small emergency snack (more banana bread), get my water bottle filled and I'm off. It takes me an hour to get going and then it is that three hour slog to do what? To do the walking practice.

When I was in my twenties, I'd do the walking practice, I'd bike, I'd cross country ski - all in one day. Being single gave me plenty of time. Now, I still have tons of time but I'm more slow. I don't want to do six hours of exercising right now. I'm having troubles motivating myself to do three hours. But I think this is valuable practice - at least it is for me.

I find when I'm doing the walk and that voice in my head is telling me to give it up and go home, I'm working at making that voice shut the fuck up. I'm telling myself to use a new voice, one that says, "Just keep going." I find if I listen to that new voice, even if I'm dying inside I'm able to do the walking. I'm able to put one foot in front of the other and keep going. One foot in front of another. It is simple. But done many times, it is less simple and more demanding. Every life requires demands. Some of them are imposed on us by life itself. And some we must impose on ourselves. Demands make us stronger - if we let them. I'm a big fan in becoming a stronger person, in becoming the person I was meant to be and in becoming an authentic versus a counterfeit human being. It is authenticity we all seek. And one way to do it is this - make a physical demand on yourself. And do this daily.

Breathing

When I'm doing a three hour walk I'm in some sort of container of time. I know I can only go forwards and when I get to the end of the trail, no matter how tired I am, I have to make the trip back in order to get home. It is this type of tramping practice that gets me to writing practice and ensures that I do it.

Walking practice comes before writing practice and is the foundation for everything in writing. If I write and don't walk, I'm antsy, the writing spills over and is wasted. If I walk, I may be tired but the writing flows. I can make a sentence and I can see it come out in a clean way. It is pure. I think walking sets me up for the race. It is the preparation for the marathon.

Now that I'm back to daily walking - I am able to write more. I don't think it is possible for me to sit here all day and write but if I break the day into writing, then walking and then back to writing - I get a fair bit of writing down. I would not be able to zigzag to and from writing unless I had the interruptions of walking.

I'd like to do what I used to do before - which was exercise three times a day but I know if I do this I'll be too trashed. I'm tired now with the three hours done slowly and with careful deliberation not to push myself too much. I don't think the old body is ready yet for six hours of exercising. I'll progress at the pace the body will allow but eventually I will increase the exercise time to about 4 hours and then maybe next year who knows? I'll get to the six hours again.

When will I do writing? If I'm walking so many hours, when will I do writing? I will do writing as I've always done it - whenever I have a minute, I've taught myself to write. If I'm waiting at the physician's office, I take out my notebook and record my thoughts. If I've got supper baking, I come to the blogs and write. If I'm in the car and a line comes to me, I stop and write it down. At night I put the dreams to work in a book. If I'm awakened in the middle of the night by a line, I get up and write it down. The way I do writing is the way I do breathing - all the time.

If writing is breathing words in and breathing them out, then there is always writing being done. I am not doing much else these days. I'm getting to the writing after the walking and then there is family life.

A small universe divided into three sections. I wonder when I'll be able to expand these sections to do other things? Right now I'm content with these three sections and I've no urge to do anything else. Maybe you don't need to do so many things in life to feel at peace with life. Maybe three things are enough.

Introspection

The world within us is the largest space we can fill and we have it available for development at any time. We can go for a walk and work on our interior space almost joyfully. It can be done in the middle of making beds, sweeping floors and in writing practice. The world within calls to us to make it, to furnish it as we will and to create daily.

The inner world inside each of us is the place each of us must start to create peace in our outer worlds. There is no point attempting to make a world of riches outside of us if the world inside is empty, impoverished and neglected. The inner world must be done first.

How long does it take? I've only been doing this work this last year. Of course, there have been kick in the groin experiences that have made me do some temporary fix ups, renovations and repairs inside me on an ongoing basis but it has only been this last year, that I've taken an entire year off and made myself do the practice of working on the inner world. Mostly I've done this work in my private journals but the work has leaked here to my blogs and to the poetry and the walking practice. It is possible to do inner work everywhere and at anytime and while you are doing the regular business of life.

I've taken the year off and I've done my practice and it is just the beginning. I'm sure if I've got another ten or so years, I'll still be doing what I'm doing. I don't know any other way to stay stable and calm but to do the inner work.

It may be that the entire world of people out there have a secret that I've yet to find that is how to get to some sort of peace in life. I know some of these people use the drug of religion to keep them happy, others use money and perhaps some use sex. But I'm not able to use any of these methods. All I've found that gets me to temporary peace is the walking and writing practice. Both are necessary. I can't just sit and write. I must spend longer and longer periods of time walking as well.

The world within us is infinite. I've only mapped a tiny area inside of me. I don't know where the next expedition will go to. I don't have the foggiest idea of where this writing is leading me to. I have no fear of it being meaningful. I know life is meaningless and I do things only because I want to do them, that I'm impelled to do it. I know if I spend my life earning money or not earning money - it is all the same - all meaningless and therefore, I will do what I want to do which is sit in an empty house with a dollar store spiral notebook, a pen in my hand and a line coming out of me like a parasite out of my skin.

What will I do this next year? The writing will tell me. It is mapping the interior world where I really live, it is telling me who I am and I'm content to let the writing and walking practice lead me to the new place I'm traveling to. If it ends in a dead end there is no shame in that. All of life ends in a dead end so to speak and so any small interruptions of the journey to turn around and restart in another trip - is not going to be troublesome but interesting. So much more interesting than the dead zombie walk of life that I was engaged in before I started this leap year of introspection.

Getting to start

I haven't done the walk yet. I told myself it is simply too windy outside. I know, I know. It won't be any less windy later in the day but I'm just procrastinating. I know that procrastination is a killer of dreams. If I procrastinate long and hard enough the day will end and I'll not have walked or written. If I procrastinate long enough the life will have ended and I'd not have my book of poems. If I procrastinate long enough, that will be my excuse - I just put it off.

How to do away with procrastination? Start. Do a small attempt. Walk ten minutes. Write for a second. You can do anything for a second. I can write this line. I can continue or I can stop. But I've done away with the procrastination trap.

I'm like a wary animal. I am running in the forest. The trap is everywhere. I'm caught. I can't get out of it. But I stop struggling. I look carefully at the trap. The trap is imaginary. There is no procrastination trap. There is only fear.

Fear that we won't be able to do something, or that something won't amount to much and we will be average rather than super or at least above average. Well, so what if you're not super? What would happen to you if you found out that you are average or below average? Being average doesn't mean that you are an oddity - you will have a lot of company. Being average is no excuse to postpone the dreams of a lifetime.

Once you get to see that there is no procrastination trap and that it is only your mind playing the fear game, then you can go ahead. You do the walk, you write the line, you say hello to the guy, you buy the house, you skip over the bad days, you make yourself fearless.

Yeah, that is what getting to doing requires - being fearless. Maybe it isn't a magnificent type of fearlessness but it is sufficient to get you going. Really that is all you need in overcoming procrastination in the end - a small shove, a push forward, a force within you getting you to start and admitting you are afraid but are going to start anyway. Getting to start requires the understanding that you can do a great many things in life even if you are afraid and that indeed, being afraid is part of every change and growth phase. Afraid? Good. This means you are learning and not stagnating. This means you aren't procrastinating your life away but you are living it.

Garden of words

I am stolen into darkness sometimes. I get up and the day is a wash out. I'm not living deeply. I stumble through the day like I'm still asleep and my head aches with the fatigue of not doing anything but automated thoughts. I force myself outside. The forest looks all green twigs and I'm the only brown slash in the green. The rough bark is covered with green lichen, moss spikes the fallen logs and there is a green layer of pine needles stabbing the air. Everything is green despite the naked trees. I am falling into the shade.

The forest is empty except for other souls in hell like me. I wonder about these shadow people I pass. Most of them look locked in old age with their white hair markers and their bony frames. What is the last stage of life like I wonder? Staring into space over some river? Or is it motion, movement, flight and resistance? I'm startled to see a young woman and her baby in the darkness. It seemed for a moment as if there was a river of prehistoric human beings here only.

It is only when I'm walking back do I stop to see there are birds hatching their voices. Or that the squirrels are brown and leathery like me. I'm suddenly calm. It is just another day. It is going to be like this for a while until I get myself in order. I'm not going to rush this business of making order and maybe I'll never make order. Maybe order making of one's life is overrated.

Every day is a new business. I get up. I make the routine. I break out of the routine. I write. I try to make something. It won't be long before the writing tells me to do something else. I do that. I come back here. Circular paths. I'm sure there may be ways to get to writing that don't involve this type of a day but I don't know of them. I think all the things I write about are surface ruminations. I'm not able to penetrate below the ice. I'm at the surface taking an axe to it but all I get are markings.

What am I doing here? I think I'm trying to find a reason to live. Because the surface life is so pointless that unless there is something below the surface, then the effort of living isn't worth it. I go for that long tramp every day to try to find out what I'm searching for but I find only greenness and light filters and sounds of the forest. I don't know if there is something in these things. I come back to the house. I do my ordinary work. I make fire. I burn myself up. I am ash.

Every day is the same. A descent into the muddy pool, a swirling around in it and then emergence, dirty, filthy and mud encased. And the next day, it starts again. I'm not sure why I even bother.

Why do I bother? I come here to make the life I'm living more than dust. I come here to find out if there is something in me that will make dust into clay shapes and breathe them into life. I come here to not give up.

Writing is a endless chore that never seems to end. I start one day and I know I've got to write the next day and I'm hammered. I wonder what I'll write about and I don't really care. Just write. I know it will suck. But just write, I promise you that there will be a day when you will have a story and it will fruit itself into being and fall to ripen on your lap. I promise you that one day you will have planted a seed and it will germinate. I know that there are many seeds I've put in the ground - my hollyhocks for example, that never make it to flower every year. I throw a zillion of the poor things into the ground. Some become slug food. Others grow to some sort of height and then are killed off by frost. I've done this for the last two years and no hollyhock flowers. And yet, my neighbor across the street, a novice gardener with a minute front garden planted hollyhocks just this year that were taller than me and all of them bloomed. I don't know the reason why mine didn't.

It is the same for the writing. I don't know why other writers are able to make their hollyhocks grow in their garden of words and why mine don't. All I know from two decades of gardening is this - keep planting. Some plants grow, some die, and some need years before they bloom. I just have to be patient and keep sowing my garden of words.

Coyote lessons

I went for an hour walk just before it got dark and impossible for me to see. The snow that had blossomed on every tree this morning had petaled to the floor where mounds of white matter evidenced the passing of the snow flowers. I'm afraid I was a little disappointed that the snow had been so swift to melt for I'd enjoyed the almost clinical whiteness of the landscape this morning without the attendant freezing winds and ice pavements. It was a gift to get snow without winter.

The walk was quick. I didn't linger around especially as a passing walker told me of the presence of a large coyote in the neighborhood. I've seen 3 coyotes this last year and I am beginning to feel that I'm a magnet for them. They seem especially tame and unafraid. The last encounter was especially eerie with the coyote staring me down and then, turning off and trotting off without backing down from his dominant stance. Man, I didn't care if he was the dominant dog. I'd let him be head of my pack any day. He felt almost ten times stronger than me even though I was taller than him.

The presence of idiot hares all around are the reason for the coyotes running around our neighborhood like small cars. The hares breed indiscriminately and this probably leads to idiocy among the offspring that tend to stand in full view in the streets just like fast food being delivered to any passing coyote in the midst of a snack attack. Just from a survival of the fittest standpoint, these hares deserve to be eliminated so that the main gene pool can be purified of their idiocy chromosomes.

Coyote lessons. Be smarter than a hare or get exterminated. I didn't stick around to be coyote fare. I booted it on the walk and did my usual puttering 1.5 hour walk in 1 hour. It is amazing how much faster I can walk with a coyote on my heels.

Pretending calm

Tomorrow I take younger boy for his MRI result. I'm nervous. But really what can I do to change whatever unfolds? It is always this way with reference to our bodies. Our physical containers are apt to wear down, break down and just go kaput. I can only do one thing. Be calm.

Children are ourselves made anew and egg soft. As parents, we are afraid to drop them, crack them, break them and hurt them. When they are in sickness, it is as if the ground beneath you opens up and swallows you entire. You lose any sense of being in control (not that you ever are in control) and you are unable to make sense of anything you are being told about their illnesses. Anyway, that was the way it was with me.

In the beginning of the boys' lives I was never calm. I was in a state of prolonged agony when they would need anything out of the ordinary such as the surgery that older boy had for his congenital cataract at 9 years of age. When it is your child, it is as if the vulnerability is total. No defenses, you are hunted and shot and bagged.

But over the past 14 years, I've learned to just pretend to be calm and pretending will often lead to calm. If I have to I will go home and hammer a pillow or two to get it all out but most of the times, when I'm faced with sickness in all it's glorious permutations in my mother, my sister, my dad, my husband, myself and my son - I am able to take a deep breath, tell myself that I can handle the sickness and get going with the solution - if any. If there are no solutions, then I work on acceptance.

Pretending to be calm saves me a ton of wear and tear emotionally. I'm not actually a calm person. But I don't need to convert myself to Christianity. I can just be a fake believer. I can just sit in the narrow corridor of my body and will my mind and soul to enter that corridor and pace slowly and accept.

Pretending calm may even lead to a certain calmness, permanent and persistent that enables me to handle the saga of illness that has plagued our family like a birth mark. Maybe all families are cursed with darkness and despair and madness and futility. Maybe we are all born with the seeds of our illnesses and we just nurture them to full flower in adulthood and old age. Maybe we come with our own detonation bomb and when it goes off, we just have to pick ourselves up, reassemble ourselves as best we can and go on until the final atomic explosion of death. Maybe we just have to pretend calm until we are permanently calmed to death.

Surrender

I'm finally getting to calm. The cup of tea is warming me up. I've got my long brown sweater on. I'm in the quiet pool of time just before the boys go to bed. I want to read to younger boy who is silent now that his play date has gone home. It was a good visit. The boys played together and they made movies. I wish I knew what goes on in their minds when they do their play. Are they making themselves into each other or are they working on their inner souls in company?

I often wonder about friendship. I seem to have less of an attachment for it now than before. I was always drawn to men who were able to teach me something. I had an insatiable sucking in of knowledge. But now, I'm willing to just be empty. To sit in the writing place. To maybe read a fraction of a book, stop and ponder and revisit it another time. If the book grabs me by the throat and shakes me up and down then I will go through it faster but now I'm willing to draw out the meal, make it last longer, chew the book down slowly and digest it all carefully. I've learned to do this. Books written by people who are knowing their inner selves have a lot to teach me and I cannot learn their lessons by running a reading marathon.

Lessons. I'm in love with lessons. Each of us get taught in school but those lessons are meant to teach us only one thing - that knowledge is self illuminating and that we can teach ourselves best. Others are symbols. We can learn what those symbols mean. But we and we alone, can make the symbols personal and significant to ourselves.

I wish I could just go to a library and not get hurt and learn all the lessons of life in some sort of sterilized fashion so that there would be no infection of the mind and I wish I could administer vaccines so that when I meet with trouble and heartache, I'd not suffer but alas, it is not that simple. We are aluminum cans. We get crushed. We get recycled. And made anew. It is just the way life works.

I used to fight against this cycling of learning but now I've learned to just let it happen, to go through each phase - the drinking up of oneself, the crushing, the remaking and experience each phase intensely. Each phase is beautiful. Painfully beautiful. And if we take the experience deep into our souls we are making ourselves into higher forms of the simple.

Higher forms of the simple? Yeah, we start out so simple. Babies. Innocent. And we get knowledge, experience, suffering and we are never that simple again. We get complicated. And we make ourselves distrustful and distant and cloaked. But to be really higher forms of the simple being we start out as, we have to be completely vulnerable, open to breakage and destruction by others. There is no other way.

If you think that you are being protective by hiding your inner soul from others well, you are wrong. The soul needs and wants every experience, every bit of suffering and love that it can gets. It is sort of like a sink. It will drain you of what water you flow into it. But if you put a plug in that sink, well you are going to overflow and make a mess. Unplug yourself. Let there be a free flow and drainage of the water of life and you will have no messes.

I'm of the school that believes that you have no choice but to be yourself. If you pretend to be someone you are not then you are deceiving others and teaching yourself to lie. Of course, I don't suggest that you go sprouting your theories of life or act out of the common when you are with people who don't necessarily want to hear any of your inner stuff but certainly, if you meet with another soul and both of you are amenable, then I don't believe in cloak and dagger type communication.

It is always better to be honest. To both strangers and to your beloveds. No one is immune from your inner soul. No one should be deceived about who you are. And when you reveal your inner soul, in all it's grief, beauty and lovingness, a wonderful thing often happens. The other is often impelled to reveal his beauty and grief and love as well. And that intimate contribution, one to the other is what the meaning of life is all about. Surrender to each other.

I come to the source

When I write, it starts with thoughts. But where do the thoughts go? I place the thoughts in images. The images contain feelings. The feelings make a story.

Thought and images and feelings. They lead to some sort of a story. Everything written has some sort of a story in it. Human beings cannot go for very long without a story to make sense of the chaos.

If we live in chaos, we try to manage it ourselves by making personal stories. But if we are unable to manage the personal stories as well as we would like to then, we go to other people for tools on making up personal stories that work. Sometimes we go to what people have written to get this type of knowledge. When we read their works, we are searching for tools - even in the form of entertainment reading because being human is difficult and because we don't come equipped with a complete tool box to fix problems we encounter in our journeys.

If we write, we are more aware of some of the problems in our lives. But we all have them. Most of the time, we are putting these problems in the back of our minds and not dealing with them for it is far easier to deal with tasks than problems in our lives.

But problems - personal problems are roads we have to navigate in order to learn about ourselves and others in our vicinity. We do not have problems because we enjoy having them. We have problems because something inside us needs fixing, changing or deleting.

A life empty of problems is a mundane life. But a life with problems is a difficult one. How does one meet the challenge of a life with problems? I write. I talk about my problems with my husband. I read books. I write again.

Every problem starts with the self. I feel bad about myself. I am grumpy. Everyone in the family is infected by my bad feelings expressed as grumpiness. Solution? I sit down and think. Why am I grumpy? Why am I feeling bad about myself? I come to the source of the problem. Myself.

We all have times when we do not feel good about ourselves. We all have times when we feel we have failed to live up to our perfect image or that we have been unable to accomplish all we had set out to do at the beginning of our promises. But feeling bad, acting out this feeling bad in other emotions such as grumpiness is not useful and will only serve to alienate and piss off those we most love. The solution? Find out why I'm feeling so bad at this particular moment in time.

Why am I feeling so bad? Could it be that not being employed, not being a paying member of the clan, losing all my educational credentials after a decade or more at home - that the loss of this "worker" identity that was sustaining me in the early years - could it be that the loss of this image - is what is making me feel bad?

When you have that worker image or identity, you have something that is fairly dependable. You can say "I was worker X". Now what I say is that "I am not working." The non-worker identity is amorphous and risky and hollow. I just have not replaced the worker identity with anything that I value. And yeah, this makes me feel bad.

Being dependent makes me feel bad. I wanted to be independent. There is another reason for my feeling bad. No matter how much I want to work, I hate the work I'd have to do. Another reason for feeling bad.

Hell, there are a dozen reasons I feel bad right now. But it all boils down to self esteem. I'm low in the self esteem bracket right now but self esteem, I know, darn well doesn't depend entirely on the ability to earn money. Self esteem depends on the other aspects of one life - age, intelligence, competence, health and courage. I'm fine in the other aspects so why am I letting just one factor - the ability to earn money - make me miserable?

I come to the source. If there is money in the bank, I don't feel so threatened by my SAHM identity. But when the money goes down the hill, I'm threatened. Stupid. But there you are. Money. It rears it's snake head and I'm bitten.

Regret nothing

I've done things I feel bad about that have made people sad and even downright miserable. I didn't become a physician which crushed my parents. I became a multiple degree earner which impoverished them. I married a white guy instead of a short, brown Bengali chap. I had two boys and almost died in the business of churning them out. I stayed at home instead of being a high earner. Yeah, I pretty much destroyed my parents.

As for poor hubby. I was thin, smart, doing a PhD when he met me. Now I am fat, a stay home never do good old woman and what can he do about it? Not much. I mean he could trade me in for a sharper looking model but why would he want to exchange one form of marital hell for another?

What about the boys? Nope, I'm not their dream mother either. I make them work. I criticize them. I am never sweet and adoring. In fact, I'm probably setting them up to have a mother complex for the rest of their lives (in which they will probably blame me for their less than stellar performances academically, employment wise and who know? Perhaps even in their bedroom performances?)

Yeah, I've disappointed lots of people but I've learned to get over these events. I regret nothing. Oh, all right maybe one or two things where I hurt my hubby but other than that? NOTHING. Life is one mistake after another and if I spent my time in a froth of misery over my mistakes, nothing would get done. I'd be immobilized. I'd be a tragic figure in my own play.

Rather than sit and beat my breasts (they are already flat enough), I'd rather march forth and do more mistakes. Theoretically, making previous mistakes should decrease the probability of my making huge amounts of new mistakes but it hasn't been so. I've made mistakes. I've learned from them. And yet, I make new mistakes (just different kinds). So I've concluded that as I've mentioned before that life is just a mistake generating device and I'm not going to regret making mistakes because I am making them in order to learn not to make that particular mistake again.

Of course if I'm making the same mistake over and over again, then there is reason for concern, but happily I've been able to, in most cases, profit from my kick in the groin experiences and not make the same mistake repeatedly.

Regret nothing. Life is a mistake generating device. Human beings are mistake makers. And we continue as a species because we learn from the most pivotal of our mistakes.

Stilling

I am waiting for a rebirth of energy and a new topic to write about and while I wait, in the utter stillness of my bedroom, I'm awake to the fact that we are going to have four days together as a family. I like having hubby and the boys home. We cocoon together. We maybe head out to the library or the zoo or the museum. And the hiking. But that is it. The rest of the time we still ourselves.

Stilling or doing nothing is a lost and forgotten art in our society. What happens when you still? You simply unclench. You relax. You fart around. You do nothing you don't want to do and everything you want to do. It is the opposite of paid work.

My husband was talking to a coworker the other day who asked him curiously what his wife did at home. My husband said simply "NOTHING!" The coworker blinked. How could he say that his wife did nothing? But hubby was exactly right. I do nothing. I'm unashamed of my lack of doing. I mean I do somethings. But they are not paid things or things I force myself to do or make myself unhappy doing. I do them because at the point in time when I'm ready, I do them for me.

But nothing? Yeah, by society's terms the things I do are nothings. I get up. I take boys to school. I walk. I cook. I write. I read. I bring boys back from school. We do homework (on some days). I read to the boys. We fart around. We draw. We write. We do nothings.

A life of nothings can be quite enjoyable. I try not to worry about that fact that I have no pension plan, that hubby is responsible for the cash flow and that my once stellar job skills are corroded beyond resurrection but I have to admit, I do worry at times. But I stifle the worry. I tell myself that a life doing nothings that I love to do is better than a life of financial security where I absolutely, hate like acid the mindless, endless tasks I am required to do in order to make money and that, at the end of my life, I'd rather be poor but full of happy nothing memories than rich and full of unhappy something memories.

For me, nothing is more than nothing. It is stilling my mind, my body and my life to enjoy what I have as gifts that are priceless - time, endless, continuous reams of time that I can unroll and write my own programs on and peace- a still, running water peace that infiltrates every cell of my body and brings me to utter bliss.

A life of nothings. I'll take that and put that on my urn of ashes and not regret anything.

Walked

What a beaut of a day it is outside. I walked slowly starting out and picked up the pace at the half hour at the end of my two hour hike. The trail was soft with decaying leaves and it felt good under my boots. I saw a couple feeding squirrels. They left out peanuts and I saw this one squirrel almost leap out of nowhere, jump onto a particularly toothsome peanut and scurry off rather in the fashion that I am apt to engage in when I've found something I adore (usually an old piece of rusting junk that I don't want hubby to see me with) and I'm off and in the van with it. I'm rather like those squirrels.

The day is still rather chilly out but the sun made a sudden rupture in the sky and lit up the blue sky just for a brief moment in time and I was able to go on without any more sunshine until I came home and now the sun is glancing through my window pane in the bonus room.

The trees are particularly morbid and twisted today, with their branches like tangled hair dos. The grass is sprayed out like white witch hair and there are long rushes of prairie where the bush sits like small totem poles -almost macabre and frightening - stumps everywhere. I walked rather tentatively today, looking back often to see that I wasn't being followed. When you are completely alone on a trail, sometimes you start to think of horror flicks where some stranger is up to no good and will stalk you until you are done in. There were a few walkers - mostly senior citizens, a sad looking middle age woman, a harassed, plumpish mother with her probably home schooled son and an excitable Blue Heeler dog that was very unrepentant in his running around in circles despite her vigorous attempts to regulate his movements and yes, there was that older couple feeding the squirrels. I, was otherwise alone except for the creepy presence of that horror flick entity.

I've got some books to return to the library (again, overdue books!!!!) And then? Don't know. I've got the chicken in the oven (decided against the BBQ since older boy is going to that birthday party). And I'm almost through laundry. Who said that it sucked being a SAHM who loves to write? Not me. And thank you sweetheart for making it possible to do this.

One focus

I came straight back from dropping the boys at school. Older boy was doing practice for Remembrance Day presentations at his school. Younger boy watched comics at the grandparents' home until he was loosened up sufficiently to go to school. Then I headed back home. I want to go for a walk right away so that I can try to do more of the trail system before the snows come. I am trying to get myself back to the way it was when I was doing 3 hours of walking per day. In other words, I'm trying to get rid of Buddha belly (no matter how attached I am to it I think it would be more healthy for me to dump it).

I haven't walked the lengths I was walking when I was at the YMCA. When I was at the YMCA, I was in that single minded state that is necessary to do anything. I had one focus. What this meant, is that a whole bunch of other things got neglected while I concentrated on getting back to the way I was in my twenties. Of course, I'll never be that fit again but well, I'm giving it my best shot. Getting back to twenties fit won't be possible in just the first year but I think will take me another decade. But I'll do it. That is what one focus does for one. It makes one concentrate one's mind to the doing of one goal and getting it done - to the best of one's ability.

The accomplishment of the goal isn't the main reward and in fact, may be a minor side result. What is more important for a human animal is the training of mind and body and soul to be living in a certain way. I want to live as a healthy, energetic animal. And to do this - initially, I have to devote more time and energy to this goal. After a few years, I may reduce the time commitment to get the same fitness reward.

This is true for exercising but may not be true for writing - where I am going to increase the time commitment. In the case of writing, it is not that I don't have the time - I do. But what I don't have is the endurance to sit at the writing place and make the writing flow for four hours or more. I get antsy. I want a cup of coffee. I walk. I loose track of what I am thinking of and then I'm up and away from the space.

I find it difficult to sit and write continuously in the writing place Even when I'm rewriting my done poems, I have to get up and do something else. Antsy. But I'm getting better at sitting down, doing the one focus deal and extending my attention so I can write for longer periods of time. I find that if I come to the writing place when the family is out of the house - at work or school, it is easier for me to get down the words. Even when they are here, if I write when they are still asleep in the morning - I am able to do the one focus trick easily.

The one focus trick works best when you are really interested in what you are doing. Do you love running? Then your ability to focus on the running will be good. If you hate running then your one focus will be scattered. I still haven't migrated to running yet. But if I put on a pair of old, comfy hiking boots and do a fast walk that approximates a trail run then my one focus is there and I'm able to go "run" as a hike.

When I'm doing poetry and the mind is utterly absorbed in the laying down of the tiles of words, one after another in the particular pattern I'm creating, there is nothing there but one focus. I love those times. It is just words rushing into my mind. I pick them up. Turn them over. Smoothen them or enjoy their roughness. Place them in their places. The pattern forms. I am utterly happy. There is nothing close to this in the real world. Nothing. One focus gets me to this happy place.

When I was a child, my mother was appalled at my habit of picking up found objects everywhere I went. I biked all over our foreigner's living quarters in Kuwait and pulled, magpie like, clothing out of dust bins, a stray rock out of hill, a bundle of shells from the beach, a bit of driftwood left to silver on the shore. I think this time spend searching for the ordinary treasures of our world is what translated into the searching through the ordinary words of our English vocabulary. Each of my found treasures as a child was precious to me. Each of my found words that I use as an adult is just as precious. I collect still. Both found objects and words. And in each case, the ability to concentrate on a simple object, to see something rare in what others consider junk, the desire to make collections, the display of these collections in novel ways - they come from childish one focus that I've restarted in adulthood.

One focus. One object. One mind. Limitless possibilities, permutations and choices. Who would not want to be a poet?

The shadow within

I haven't started the poetry yet. I want to walk. I have the poems ready in a binder. I have told the boys that I won't be doing home lunch today so I have the entire day to redo poems. I do have other work but I'll fit it in around the essentials - walking and writing.

My hands are cold as I write. Winter is here. I've still a few plants in pots outside and they need to be in the ground. The forecast for the weekend is snow on Sunday and Monday. Hmm... I guess we can't be having Hawaii type weather in Edmonton. We've been lucky so far.

Right now, I'm going to write, eat my tofu dessert and then head out wrapped like a upright Mummy (Egyptian that is). I will do that poem review. After.

Hubby is making noises again about the paper and journals and books I've got in my writing area. I look around and see that he is right. My writing area is not exactly pristine. I have plastic boxes too full of writing. God knows why I keep every scrap of paper that I write on - it is not as if I'm going to be able to decipher some of the chicken scratch I've doodled out in the car or in the doctor's office or even at a playground. Most of it is noise. But I keep it. I wonder sometimes when I read the chicken scratch who wrote this stuff. I mean, some of the stuff I write, seems like it was written by someone else. Kind of creepy that. I mean if there is a multitude of writing entities in each of us, why there would be some sort of United Nations required to stop them squabbling over what gets written daily. I mean, who is the most dominant writing entity in there? The one who writes about money or the one who writes about evolution or the one who writes about lust or are they all part of one entity but different facets of the entity? Writing reveals.

And what it reveals is often what you don't want revealed or that you never realized you were. Sometimes this is very frightening especially if you are a wuss like I am and immediately put away what you wrote that unnerved you for a year and then come back to it like a prisoner headed for the guillotine. Yeah, when the writing you do makes you wonder who the fuck you are, well it is hard to face that sad reflection of you in the poems.

Most of us like to imagine ourselves as fairly decent human beings. And outwardly we are all jolly folks. But in reality we are, under the skin, not so jolly. We may even be rather disgusting creatures. When I write, I find some things about myself I don't really like but it is useful to know that I carry such germs inside me so that I can have some vaccines ready so when the influenza outbreaks I cause - get going - I can decrease the number of casualties. Yeah, if is always wise to know the shadow within.

Why bother to write if there are shadows that unnerve you? Well, it is interesting to know you aren't that sterilized nice thing you thought you were and to find out that you can be pathogenic as well. And knowledge of one's shadow is useful to prevent the shadow becoming utter darkness. It is also productive, no matter what, to learn about yourself, because mastery of oneself and one's desires is a sign of evolution. Finally, writers write and why not write about oneself since in reality we write about ourselves even when we write about others.

It is far more interesting a life if we think of others and ourselves as growth vessels and not simply tacked on pictures on a bulletin board incapable of surprising us anymore. We don't need to be captured pictures of human beings. We can be metamorphic beings. We can continue to change but really, change requires some sort of self management and motivation. It is far to easy to just drift and go through life like a bit of a twig on a river to snag finally on some beaver's dam. It is more difficult to resist currents and be oneself.

The shadow within is within each of us. I won't believe that you are the way you present yourself because I know that despite my efforts, I manage my external presentation of the self as well to you. I do this to a lesser degree because I'm not on a work stage but I do manage it. I think it is impossible for human beings to be themselves unless they are in an intimate relationship. There are too many barriers to intimacy in real life and as such we are limited to such being of self to our homes with our families. Too bad. It would be utterly ravishing to communicate as we are with each other in our natural states, to evolve daily and to reveal our shadow sides as well as the light parts we are always beaming out to the world. The shadow part of ourselves is not bad. It is there. It is the part of us that we need to accept. And manage.

I dislike having to meet people who are always positive persona because being sort of grumpy, I don't trust naturally smiley faced people. There are many such people and it annoys me incessantly to have to pretend to be one of them. I'd rather just be grumpy until my third cup of coffee has started up my brain and then slide into some sort of contented state after hiking a couple of hours. Natural cheerfulness is foreign to me and should be to everyone else. It is unnatural to have a smile plastered over one's visage at 8:00 am in the morning at work. It makes me afraid for the smile bearer's sanity. Or lack thereof.

I'm on my second cup of coffee and I'm not done breakfast yet. I may get out soon. But my fingers are still freezing. God I wish Canada was hot and not as disgustingly miserable each winter. Only problem with hot places are the monstrous bugs that fly around and get everywhere. Maybe it is better to have snow rather than cockroaches dropping like divers into the pot of tea you make. Maybe it is better to have a bug free season like winter. Maybe.

Off to bed

If I think about all the critics out there yapping about lousy poetry, I'd never be able to make a poem. I can only make a poem by going to the secret place in my bedroom where I sequester poems and drag myself into the book where I'm currently writing and make the lines come out of me like a parasite I'm curling around a stick and pulling patiently out. I'm not going to show those poems to anyone. Yeah, I can't imagine taking parasite poems out of the book and putting them out for criticism. I'd rather be my own critic and do that decapitation myself.

It is far harder to write than I ever imagined. I've got a binder full of written poems and I have yet to go back and scrutinize the poems but I will do that now. I have my typed poems and I'm working backwards, transcribing them into the dollar store coil notebooks because now that they are in the second draft it will probably take even more years to get them through additional revisions and then who knows? I'll probably just keep them in the notebooks.

Sometime a poem gets written for the sheer joy of the writing and I don't need to show anyone it. It will sit like a bit of a green fruit in my book, ripening or rotting. I will still write poems even if I never get a single one published or even if they are panned and ripped apart because the poem asks to be written. I think if the poem asks you for the creating of it you have no choice, you must do it even if you are writhing with shame and fright and pain over the contents of the poem. The poem is teaching me something - perhaps the things I don't want to be taught or have revealed to me but that will help me evolve and any tool that uncovers prehistoric bones is an important tool.

Poems simply won't go away. I've had this pile of poems for a year now. I've been utterly unable to confront them. But tomorrow, I've told myself to sit at the kitchen table, take one poem in my hand and write it out again. Just as it is. No changes. Then if you want when all these poems are written out as they are on the typed sheets, then you can deconstruct them, cut them to pieces, burn them or rewrite them entirely in another book.

Once I've faced these poems, I'll continue writing poems. I won't stop. If I do stop - I won't be me - I'll be a outgrown skin of a snake and might as just dry up. I'm not sure right now what I'm going on about so I'm going to stop and just start again tomorrow with poem practice.

Happiness is a moment with or without money requirements

I haven't been writing on my blog on paying down my mortgage or the money blog. I think it is because I'm unhappy about money right now. It is always this way. I look for jobs. I hate the jobs I look at. I can't bear the idea of working. But I want more money. Ugh! I think I need to just do one or the other thing or find a way to earn money and shut the hell up about the problems of not having enough money.

Hell, I'll never have enough money. I'm always wanting more money. Desirous. If I have a certain number of dollars, then I'll pay down the mortgage. And then I'll be happy. Like right. I paid off the rental property mortgage. Was I happy? Damn right I was. For a month or so. And then, there was a new goal. Buy a personal home. So I start saving money squirrel like for this great deed. I buy the house. I now feel unhappy. Because of the megamortgage. I make myself work for a while. Miserable as hell. But we pay down some of our mortgage. I stop working. I'm happy for a while. Then the bills pile up. Hell. Again.

So there is just no point in not equating money with happiness. Money is happiness. Money is entirely life. Money is god. Money is the route to peace. Temporary peace at least.

Don't get me wrong. I know money is essential but it won't give me permanent happiness. There is no such a condition as permanent happiness.

I know most of my worries about life are based on the lack of money in my life. I know that having money will remove these current worries at least. But once this crop of worries have been harvested, a new crop will be seeded in and I'll grow them to completion. Money is a temporary salve over the wound that we make ourselves.

I am unhappy because dammit, I chose to sit here and make myself unhappy. I could just reflect on sunlight and purity of the heart and all that crap and I'd be able to achieve some uplift in the mood. I could have just done my walking practice and made myself high on the outdoors. But no, I didn't do that. I chose this topic of money to write about and to be writhing about and yeah, it sucks.

And I'm not even poor like that poor homeless guy I saw on Whyte Avenue, his jeans falling off his rear end, the backpack full of junk slipping off one shoulder and his dirty, slovenly self shuffling along the street like an ancient cat or wounded dog. I am not him. Thank god. Because I don't know how you survive without any money. I am terrified of the idea of not having money.

But what would happen if I had no money? Hmm... I guess we would lose the house. I'd get a job. I'd pay bills. So why am I going on and on and wasting my writing time writing about money? It is desire. You always fricking well write about things you desire and you desire more money.

I could teach myself to desire money less. I have taught myself to desire product purchases less. I have made myself get off the gratification of a job well done for pay. I've made myself less inclined to worry about retirement funds because that can all disappear in a second as proven all too clearly by the recent stock market hemorrhage of investments. Nothing lasts. Nothing is permanent. So why should I think that money will make it all less miserable?

Happiness is simply hard to acquire and even harder to keep long term shackled and chained to one side. You simply have to wait for it to come and surprise you with it's presence. You cannot get happiness like you do a vitamin pill in a bottle filled to the brim. It arrives like that woodpecker I saw the other day on a walk, tapping it's presence into my consciousness and then entertaining me with his rambunctious mining of a corner of the forest. Then he flew away. Yeah, happiness is like that. A woodpecker. One moment in time. And money may or may not be involved in that moment.

Politeness

There is a huge amount of stress and hostility out there in the world that we all encounter in anonymous, brief contact moments. The line up at the check out of a store where the grumpy ones are whining about the service (myself included), the stasis on Edmonton streets where the entire objective of the transportation department is to drive us all collectively nuts as we commute or even a simple encounter on the street with another human being where a friendly smile or hello is ignored simply because the other or yourself are too afraid to make contact. Yeah, we are all in the living hell of being in our own barriers.

But being in these barriers - if they made us happy - would be fine. They don't make us happy and they serve to make others unhappy and that is the point we have to make the move to remove these barriers and to return to a sort of gentility and civility that is being painted over daily in our rush to make money, progress and profit.

I'm talking about being polite to each other. If you are at a checkout at a grocery store and there is someone limping behind you, hey let that senior citizen in before you. It costs you maybe ten minutes of extra waiting but for the man with the limp - it is few minutes shaved off his daily struggle with a disability. Smile at people and say hello even if they do not make eye contact or smile back. It costs you just the moving of facial muscles and nothing from your pocket book to make such an attempt. Be kind and encouraging as much as you can be with all you meet. It may be difficult sometimes but everyone is a person. Everyone has a soft inner center no matter how hard the outer surface may be. This is not a Pollyanna type philosophy here. It is just basic common sense and decency.

If we can place ourselves in the other person's life and imagine how stressed he or she may be then maybe we will be less inclined to add to that stress level by being rude, impolite or just plain jerky. It doesn't take much effort to change a reaction into a response. Just delay your immediate killer instinct and opt to go out of the react mode and into the response mode. And while you are at it, be polite, smile and feel for the other. It will make the world a better place quickly.

A sequel please

I started reading to my younger boy and I read until he fell asleep. I wanted to stop reading but I couldn't. The book? "Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life" by Wendy Mass. It is always a wonderful feeling to enter into a world that has been created out of dust. I feel that the ability to create such a world with deft sure hands is something to emulate. How Wendy Mass is able to make us love Jeremy Fink, be caught up in his search for the meaning of life or even to envision a story where a 13 year old boy is sensitive enough to think that life must have some sort of meaning - that is something I don't understand. Did she sit with Jeremy Fink in her mind and the story came from the idea of a premonition of death on the part of his father? Then how did the plot spring up that the father would send a message in a box to his son in the future that told him of how individual each meaning of life search is and that life itself is just a series of moments that we choose? I can't begin to tell you how well organized this world is, how delightful are all the characters and how hard it was for me to give them up. I want another Jeremy Fink story. Even if my 9 year old son falls asleep in the beginning of the quest.

This is the e-mail I sent to the author:

Hi,

I was reading this book to my 9 year old son today and he fell asleep while I was on page 20. "Drat," I thought. I try not to read ahead in a book since it robs me of any interest I have in reading the book again. But I just couldn't stop reading the book. With the warm body of my utterly oblivious child snuggled close to me, snoring gently as I sped through the pages, I was utterly seduced by your book and now I'll have to reread a read book to him tomorrow (unless he falls asleep again at perhaps page 39).

I loved Jeremy Fink. He is the son I have always wanted. A son who ponders (or at least has been introduced to pondering) about the meaning of life. I have tried for over a decade to get the boys to search for the meaning of their lives (brief though their lives currently are). But they refuse to do this. Maybe it is a guy thing. I've also tried to get them to read books and have spent most of my misspent life as a SAHM filling our home with printed pages but they are allergic to book matter.

Instead of Jeremy Fink type boys, I got younger boy (who falls asleep when I read him books) and older boy (who is thirteen and reads graphic novels which are not REAL books). I mean I have to read books to them like they were toddlers in order to get them in the vicinity of a REAL book. I give up. I'm going to forget about them and think only about me. Please write another Jeremy Fink story for me so I can have the illusion that this boy is mine and he lives in my house and that he is following my instructions to embark on a personal meaning of life journey. Please.

I get distracted

I'm not going to get upset. I tell myself that before I start getting myself upset. But what can tip me over to staying calm is this - the walking away from the mind unrest.

I go out. When I'm especially uncalm, I just put on my duffel coat, get my shoes on and head out. I don't wonder when supper will get done, the laundry finished or the writing started. I just go. Sometimes, I start out ruffled and unquiet. The thoughts are seething, hornet like and stinging me endlessly. I get distracted by the bird song. I see the elephant trunks of the trees, their lower limbs like large octopus arms and the sucker like flaying they are doing on the forest floor. I watch the ring of moss that circles the slender poplars with both hands and then string themselves upwards. I get a woodpecker testing the tree next to me and then disconsolately, reject it and head for another one. I watch the chickadees busy in their darting flight.

When I'm distracted, I able to get away from the unquiet mind and focus on the water with the paddling waves. There is water everywhere I think somewhat bemusedly as somewhere in the forest, a tree falls and the cracking of the trunk startles me awake. The tree crumples as easily as a roll of cardboard and falls over on itself. I watch the chipmunks make their frenzied runs across the forest floor and the alarm that they sound to warn family up ahead that there is an intruder in their midst. It always amuses me to see a tiny chipmunk straddling a tree bough and chittering in an annoyed fashion down at me. I always wonder what he is warning me not to do.

And then the blessed quiet. The mind calms down. I'm able to head home. There is the small stretch of time where I am emptied. This is what the walking does for me. It empties me as cleanly as a farmer empties the teats of his best milking cow. I am that cow. And the walk has drained me utterly of my milk.

Personal work

The concept of working is always tied to money but what if we dissociated work from money? What if our real work was the work we did because we enjoyed it? If we did work that we didn't care a fig whether it gave us cash or not, how would that change our experience of our lives? I think work that we do because we love it is a way to the spirit.

What do I mean by this? I think we are meant to do what deeply satisfies us - it can be regular work where you are learning something new that gets paid, it can be the unpaid hobby that you do after paid work is finished or it can be craft that you practice that brings money in - in other words -you would do this work, whether or not you got paid, because it is you in your finest present condition.

Most of us live in states of anxiety, dissatisfaction and active unhappiness. We look to others and work to give us the feedback that tells us we are worthy and that our lives have meaning. I don't believe we can get our life's meaning from anyone else or from work that doesn't satisfy us. What gives our lives meaning is the practice of some work that we are absorbed in, that we incrementally progress in and that answers some deep rooted need inside of us and that allows us to dig into the soil of our inner spirit.

If we do not do this work - all is clay, dust and sand. We cannot be content. There is always a void, an absence, some sense that we are going through life like shadows of human beings. What will make us solid, rooted and our authentic self is the practice of personal work.

What do I mean by personal work? It is work that you and only you are interested in doing. I'm using writing as my field of personal work. It doesn't get paid. It is done for the sheer interest I have in the doing of it and the fact that I can explore any idea - no matter how superficially - it doesn't matter - what matters is that I try.

Personal work does not have evaluation torching it. It may eventually turn out splendid but it is really ordinary work that is done daily by ordinary artists. I say artists, because personal work is usually artistic work - or work of the spirit. It can be other work like doing law or medicine in a very elevated fashion - but in general, I think personal work is deeply private struggles with artistic media that yield in general beginners in continual progress. Such work rarely yields literature, sculptures and paintings of profound merit. Rather they yield woven baskets, blankets, quilts, drawings, paintings and writings done by ordinary people in some sort of private, subdued ecstasy.

And there is nothing wrong with that and something to be said for the striving of ordinary folks in some spiritual work that realizes their internal worlds and externalizes it so that they and others have visual evidence of the abilities of ordinary peoples . In fact, this striving is all that saves ordinary peoples from a dreary life of toil, monotony and constant repeated blows of life events. It is this striving that fights against the encroachments of our society, the weirdness of the far right and the unforgiving indoctrination of our education - both familial and public. It is this striving that makes each of us unique, authentic and true to who we are and prevents us from becoming cloned humans. It is this striving that keeps us alive.