Right & Left: the Space Between

A daytrip resulted in a broken arm. It’s not too long a story – may I start at the beginning? There are funny moments, but you kind of had to be here for those.

I tripped over a concrete parking block (also called a parking stop, a curb stop & more.) It’s that concrete thingie installed in parking spaces . And, in a spasm of ironic humor, it was a HANDICAPPED block – but then, blue is my favorite color. We were in a rest stop near Silver City.

I have a mental vision that my body whipped forward in a crack-the-whip motion, my right arm & my nose landing simultaneously. I have a slow-mo impression of bouncing on the tip of my nose, my head snapping back to have another go at landing, this time fully face-down. I now call it my “asphalt exfoliation.” I could feel my nose dripping blood. Pat, my travel companion, rushed to help me, as did another man but before they could touch me, I growled, DON’T! I drew myself up to a sit, carefully positioning my face forward so as not to bloody my clothing.

Inside, I sent up a fervent prayer, Don’t let it be broken!! I rushed through the door marked Denial in my ringing head. I got myself up somehow, re-entering the bathroom where the water pulsed in a slow trickle. I looked in the mirror & choked. I dabbed carefully at my face with a rough paper towel. I figured, It’s done, might as well go on.

My friend & I continued to Silver, discussing whether to go to urgent care or a hospital. But I was reluctant. I asked Pat to fashion me a Girl Scout sling to support & immobilize my arm. I kept sending up smoke signals of prayer (“not broke, not broke, not broke”) I knew on a deep level: broke for sure. This experience was, after all, a revisit to a 2002 event in which I landed on my right elbow.

We had lunch at an outdoor table as (of course) all indoor venues are closed. After half a tuna sandwich & a fruitless search for a store Pat wished to visit, we stopped at CVS for an arm sling. The passersby in Silver City offered ice, help, care, directions to the hospital… We started home. I was in that space after a traumatic injury. Nothing yet hurt, but I wasn’t exactly planning on breaking out in the Macarena. The ice melted in my lap wetting down my shorts thoroughly, adding a level of comedy…oy! Wet pants on top of everything else.

Since I’ve broken this arm before, at the elbow, I had a preview of the immediate future. I groaned inside as my Medicare card does not include doctor fees, but relied on the fact it does include hospital care. Next piece of irony up: the hospital treated me as an outpatient so I now face bills in four digits for a 15-pound plaster bumper, a 4-pound “ski” to seat the injury into & no fewer than six ace bandages tying the whole thing together. I left hospital with an offer of oxycontin (NO!), a bloody-scraped face which they didn’t even offer to put a cool cloth upon, a CD of the break & a prescription for an orthopedist in Las Cruces.

I barely fit into my tiny car with my cement block arm. I learned that slings of any kind are not forgiving of DD bra size or having a straight neck. I adopted a tilt to balance the weight, learned to meditate about moving no matter how urgent the call to do so. Slithering seemed to work when standing up was involved. Dishes, washing, food prep, dressing, climbing the steps & descending backwards…

Friends gathered every day to help with all of the above. From feeling faraway while up close to my surroundings, I was gathered in a bubble of love & help that brought more relief than tears, tho they were not far behind as it turned out.

I am not even a month after the event. This morning I opened a jar, cut my eggs, buttered toast, washed in the shower (hair, too!). I dressed carefully in real clothes – finally free of the single caftan that I could squirrel into. I am typing with both hands, my right elbow tucked in close to my hip.

The tip of my nose is still pinker. My arm bears a stripe of discoloration which may never fade. My elbow looks like a small ball has been shoved into the joint. The injury – supracondylar transverse fracture of the humerus – heals well under the infrared lamp, constant Reiki & much mental conversation over the future.

My career as a Massage Therapist is likely over with this being the second injury in the same area. A whisper of possibly changing careers in these unusual times has become a steady hum. I finagled a couple of payments for the hospital & the doctor who earned $608 for looking at me, recommending oxycontin, insisting on a CT scan for what he was convinced was a broken nose, then disappearing to peck at a computer behind his decorative mask. (Since a CT scan would provide nothing to enhance what might become a prizefighter’s cauliflower nose,  this I also refused.) Not a bad night’s earnings when it was early on Friday evening with the weekend rushing in. I’m not even gonna talk about the hospital bill. They could have admitted me so the bill would have been covered, after all.

Life & moving on. I am left to do right in future, to repay the care & love I’ve been shown. Soon I will be driving again – maybe I’ll get to Silver City to thank the people there, too.

 

 

Seven Summer Samauri

(2020 Isn’t Even Over.)

 

(1)

Doldrums not dolphins

Lockdown, not “Hey, stop down!”

 I have arrived

In my earliest summer mornings

…I am relaxed…

 Body memory takes me back

Anatomically, a switch fires:

I am hanging clothes for Mom in the backyard,

Alongside the Little House.

 This is experience, not memory.

I can tie it to the other summer mornings on my belt & move on.

(1)a   Sense

I have the Sense that time is playing peek-a-boo

Time meant “life” as we knew it

Before the Ides of March arrived on the 23rd here…when

Time actually became a worthless currency – erased from the face of the clocks.

(What did it matter when we took off our pajamas?)

We had time all over our hands, dripping off, unimportant, schedules erased, through no fault of our own.

It ran off the clock in inky blackness we tried to catch & put back up. Instead we were made to wash our hands of all of it.

Time wasn’t money…but it was worth it.

We backed into not knowing the next of it

Days passed, even cravings vanished eventually, let alone news accuracy.

It began to feel “right” to seal inside – of course I can always say

it’s part of the heat signature, if asked.

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t plan for the world to fall asunder,

At least as I’d known it.

All the bubbles are popping

All the soap operas ushering on their fat ladies with sweeping bows.

Mom always said, “Have six month’s expenses in the bank.” Ah! The description of a dream of my very own!

Between the moments of evolution & the next Emergence of holy life

We stand poised, yet learning by discovery (as always)

You live by your prayers, your wits, your altered (alerted) senses, until you live by habit, by rote; all alike as box stores at the edges of scintillant consciousness.

(2)

Biblical

Again cornered with un-betokened dark news

Clothing myself in worded Psalms!

O, Lord! Added to the  head of the line.

(3)

My Arrival

Is the short reply to a long-awaited answer.

Mystery a lá Alchemy

Finding at the end of “What was I thinking?” a

Long, drawn-out “Ohhh.”

(4)

My Arrival II

A resounding & magical “Amen” to all my prayers

(humble as they were, they were mine)

As a Traveler of Words, I evolve quickly,

Like, with a wish.

(5)

My Arrival III

There is no GPS in heaven – you either know where

You’re going, or you leave.

Some of us agreed to be the leavers

Some of us travel lightly across worlds

In no particular order other than within.

(6)

A Theatre of Words

One letter shy of encompassment –

An Imprimatur emerges in my life

I acknowledge my me as the only one

& thus the best.

My next moments are spent

Tagging the universe & running away.

(7)

I’m Here!

I was waiting for the Light. I was watching it magnify around me

As one by one by solitary one, all the descriptions I might have for it

Melted away to simply standing still.

childhood, Part One

CHILDHOOD: Part One

My mantra was, “I cannot remember the child I was” or all the years of now between then.

She has taken to showing up, slipping postcards of our past under my door.

Yet my memories of her are as foolish and small, hesitant & fearful.

(How I wish I could take them back to uncreate! Urge “Be cool, suave, debonair! All answers lie beyond your patience.”)

I wished to be in reality – as I seemed

In other realms.

If only my environment had prepared an ounce of the pound of me.

 

I recall being tiny

Braids so severe, my scalp stayed taut

Hypervigilance in glasses – blinkered by nystagmus/

Glasses impossible to keep on my nose.

 

I lived an imitation life, so much safer than living my own which was hidden for the foolish moments, hazy on salt air, striped in shadows.

I felt launched, like an episode of Quantum Leap into the Carol life,

Choosing only the stars that spoke loudest save I be missed.

 

I remember cartoons: sporadic family interactions: Reading!

These all indoors, but outside of the house only five long blocks to the beach, where an entirely offset (offshoot?) of me crystallized. And although I knew the beach would be where it always was, I was always grateful to it for being there.

 

Later in life I would remark, “the beach was my mother.”

I remember the beach: coming upon it

Digging into it for shelter; cool sand-silk just touched by sun,

Walking to the water where all smoothed into invitation: sand: sea: sun coalescent, the chanced Kaleidoscope of my life fitting into synchrony: I was perfect right there.

I must have memorized it with my breath.

Here I laid down all weapons, prayed my heart to open;

 here it was clear I was here only to be here – a placeholder

for divinity.

As sure as the reminiscent moon feathering off above.

I re-call the playing light & shadow, even rain, legendary whips of storm.

What I don’t remember is the other 80%.

 

End Part I: Placeholder for Divinity Series

Moving Closer to the Moon

I thought T or C would be my stay-place: my spot to live out my 70’s (which, by the way, I’m just getting comfortable in.) However, now I’m told to move on. And that I’ll move three more times after this one!

There is a total allure to relocating. Higher mountains, closer to the moon, furry pines to breathe, colder winds & much more snow.

Truly, I love the adventure & discovery of life Somewhere Else. I enjoy arrival, the three turns of settling in, the capability to love more, whether friends, a lover or a slice of scenery.

There is much to be said of love: life with it & without it. Oh, not the love of friends, but the Love of that self-offering where shields can be put aside & the whistle of warning becomes a coaxing sound. The dance opens to my steps.

I move away from love towards love. As I reach 72, perhaps I’ll settle  into this decade of 3D time. And still so much to explore.

Are transigence & intransigence the most fallow for me? In many senses & tenses, just “yes.”

The spear of Sagittarius rising arcs across my heart, defining yet another new path. Since 2013, I have lived in Ruidoso, Ocean City, Berlin, West Fenwick, Hillsboro & T or C. That arc is a goad & a lodestar at once.

My goals are to be in a higher elevation, a smaller, welcoming population base, reinventing myself there & renewing my attachment to the terrain of mountains. I want to live more of my dreams aloud with permission from this me through Higher Self.

I see me on a deck, overlooking the play of light on trees, the moon darting between, shy now we are in propinquity. I smell that distillation of fir-scented air & chill, ground from stardust. I walk steeper paths on frosty floors. I grow accustomed once more to bracing cold.

While nowhere near, I am already there…give or take a year.

8/7/20

 

Seahorses In The Rodeo

I have named it: Mask Derangement Syndrome! On my morning walkabout, I used to leave my house like Rocky gritting up the last two steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, “Gonna Fly Now” ringing in my ears. Now I slip out the front door, look both ways & up, then slip around the building for the alley-streets.

I will admit that I wasn’t ready, & then I was. Ready for masking. I knew when I reached the point of not letting it possess me, that I had won my victory. There is a reason why humanity is letting this get to them with such unhinged fear & it cannot be only of this fear.

In The Exorcist, the sound of angry bees was layered into the soundtrack as a subliminal. People were up out of their seats without knowing why, attributing it to the horror of the story. A young girl, possessed by demons… our very spines react in fight/flight. But how much of it was simply our nervous system vs. the sound of angry bees?

A whole world, possessed by fear of a virus born suspiciously of ill intent from a beast of darkness. We aren’t computer programs;  we don’t need constant viral updating & then “vaccine fixes.” (My real computer returns from each Microsoft “update” a bit more befuddled than before.)

While healing is not a business, although it is mistaken for one, it can neither become a whip with which to beat us. We take our chances with illness – we always have. Virulent, mild, all the in-between, all the symptoms & cures have been experienced & taken. What works is a bit of each & more common sense than all else.

Quarantine the sick, the healthy are needed out in the world to help them get better. Stop this masking. Your spit won’t make me sick & mine won’t you. This topic, plus the 6′ distancing are from books about fictional outbreaks, not from the current symptom list.  They were novels.

Sooner or later we all die. If I need to chance the death statistics of this one, I’m up. Because so much out in the public domain is lies laced in with damned statistics.

Can the doctors recover a reputation for truth in medicine if they report the truth of this? Is it worth believing them now when we could not before? When they endorsed Camel cigarettes? Do you believe the hospitals reporting a plague status, or the nurses all dancing in a complicated routine around an IV pole? Do you watch the empty hospital ship motor off while patients requiring isolation are walked in the back door of the local senior care centers to join the general population?

Where are you? My capitulation is announced by the mask on my face. I await the turn of circumstance that will return my world, whatever new scars it bears, back to me.

SEA CHANGE

(The wave, the wave, the second wave is coming.) This may be a pointy thing to take in, but I’ve had eleventy-seven sea changes & headed well over too many waves to number. Occasionally I dove through; at times I dog-paddled up & over; sometimes I jumped straight up & held my nose in case I came down in the crest.

On my walk today, I perused thoughts of where I want to be for the next decade. Answers seemed more available than they were before. Either or both: the veils thin this much or I learned from my “befores” how to choose. A future is an after-burner on the present. When I hit the ignition switch, I’ve always before preferred to know where I will land. It seems less specific in geo-location & only specific in a dream location. My dreams push gently on the bubble I live in.

“Hey kiddo, time to get started to go.” A little tapping on dream doors can haunt the day.

Always I have given my dreams away. Some accepted them. Some found true love instead.

All the Oriental wisdoms say, “your thoughts are your future.” As I walked, I outpictured “future.” I momentarily missed again the wishes that got away, the capes I’ve left on the road in defeat while walking towards the next superpower. None of them have anything on that which is coming.

I fill in the vacuums I create with my personal helpers. I read an angel book once where the advice was to form  Angel Committees to help you get tasks done. It’s time to hearken to Chairwoman of the Board stuff… Even as I write this, I can hear them laughing in the occiput of my head. “There she goes again, making plans! Wait’ll she figures out it’s unfolding in divine order (yet again). But hey, you have to admire her ‘take-charge’ attitude. If you can.”

I think the water is the closest I can get to the visible Air element of my sign.

Excuse me, time to plunge in.

Ta!

 

A Hall of Mirrors



Recently, I compared my life to having lived in a hall of mirrors. There were mirrors that reflected me in beauty, shining. There were mirrors that reflected me as shriveled, dulled. Then it occurred to me they were the same mirrors.

I meanwhile found a greeting card of a woman looking like an “air corpsman’ with a dragon on a hoop on her shoulder. I immediately thought of three women or more I could send this to as statements of our lives. Nurturing dragons is not easy. It is a task brought to the wiser among the women. Dragons ever call for quick thinking.

By these & other omens do I determine my days. I have taken steps to change my home & my energetic signature within it. First the rearrangements to create space. The space becomes organic & begins to grow. The next step in growing is invited in & the energy changes: boom!

So is it not with my life? Refilled over until one day, only new will serve. I am approaching this “new.” As the timelines around me collapse, my life flashes in front of me – a Tarot deck of my own dealing. I spoke elsewhere of seeing my past leap by on its own two legs as I stayed in place in the present. I spoke of doing massage in every room I’ve done massage in – most notably New Mexico & most recently, Delaware. I feel momentarily in that space as I see the room through these eyes.

What’s it gonna be, girl, dragons or mirrors? With what keen beasts will you keep company now that company is shaved away to the barest of minimums as we are trained to keep distances?

Finding the within is worthwhile. My activities of late are what once was called ‘contemplating the navel.’ It is finding the middle lands in me. I have lived from bottom & top chakras so busily. Now comes the time to go back & revisit the middles: relationships, creativity, my re-greening, all flourishing. How long ago did I abandon these to leap with my past over my present into the ever-emergent now?

I might have seen myself go past in one of those other rooms & only now be remembering it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recuerdo

I am tired of my own face.

I cannot avoid mirrors.

Once I was younger; I have never been this old before.

How can I ever find myself, lost so long ago, now bathing in memories I have never had? What made me think I could live alone so long & never be lonely? I can check my closets & my drawers & never find who I am. I can see how I held love at arm’s length. I can feel the bubbling truth of of days & nights with no one nearby.

I may have made a good nun if I could have convinced myself God was enough. I could have been someone’s truth, a shout instead of a whisper. I could have closed my eyes in someone’s arms & rested. But I didn’t quite get it right this life. Not that I regret a word of it, but it might have been so much larger.

I can feel the love spilling out of my heart, I can see the flowers I grew. I could have built cathedrals instead of this beautiful, empty chapel on a hill, open to the wind blowing out candles. I listen to the bells that never rang for me. I re-live the moments I was loved, but these are faint now & lack color.

All the love I had came out my hands as I worked on bodies. All the roads I walked led me here to this now. It would have been different, once. I could have walked forth as a woman who loved a man…instead of the mirrors showing me, they could have showed her.

Instead I have shared with strangers the touch meant for another & each massage I gave could have been an afternoon in bed stroking Love. We learn each day what is needed in its time. I was born for leaving yet if I had only stayed.

Shadows & whispers gather with the dusk. Another night, another book to read; a clock to watch. It might have been I would have recognized love had I known what I was looking for.

I have done well. If I enjoy where I am, am I lost really? If I choose to live with ghosts & memories, am I in lack? They do comfort me, insubstantial as they are. My lucky life lived from the outside in, late now to bear this fruit. I will watch this careful blooming watered with salt. I will keep the control I’m famous for, except until I can no longer do this.

I could say I don’t want this heart anymore. I want a transplant to a woman who still has life in her womb… or I can stand by these choices & simply go on.

Mother, lover, woman, wife. All the storms I never reaped the rainbows from condensed to my present. I see them in the corners where I have chased them. It was not my fault, why this guilt? I learned early not to love, that I was unworthy of it, that it would never find me if I only hid hard enough.

Tomorrow I will be stronger. Tomorrow the mirrors will know me better. I have not let go of the dream tho it may seem so. I will be watching for it all now & when it comes to me, I will never let it go.

 

 

Arms Open

Time is the Great Engagement we make with life. To attain earth, you must agree to obey Time – you get to return as a tick or a tock & the rhythm of your life is set.

For example, I have six clocks but three mirrors. Only recently, in entering the no-time of lockdown, I note the pressure Time wants to impart. Fortunately, I can withstand all of it. I realize I could do a better job at this if I were to adopt a regimen which rubs very closely to “regime.”

I’m enjoying freedom in a more engaged & altruistic state of self. Prevented from Service to Others, I return to Service to Self. I can be gentle to myself; I can be kind as I would be to a stranger. I can offer alternatives to me just as I would offer choices to another.

I am still reacting to an implant, a blocker, but it is melting down in the new vibration that I shift to. Cosmic shift. I made it through the Matrix & Creation both…this far. Some of my lives were hijacked but I am coordinating more carefully with life, now.

I know the blocker was the price for admission & I knew it coming in. I also knew this lifetime I would grow out of it. Best keep on with it, yeh?

Read, Write, Learn, Repeat

I know I have written up this topic before…not that I could show you where & when in the moment. All’s I know is this exact thought hass occurred to me periodically all my adult life. So I will write about it yet again, let the definitions flow – the ones of how I define things now as compared to / repaired to at other times.

It has taken this long to grow into this me. And she still looks over her shoulder at the other Me’s, wondering if this growing thing is okay. Well, it may have been easier before, but I’m not really sure how much so. Simplistically, each place I was before I needed to be in. Like later, I’ll read this & think it immature & weenie if compared to the place I am then.

I came into this life knowing exactly what I wanted & even more exactly, how to become that. I got sidetracked by so many events, relationships, suffering joy & enjoying suffering. I grew up with metered laughter when I knew what was missing was unmitigated joy. (I go for “relatively jolly” now. }

I was too early groomed for the life my mother lived. It was her best life & she couldn’t think of anything better to imbue in me. She gave me the basics I needed to be myself. What I was trying to remember was overlaid with her tracks. When I followed them, I got to her life.

As a child, you do not abdicate control – you do not really have control as to those around you. My generation (Baby Boomers) was kind of subjective to parental whims & laws, societal “rules” & a scholarly “obedience” that included very little learning.

What a prep course for the 21st Century!

I was, I think, peculiarly malleable. Craving only approval, I was repeatedly crushed in that regard. I still hesitate to send my roots to the center of the earth, just in case I’m not to her liking. When I next check in about this very topic, I expect to be over that.

I can take it.

I most recently am in the process of learning to be easier in my life circumstances, both less driven (by accomplishments) & more driven (to accomplishments.) I am learning the real violence to others is not to try to teach them how I do non-violence, but to let them live out theirs. That can hurt.

Yet this comes from the sure instinct finally fully supported, that I cannot change anyone’s course through direct direction. We must all understand the immanence of self-responsibility. I believe I came her with the intention to recover from all the other lifetimes. This one’s a culmination, folks. I don’t have to come back unless I want to & that’s huge. All these words are in service to the platitude “Live & Let Live.”

I am witness to the pressures of other’s wishes as matched with my self-expectations. This is, however, what refined me to my current humanity.

After reading There is a River by Thomas Surgrue, I demanded of myself to “create no Karma!,” Then I went about pushing Karma forward with my damn nose as what I did not wish to create, I experienced.

Holy Hell!

If I had to define my place right now, I’d say I just might be getting the punchline of the joke life was made for me & others while we were watching TV. Thing is, it’s not until now I’ve been able to simply laugh about it – this releases the connection to it in a delightful way.

My apologies smear the hurt I’ve caused; they don’t erase it. I cannot erase the pain I’ve etched into another’s heart or soul. I can only heal my own.

It’s a marvel, but I’m learning how to be the I AM I came here to be.