Author: cborsello

Jersey Girl, born on the beach.

Memory Day

How does memory interfere with change? Am I trying to accomplish a similar situation or evoke a same-satsifaction response when I ‘threaten’ to change? I want to think I’m into new thought & new ideas but all around me are memories – mine or someone else’s.

I kept my bureau full of bowls for two years. They are lovely to behold, handy to put odds into, it’s easy storage & access. Two days ago I rounded the Goodwill & Dollar Store to effect a different look & now my bureau is a different tableau – a meditation on familiy instead as I dug out the few photos I have of my people & put them up: the Dad I never knew, my dead sisters, my dead Mom, some former me’s & others purported to be on the planet (rare of contact & lacking in content.)

I attended Unity in Venice. Yes, I know I said I’d never go back, but Memorial Day & all that. It was a beautiful Memorial Day service & the head of the school for 19 years was treated to a slide show of many memories, the grown children she had cared for there with hugs & balloons.

All of this seems to have chugged my brain into contemplating change. One woman I met was trying to sell her house but the market is dead sluggish here. Her lament included concerns about how her dog would deal with it. This took me one more gear lever into how much some of us enjoy caring for others or feel so responsible to hold them in stasis where we also are held.

Routine is boring, but comfortable in its way. Yet still, we need change, different, new, other, movement! I am wanting to be about changing my behaviors. I am impatient with those who will not to change. I see people wearing down a groove they settle into & then bitch about for the longest time. Of course I do it too. Don’t you?

AIthough I engage in behaviors requiring sameness – I need to engage in being alive. Sameness only ensures existence.

This Unity did not offer any new thought or any sentences that evoked a jump-up-&-run-to-do-it response. It was “nice.” Tradition is “nice.” It’s no longer what I am after or what I want to be about & the bestirrings of change are restless in my gut. I feel them. I will obey them. I must, or I will rust in the fields of my comfortable life, content, not contending.

This is how beginnings manifest for me: that rumbling in the distance I take for thunder, the darkening of what is already here – a light piercing through of a quality as yet my eyes cannot perceive. Here it comes again.

Soon it will be ‘here it is’ instead.

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Meditation Return

I understand meditation as a discipline. I find after years of “knowing thyself” that I don’t do discipline well. If it is self-imposed, & on certain topics, yes, it appeals & then I’m kind of ADD about it. I was that way once when I wished to change my life. I sat in morning meditation at a small table, in a jack chair, a single candle & stick of incense lit, a specific theme to revisit.

I had amazing experiences as my cats wound around my knees & begged attention: I was sitting stilll! Why was I not petting them?! Then they would settle & watch. I’m sure my flickering aura was enough to entertain them.

I would stand after reading my prayer, sitting with it awhile, writing on it. I would dress & walk out onto the golf course I lived on, to a specific tree along a fairway. I would dance my Qiqong Five Dao Yin Prescription Exercises there using the tree as focus.

After a year, I left Nashville & headed southwest in a changed vehicle, with my new puppy, camping & finding beaches & taking lunch breaks for odd foods. My adventure.

I plan changes again in about a year, tho the only specific one at this moment is likely leaving Florida & likely returning to New Mexico, but north this time, near Questa Valley.

Recently I was asked about a bucket list & I had nothing to say. Since that gathering, I have revisited all the shoulda/coulda/woulda’s: I want a house of my own, I want a beagle (a beagle?), I want to go on a writer’s retreat & explore doing nothing but writing for hours & days. I want a place to dream in color.

I no longer have the jack chair, so I sit on the Kokopelli pillow. I fold my legs which, later, will take focus & concentration to unfold. I pet my cat who says the very same things: You’re sitting there doing nothing, Pet Me! as she threads around my knees & under the table I am folded in front of. I write bits of prayers & realizations & somehow do not think of breakfast. The Qigong has not yet found a tree although there are hundreds here & I live across a parking lot from a jungled mass of greenery.

My Circle has not yet formed up. The faces are not yet clear. tho some approach to check out the setting. I may need to change shapes from a circle to a star.

As you can see, ironing out needs to occur. But there is a tall palm tree just outside the door & my garden just under the steps. The light breaks the same. The silence invites re-entry. The changes need to be made.

It is time to love change enough to invest in it.

Cha-ching!

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Post Midnight, Pre Daylight

This Brand New Day

Tho we are older than we know how to be

our minds constant in childhood

in Wonder & Wholeness,

tho a blank sheet of paper tingles with expectance,

while swinging our feet from bed to find soft slippers 

brings our entire system into alliance with energy…

The years have shaved our dreams

with thin shivs

potent in airing out poofed-up problems.

These will come-round again no doubt

worries are sparkly-somethings-shiny

we follow into doubt.

And all below the bone & gristle,

in between the white & red cellular composites

Our eyes record, our ears take note

our feet tread familiar paths.

We pick up used dreams & lay them once more down.

—–

The seldom rain arrives

there is so much moisture here that to have it 

fall from skies above is an elemental excess

yet one we so enjoy: the quiet it draws over the land

panting in heat exertion

the plants so open to light open even more for moisture…

Each leaf a cynosure – how is this so?

the light, so bare & bold & bald,

so daily in presence

takes its upstage position

watching the scene change, darken, wash itself cooly

with wet.

that slippery place where life bursts

from the sweet stupor of heat

the dimming blur where secrets

unfold & seeds soften &

we start from new once more.

—–

We women cannot run from blood

for life is bold with it, rife with it

nourished & depleted in balance by it

Blood moves through us & sometimes from us

in cities & colonies of both growth & dying

We bring blood with us to everything we do!

Indeed, keeping company with blood is all we have

being such avid containers of its living, breathing presence.

It pains to bleed but then from blood we bear our secrets out & they are vivid in disclosure, obvious & quite disconcerting.

Concerning.

We bleed from our thoughts but bear our births with stoicism or screams

The either/or of choices.

I bleed no more of body

but Blood’s rich mystery still carries me into entryways where birth is mine to repeat,

Depend upon it!

—–

Faint voices carry through the open door

Unlike the rain which keeps itself to itself

Falling apace in a steady, focused fashion

A known mission & so fulfilled.

The voices thread, words indiscernible

Mood unknown

I cannot bring them to understanding

As these words grow on the page in their own shy sigh,

Blossoms upon blossoms, a Florida flower

Which, just when you cannot think it to bear one more petal, brings out a tiny white star to share.

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Good Morning, My Friend

I am musing on what we do for life: what we will do for life. On what it means to be a human, to have talents unexpressed, to live a betrayed life where our air is tainted for money, our food the same, our housing untenable, our transport distilled from earthblood. We live where every pleasure has a razor edge of profit scraped from it, profit lining another’s pocket. I see them grinning like the comic long-jawed jester wearing a herringboned cap with two points topped in bells. That simple smile becomes a grin, a rictus, the teeth sharpen to incisors of serrated & saw-toothed ivory.

I feel the jaws close about at times; I am shaken like a dog-toy, by emotions: people suffering hurts me, too; people sick make my hands twitch to reach out & erase pain; bloody bruises weep & mew for salves of crushed herbs, cool & soothing. Howling children grasp empty hands, eyes crusted shut.

We give ourselves to life eagerly, bones bared for chewing through to the marrow. We are walking appetites, voracious & calling aloud for satisfaction. We want. We want. We do not even quite understand, but we want. We whine for love, we are numb with its lack; that longing fills us like music, we choke on it, but we breathe it in with a frisson of eager satisfaction. And even in that tiny satisfaction we are sated, We think we have returned to balance, we sign our names in tears to the contracts we agreed to keep.

I turn, I don again the body almost erased by sorrow, fled of its shadow of grace. I flex my mind, presuming feathers & wings & claws for feet. I wriggle in, & the claws become toes, the feathers skin, the wings bone.

This is what I do for life. This is my fate, my borrow, my bond: the reason I exist, the words I eat for breakfast, leathery bacon & silken eggs, tangy salt. The day remorselessly forms up around me: work & play & movement; air & earth & sky.

I am deboned & then restored. 

The morning is music unheard, the sun forming lyrics unsung. A beautiful day emerges from the formless night-dark promise. The day is a  purse of riches I may spend or save & jingle with a thought.

My heartbeat is thunder, & if I am still enough, my eyes pulse in its rhythm. 

I live. I endure. I am.

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2:30 A.M.= Worry Time

With my old job at Unity, I woke regularly at 2:30 a.m. thinking about what needed to be done. No matter how many lists I’d made that day, one more chore popped up that dragged me from the sea of dreams to itch in the sand.

With the new job, this does not happen much: I sleep & wake early – maybe at 4 – but I rise & check the national news via the slant of my weird X account which rolls from atrocity to the fun antics of emus & pandas.

Right now, I’m awake bearing down on tax season. I delay paying taxes every year in the hope someone somewhere somehow will abolish this illegal activity. I read how 80,000 tax staffers have been fired (& are likely awake right along with me now) but I am still going to owe money. Now that I have read what that money has been used for – to measure how irregular spiders on concaine spin webs (& how much of that stock in trade went to grins & giggles?), to sew pride flags in Myanmar for parrots & all the other mystery projects the minds of grinners/gigglers can stock in trade…

Once upon a time I figured the money was funding bombs & death-stars. Irregular webs seem the lesser evil, but still.

I’m not struggling to buy sandals, but I’m working part-time now & upkeep rises. I’m not investing in the medical “industry” or needing surgery or dreading more teeth being pulled, but I have concerns about funding my favorite pumpkin flax cereal which has risen to $7/box & my occasional tin of Altoids risen from $1.29/tin to over $3, after which I worry about just throwing away tin trash. After all, I’m still paying for the teeth that were extracted two years ago now & within one payment of finishing off my 2018 taxes for which Wells Fargo has assiduously charged me $50/month usury on a $49/month payment.

The system was always upside down but I did not contort myself over it. I just put my nose against the slowing grindstone & my shoulder to the spinning wheel & carried on for eleven other months without waking over money, just other stuff. Now that I see the sheer ridiculousness of where “my money” has gone, I take longer to pat down the nag of where I’ll borrow the cash from this year to stuff cash into Uncle Sam’s capacious pockets.

I would love to be even up with life: to not owe but to go on my merry way without April 15th bearing down on me at 2:30 a.m. I hear the ding-ding-ding of the red & white gate arms slotting across the road – the one where the pothole from 1955 lurks as my tax dollars have been used to fund fright wigs for Great Danes or some such.

Let’s get this thing straight: either IRS is illegal (as hinted at for years & now swimming into solidity like the “yes” on the Magic 8-Ball surfacing) or I owe legitimate funding to pay for some fresh tar on Myrtle Ave.

USA, make up your collective mind. Give my money – and it IS my money – to North Carolina neighbors & cut the crap or quit it!

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Just. Add. Water

Another midnight awakens me, shouldering aside sleep to assert time’s passage. The cat assumes her bed-by-the-door & watches me pull out the computer to write after penning a letter. The thoughts will emerge, clarified by caffeine as I carefully sip on heat & sweet.

As my third year here begins, I find the treasure chest of travel washed up on the beach where I started from so many years ago. Those years have lost their weight: too many now to hold me back – the level has slipped to post-apogee; the downhill is apparently required. This body is ready for the vast slide down into limitlessness. I’ve earned my way uphill enough.

Here, the earth is smooth, bonded & bounded by water just below & all around. Here the crystals are seashells, fragile containers all. Yet treasure chests wash up on the beaches, dreams & drums therein…

I don’t question this stirring anymore. I don’t move lightly into the downhill rush of my lifelong avalanche for change. I don my swim gear & slip on in, knowing when I arrive on mountains I will need new clothes. I am certain of their provenance even as I recognize I know nothing about the process, only the results.

My vision board manifests. Some things I know for certes, I want a dog with silky ears & a bold cat unafraid of shadows. I want writing & friends & tables in between holding savory food. I want poems & a window seat to read them in, vistas to view, trees to love, green grass to nourish these tired eyes. I know all I wish is held nearby, waiting to burst over me in light’s altogether surround.

Yesterday I ran out of current: my phone left unplugged lost all charge, my computer had one tic of power, my Kindle two. I worked out in a flurry of strength reborn after a bout with a pelvis refusing to extend itself to allow me to stand straight, a time of wearing two pain patches, swallowing my last prescrbed extra-strength aspirin saved for such a moment, from unrolling the yoga mat to stretch on my bedroom floor, wondering WTH this came from. Wondering if I’d ever become anything other than a blob of planned obsolescence.

But I woke without pain & raced to the gym to wrestle with resistance, realizing I had one more day of triumph to go. I blew through an unexpectedly contentious day at work somehow repeating Monday in its business & demand. I did 14 laps in the pool at the Y without stopping & laid in the sun 20 minutes more before driving home to plug everything back into the walls where mysterious electricity is to be found. I faded into sleep at 8:30 to reawaken at midnight’s stroking.

I feel sleep closing my eyes again, now 2 a.m., after a letter & a blog. At this hour I can feel change gathering, change I’m sidetracked from during daylight’s immediacy. I am comforted by the thoughts insomniacs do their part to knit it all together. I recharge the mask I’ll wear all day doing that earning thing yet again. I list the bills to be paid when the earnings arrive tomorrow. I realize all scheduling has shifted to divine time – Daylight Savings be damned.

This is the life I’ve chosen for now. Was there ever anything else?

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Conducting a Review

There seems no “conducting” about one, to me. It seems to simply unroll in front of me – a memory of an experience, a thought of years past, word of an old friend who represented an era for me. Thoughts that bring me into others which I better understand now.

The items to review (come under review?) seem to crowd up with the mistakes, errors, etc. of just about everything in the known world I could be accused of, with more than a few in the queue.

But now I can be bolder & call forth (call into review?) the goodies – the shy ones in the back, the collage of goodness I keep tossing stuff into. I do good in this world. I see you as a force for Good in this world.

Only know my mind seems fixed on selective memory, but wanders in other vineyards all the time… The memory right on replay, not even having to push a button. Which is a fancy way to say I remember every detail.

Re-member. Putting it all together again. Re-view. Seeing with new eyes.

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A Handshake With Death

This’ll be a disturbing blog for some. I don’t mean for that.

I had to get AI to generate me a photo. I don’t look like the woman in the picture. Maybe Death doesn’t look like that either.

I may never have been as serious about death as others. I’m not sure. I am pretty serious about life for the most part but it’s life in the moment that provides a spark. Dying isn’t devolution of life. Dying is kind of like a propeller. Lower it into the water of life & everything agitates.

Lately, I have heard of many suicides: voluntary deaths. If life is a gift, isn’t this “re-gifting”?

And for those who gifted you with life – parents/friends/teachers/etc., isn’t this a slap in the face? But a slap is also a wake-up – it’s what we do when someone goes faint, no? A little smack can refocus & bring meaning into fadeout.

Death is almost universally misunderstood & feared. But the only way to escape death is to experience it as what it really is: the introduction to eternity. Can human mind grok eternity? Not really, no.

This 3D construct is not a truth of reality, it’s a simalacrum at best. We adopt death like an exotic pet, keeping it in a closed room where we can take a quick peek to see what its doing, tossing it the occasional bone by thinking about it, experiencing peelings of it when life gets slippery. We pet it gingerly when things go raw…but when it growls, we quickly take back the hand.

I couldn’t tell you where death got such a bad rep & bad rap. Go forth & multiply is to imprison someone in our DNA. Progeny are seldom all they’re expected to be. Everything ends, so does it die? Not really – think of all the songs you still sing, jokes you still tell, the repetition of phrases Mom always said, or Dad. Think if all the do-overs keeping ideas alive & likely distorted. If you aren’t Original Mind, how dare you repeat? It’s always in your own language & not what the speaker was saying for the most part.

Thing about life is we want quality! We want to live our best life, find our largest expression, enable our most humongous dream, spread wordwide wings & fly. I know so few who do that & most of these are the ones facing death.

It’s harsh to get to the end & look back to see no shadow.

So, to death, a handshake. Just got your nails done, too, I see. You think you’re gonna hold me down? You think you’re gonna (h)arm-wrestle me? You’re just the key I need to go blasting off into universe & light up Source Itself! Like I recognize you, everyone will recognize me.

I have a few more appointments in Samarra. But I’m well worth waiting for!

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One Misty Moisty Morning

Take me here, who once was there

no begging or burning, just bliss

Cooly touching skin, each hair alive, enthroned upon the next

the leaping stars in my eyes focus all-at-once on everything

The carpet of red (that fabled entry)

Somehow, another morning

Dare I blink? The day so delicate

framed in momentary stillness

there is only where-to-go

No where-of-before nor whereof beyond

The mourning doves sing counterpoint to all there is

This hour, made of mist & wonder

each flower a star unique in potential

how to describe color laid upon light?

that 3D standout of beauty made tangible

on the thread of beginnings

a bead to the wear – first light of the day…

The tree spirals into the sky, hungry to touch

limitlessness; be-stilled by air & certain light

Solid in its earth yet momentous in potential

where growth unhindered trembles.

Carol Borsello – 1/19/25

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Consciousness

In the blogstreams I follow, this word appears often, preceded by so many others: abundance consciousness, gratitude consciousness, unity consciousness…I could go on & I’m sure you could add your own words there as well. Yes, these all work for people in their ways.

My vote is on regular old consciousness – the one that the nuns drilled into me as 2×2=4. three branches of functioning government, Alaska not being connected to the contiguous USA.

I went to Walmart yesterday & now will Go There No More. The entire place is third world mercado. I asked ten people about where to find pie shells. I was directed (silently as none spoke English & after deep consultation with cell phones – one clerk handing the unit to me indicating the “search” box) to yogurt, walked to breakfast meats with a flourish, taken to the bakery, to frozen pizza & to the pasta shelves. My single English-speaking helper (#11) said “no place but the ice cream freezer.”

After awhile, even tho it was the end of the day & “my dogs were barkin,'” & I was pushing a cart the size of a VW, it became a kind of Where’s Waldo Quest: how many people does it take to find a pie shell to make quiche? Walmart is now officially not the place to go if you need to ask a question, unless you’re collecting answers for grins & giggles & willing to go walkabout for goods.

I stopped at Publix across the street & got a couple. Come by later for a slice.

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