Magic Everywhere

Woods - Taliesin orchestra - Forbidden forest - Impressions of George Winston




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Walk Over It

(Not my photo....)

Growing up in Kentucky I would often visit my grandmother, Momie in her small town. Sometimes we would walk the four blocks to Main street, the major shopping Mecca. Her husband was the Postmaster (Kids, do you know what a Postmaster is?) and they were big in the church, so we stopped often along the way to speak with her friends.

Imagine a young girl, aged 7 or 9 or 11 decked out in her fresh, dewy skin, hair thick and lustrous waiting for an age when it would be gold on the market.... eyes bright, foot quietly, politely, but incessantly tapping the ancient, broken sidewalks, sometimes made from tombstones tossed face down to create a walkway... waiting and waiting as the elders, the older women, the wise crones exchanged the latest health issues, if not death issues of all the friends they had in common. Which was just about everyone in town.

It was black and white. Oil and water, this mix of child and wizened warrior. No matter that she taught me how Cardinals sound in the spring, why Peony's are special, that cornbread made into pancakes is far better than cakes... that no matter how broken you are when you arrive, there's still room at the table....

No matter what she taught, we were 7 and 57 and I just didn't get all this illness and death talk. Truly, I still don't. Not in certain ways. But...

I have one friend going though an incredibly hard bout with cancer (I refuse to capitalize it. Illogical, I'm sure). Another is just out of the hospital, having battled pneumonia and drug side-effects. A third is lucky to be walking. I'm going to the doctor tomorrow and everyone knows just how much I don't handle that.

I don't want to embrace the illness, the ache, the pain as a daily ritual. Not mine or anyone else's. But I do realize that it's becoming (like a quickened sunrise) a part of my age's 'neighborhood'.

Sadly, I've been through this before. But it was different.

I remember the AIDS epidemic. At the height of it, you would walk down the street with all of your emotional nerves exposed, though trying to act like everything was fine. You knew that at some point someone would say, "Did you hear about ___", "____ went into Hospice", " I don't know what to do with ___'s things". "He has developed Kaposi's Sarcoma. He has dementia."

But in those instances, the breeze in the trees overhead weren't moving across the cycle of life, but were grating against what was wrong. There was no solace in knowing a 24 year old man was soon to die, hadn't begun to touch the life my grandmother was familiar with, that her friends had been familiar with. In truth,

what I've been familiar with.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm trying to embrace this part of life that we all go through. Carmon, who is so depleted by drugs and cancer is planning to sit by her new garden, soon. Can you imagine how wonderful it could be, if the 'bestest' thing you hoped for was sitting next to new plants? Sick or not, young or old, investing yourself in the burgeoning world around you has to be one of the most powerful things you can do.

It occurs to me that as my Grandmother and I walked down those broken sidewalks, and she spoke to me of birds and flowers, and told me through her stories that I was as valuable as anything in her life, she was investing in a brand new world, was shaping me and holding me, even unto this moment as I sit telling her story to a 'machine' she couldn't have imagined.

Maybe we are crayons, rubbing up against new life, shading it; defining the lines. Maybe we see the black frame that encompasses the picture and say, "Walk over it.".

Morning

I am not a morning person.

As I get older and my ideas change, I wish I were.... but let me state again.... I am not a morning person.

Nonetheless, this week my manager has found it important to have me at work by seven (Yes, that one vehicle in the parking lot... you know, the red pick-up?.... is there simply for a Peace Lily.)

If I'm to be there at seven, I have to be up by 5:15 at the latest. It's dark then. Dark used to mean bright lights and loud music. Now dark means; where's my soda, cigarette's, pants and the dog? Because we have to either walk or play.

At six in the morning we usually walk, and oh, what glorious walks they've been these past two mornings. This morning I just stopped for the sound in the trees. It was so unexpected Meander just stood there with me as I listened.

The birds are coming back and they are feisty. I've never heard them like this before. They are insistent and strident and loud. There is one song I've heard only occasionally, but I come to think it's from a Robin.... singing some weird, "I'm here. Where are you', thing.... but it's so full and liquid in the hearing. There were other songs... many other songs... and when you listened you heard call-backs. All that communication, just in sound.

As we stood and listened I saw the sky over the lake. The sun had a good way to go before cresting, so there were only dusky blue clouds creating a comma in front some clear, pink and lavender sky... far out. Mostly, it was dim.

The thing that I noticed was that as I stood there and took in the sound and the sky and the water, which was only a lazy lapping... I could ( somewhat) hear traffic, but it didn't matter. What I was truly, quietly 'witnessing' as I stood there with Meander, was what the world has always been no matter what we've etched upon it.

You think about what's happened in Japan, close to the sea.... caused in part by the sea. I imagine as people sit amongst the rubble and contemplate, fear and try to realign their future, they hear the birdsong... see the dawning sky. When you are in that much pain and confusion, does the sound and sight of it offer certain solace because it's one thing you know or sorrow because it's something you know that goes on forever without you?

I have reason to think that my life might get better, but I don't think it would matter.

There is wisdom in understanding that every spring the Baltimore Oriole will stop by a park in a northern suburb before going on to his summer home. That the Robins will be everywhere. The that Barn Swallows will be back to our porches, looking for last years home. That Reva might be able to feed her Hummingbirds again.

I might be able to watch the Swallows again, thanks to a friend. I might be able to do many things, but it's sweet to know that in the end, nature will out.

Trying not to leave before I leave...

I'm trying not to leave before I leave. I'm talking about my home, of course, and moving which I must do.

I'm trying to remember before memory is all I have, what the lake sounds like from the bathroom. It sounds like wind. Not water.

As I walk Meander out the back door and down the steps, past the cement duck, the pot of two year old grass broken during the blizzard, around the stairs and on to the gangway, I try to see things. Is Pepper the dog on his porch? What is the water like today? The sky? Has anyone left anything new on my potting bench, the one that will likely remain when I am gone?

On the beach, chucking-the-ball-chucking-the-ball-chucking-the-ball, I imprint the nature of the waves on something etchable inside me... and notice how the lake bed seems to have changed in one place and sends the waves south, instead of west.

Back home, my porch ceiling is Reva's porch floor and I try to imagine with an open heart what it will be like, months from now... sitting above my old perch while visiting her... knowing that I can no longer go back down the stairs and into the home, that housed me as I went, without a desire to... from inside out to outside in.... twisted and burned and nearly extinguished and then came round again.

As I come to terms with old friends who are now strangers and the anger and hurt they have engendered, I try to remember that we were all damaged early and come to reckoning late... and I don't write the cruel words that match their bitter silence.

Yes, trying not to leave before I leave... because that's what I do. Well, did. Always did. And it's time, now that I may have some inkling why that for fifty-four years I've done it, to stop.

I wrote this in an email to my Dad several days ago..
.........................................

"I heard, not long ago on the radio that until the 1960's doctors believed that newborns couldn't feel pain, and so didn't give anesthetic to them during surgery.

That explains a lot. Why I'm terrified of doctors, pain; why I leave so abruptly when hurt. Why I am so unforgiving.

Still, once you see that, you can't use it as an excuse. You have to factor it in, but I have to take responsibility for some of it."
...........

Born with a cleft palate in 1956. Surgery on day three.

.................

That's not to say that my leaving some people and situations were wrong decisions. But there have been 'leavings' that have always had me wondering.

When Keith and I left Kentucky to come to Chicago, I think I slept as he and Carey packed the truck. Though Chicago was where I wanted to be, Kentucky was all I knew of home.

When the apartment on Bittersweet went south (the home I've loved most), I did my best (Jay was not helping) but I remember laying down at the end of moving day on my mattress on the floor and going to sleep wrapped around Casey the Golden Recliner as if he were a lifeline. Keith and Kevin were left to deal with the aftermath... as I drove a petulant husband north to a cabin in the woods. I didn't see it then, but I had long before left before leaving.

There are people I've left. Much more serious situations, where I've left. To some extent, I'm ashamed. But now I think I have a clue to lead me out of the fear.

..............

My mantra lately has been to face my fear. So far, 'whatever' fear (as the adage goes) has been far greater than the true situation.

...............

I've always felt there was something that happened when I was young that set me on my peculiar path. Therapists are always quick to ask, "Were you sexually abused?".

Emotionally abused, yes. Sexually, physically.... no.

But I believe my body and psyche has remembered all these years what must have been a tremendously lonely and terrifying time in my life when 'superpowers' created great pain and I had no voice, just a cry like all the others so misused.

And so now, I'm trying not to leave before I leave but instead to mark the love of something before it's time to say goodbye.

How to create a Centerpiece/ Define The Day

First. Throw two old tablecloth's across a long farm table making sure they are juxtaposed. Find some ramekins from the kitchen and a string of garland that has been abandoned.



Add a stick and look frantically for something else you can use. Determine that she has brought enough limbs from sold Christmas trees, and start pruning the green stems from them and search for something else that adds interest...



Hummmmmm..... candles.



Add those, and more greens.



Distracted from your work, pet the pouting dog.




Add more greens.



Look at it and find fault. Thicken the greens and add ribbon. Hear Robin say, "It's beautiful!". Being an artist, it's not... to you.



Decide to complete it by 'enhancing' the ugly chandelier.



Whether you realize it or not, you've created a beautiful backdrop for a lot of people who were otherwise looking at a bleak Christmas, for one reason or another.