Author: cborsello

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.

This One’s For You, Lover

So, I’m in & out of our relationship like playing “Go In & Out the Windows.” Each time I returned, it was more precarious, tentative, tenuous, & shorter than the last. Yes, just as it seemed I would settle into a routine, I bucked it off, backed out & wore out hinges closing the door.

I believe that you love me. But this is not permitted as evidence anymore. And I know you tried hard, but I’m a Contrarian when it comes to love & cannot do sex by appointment as such. I’m still stupid enough to believe love is holding hands in the car, but we never even went anyplace.

Being turned off in a relationship physically emerges from mental shutdown. We were dangerously abbreviated in conversation. You weren’t interested in looking into what I was talking about. I got boring in explaining my “out there” ideas every time. Research is so simple, conversation so elegant. But not happening on either level between us. After the first rush of teaching, it becomes tiresome to repeat instead of converse. And of course there is very little you can share about your life.

That there was little interest disappointed me deeply. With so little in common, it’s no wonder I felt pushed to where I did not want to respond. Turning on to a person is mostly between the ears & not the legs at this point, tho it surely started out thataway!

With no place to go, we wound up here.

Visions

Easter has been canceled for 2020

A day of renewal, in renunciation of the Dark, the Light Lord’s return. The old is easily left behind in times such as these. Does it need to be remembered or renewed? The new seems possible in the rebirth of all.

Last Easter I wrote a blog about my childhood holidays, about spirituality, family dinners, earthly ramifications of a returning Spring. All have been put into the polisher together to emerge free from rough edges.

In this year’s blog, the Easter Bunny coughs lightly & dons a mask before putting eggs in the basket. These are seriously different circumstances. The immediate & draconian effects of lockdown on population, the economy, the children…oh & so much else… is unknown.

What at first started as a “holiday” from routine became a forced time-out where our faces are hidden & we’re herded into lines & placed 6’ apart in order to stay alive. Now, with the problem tapering into an annually-returning possibility of death, these measures seem stupidly draconian.

Roseanne Bar says this virus is tailored to wipe out the Baby Boomers. I am one, so I listened up. But I still don’t believe it will take me along on its morbid cross-country path. Even Death would be arrested if he stepped out of line! Undoubtedly, this is a wicked scourge upon the land.

But I see it is as a coalition of fears. I am not sure why we fear death at all – not like you can put luggage racks on the hearse & drive to Bolivia to get away from it, yeh? But fear has compressed & compromised our vulnerability to naked exposures. We need to return to a quality of life unmarred by it.

How many today sit with their bucket lists in hand, mourning? Or adding items frantically till ink runs dry in their pens. My Bucket List is right now: no obligations, no restrictions, no lack in my life.

This present time revises my future. In planning that future so tenderly, I notice the sun shines right through it. It’s a glow of green on the horizon, growing in hope, faith, charity & knowing itself to be the most of these forevermore.

I get subliminals now, a montage of the past- this is what I’ve perceived as the life flashing before my eyes. Rumor has it this happens with dying. Little but love lasts forever.

I have known pirates who thought nothing of walking me to the edges of planks blindfolded & prodded by cutlass tips as though I might continue perambulating lazily on the water below. I look to the side & see Priest Lake in Nashville where I hiked. I do a massage & I’m in every spa room I’ve ever worked, with the northern light deepening to dusk. I walk a trail & am on the boardwalk in Ocean City, dolphins bobbing just beyond the waves.

While fun, it’s quite startling to suddenly plug into the past this way. I’m tasting Ledo’s thin crust Pizza, sitting in a sticky booth. I’m sipping coffee in one of a million diners, the cup thicker than my thumbs & heavy to lift. I buy bagels & devour them on a bench, watching strangers, early for an appointment. I walk North Park with its fireworks displays, I stand in the uniform of theatre usher with a smile. I smell Fisher’s Fries. I see the white bones of an island rising from ocean as I cross a desert bridge.

Where does this memory trip rise from? Are my cellular memories releasing, squeezing out my past to make room? In experiencing these, I am treated to the many places of my life where visions matter. I rub my eyes & look again.

Horizons Go Horizontal

Facing Beginnings & Endings

I think it is best to learn how to face & save face with these since they follow me like clock hands searching time.

I am surfeit in my pleasures: bread & butter for breakfast, delayed coffee…Boy Howdy! Belly warm & feet comfy, music to one side & an open window with a breeze to the other.

Where will I be a year from now? I don’t know, I just feel the leverage of life prying me loose. Maybe I can find a writer’s camp to work in…but it all starts here. How will I change? I’ll need to be in a bigger town if I’m going. Or out in the desert far from anything but cactus, hopefully with hot water & indoor plumbing.

What I see once again is possibility opening to bid me enter. I want to celebrate with others & write about it. There is much catching up for writing – my proof of life.

What do I want? To laugh, to be respected, to be relied upon, to care for others who will, in turn, care for me.  Sad to abandon the thought of being loved, left on the side of the rode like a suitcase I can no longer sit on with my thumb out.

These are best guesses in this moment & unreliable. I’m not really sure overall.

From the specific to the general…whole populations are moving. Will there be another Great Resettlement? Will America become an ideal again in terms of all of us leaving for a “better place.”

I am gone again. Time to go smaller & less populous? Or be alone in a city? I find I’m content in my own company on good days. It’s at night when the shadows crowd ‘round & I realize I’m not enough for myself anymore.

I thought I had created a refuge here. Pressing words into sentences is my favorite but cannot be my only pastime.

My finger’s on the trigger. Where is the gun pointed?

Company’s Not Coming

As usual, writing is my lone companion, the golf towel to absorb my tears, the faraway smile fading into Cheshire darkness.

I hate to admit weakness. I am emotionally stronger than the average, so it is a distant place to find where I can let myself be this weak.

I seldom ask, mostly as I don’t want to be refused & a bother or be considered a pest. And mostly, asking does no good since people do not understand that an offer can be a cry for a visit or a time not alone. They figure it’s an offer & they all have lives so it’s easier to just say “No” rather than, “Oh, hey, come over. Let’s sit on the porch & talk.”

I keep setting my walls higher. I’ll die alone & be relieved to do so. It’ll be the fallout of a life unexpected.

I used to think I’d be married & otherwise in a beloved state, a member of a pod. I make myself a desirable friend; but that’s just being loved at a distance.

Maybe I’ll – but I don’t even think I can do this – maybe I’ll just withdraw entirely to myself. No more dinners with others, no more asking for conversation or laughter, no more sharing.

I feel like this unwanted, underfoot, misshaped person. I feel like I’m a burden & a PITA. The way out of this feeling is to keep moving along in relationships, ideas & in writing.

So I sit with my real BFFs: a steno pad, a pen with a new refill & lovely writing point. And hey, fueled by tears.

Sad, isn’t it? Or? Maybe not. Could just be Fate it would have been so different & maybe could have been so except it’s where I’m at. Me & my words, closer than my shadow.

And I wish there were some other way to live my life. And it may change still. I sure do believe in miracles, so standing by for one isn’t a bad way to go, I guess.

If not for me, the life lived here would be enough

If not for silence I would have even less to say.

I might have been a wife, a mother, a lover, a friend.

Instead of this-that-is, a might-have-been of any other one of these.