Category: Blogs

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.

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.

POWER, FORCE [& LOVE]

There’s a Ren & Stimpy song where they sing of too many candles on the cake for a birthday, of the fire department standing by. Were I to have a cake with candles, I’d need a sheet cake so as not to be a fire hazard & somebody who counts higher than I dare these days.

I wrote this back on my birthday which is already more than a half-year ago. Happy Birthday, Me! Indeed, happy birthday from my island in timespace, from the celebratory bundle of cells & thoughts that is my Be Here Now.

I was told recently I am quite immersed in power & force. Funny that this might be a fresh insight & not one anyone has heretofore shared to my face. Now I could go a bit irritated or even drippy with insult. On reflection, I see it as a good insight & depiction of my need to have it my way. But anybody out there who doesn’t want it their way can stand in a very short line, yeh?

I’ve described my own self as “imperious.” As a child, my Mom called me “Queenie” and meant it. No nobility of note here…just an American woman of Italian persuasion. I love laughter, good conversation, great food & the sensation of travel. And I’ve arrived here at 71 with limbs intact, a cheerful demeanor & a plethora of skin tags.

I know the Power & Force thing about me to be true, tho. It fit right into an open slot on the description board. It explains so much! Yet I started as an Independent in a nest of Catholics, a spirit malleable only to a point. It wasn’t easy, but they never penetrated all the way into my soul tho they knocked it about a bit.

I thought I was offering a bare-knuckle friendship. But more than once I was stirring a fishwife stew, hollering at him as though I had a relationship involving a ring.

So what’s the problem with Power & Force? Should I give in to the black pearl of life alone & despairing? There are times this terrible beauty is most attractive. Should I stop helping or offering the graces I also otherwise possess? No, not happening. And if my lifestyle of success, blessing & laughter doesn’t suit you, go dress somewhere else.

Yeh, I’m my own Cult. Yeh, I’m aggressive & righteous for my personal brand-name. Yes, I’ve dared the fields where angels feared to roam. I was loved into life, appreciated by others who dared to do so.

I’m a real woman, imperfect of sight & bearing. I do Tinkerbell as a nuclear device. I accomplish what is mine to do (once I figure it all out.) I learned early to dog-paddle & never surrendered it for swimming aloud. I can tuck Power & Force into my superpowers pack & move on.

Wish me tame trails & New Mexico skies, the suggestion of rivers at a distance, of life beneath the life on top. Your qualifications to handle power & force are your own; I won’t disturb these.

Come, my Kingdom, my mismatched blessings! Come lovers & liars, I will rock your world!

My Sister Died On Her Birthday

Which I thought preternaturally tidy. She always was a tidy woman. I wonder what will happen to her things, to those remainders of life left in drawers & desks, to shoes unworn at the end since she zipped about in a “mobility chair.” Another oxymoron.

My daughter was ready to go out to Arizona from Virginia when she heard Aunt Teri was in hospice care. But when she called with flight arrangements, my brother-in-law said, “She passed last night.” And we have heard nothing since.

For all her computer skills, either Teri left no plan, no will, no scrap of “here’s who you contact if” paper. But I’m not one to talk about it since I’ve nothing either except conversations with friends none of whom would know how to contact my kid. Guess I’d best get something in writing.

Hell, I’ve barely enough to live on, let alone save for term insurance. I keep telling people “just toss the body down some abandoned elevator shaft.” And I’ve moved into an apartment built over a former Jiffy Lube with my unit atop the pit – a simplification if I’ve ever heard one. I don’t want to be a burden, I don’t want to cost anyone anything, I don’t want to have my face on a jar next to the restaurant registers with “Help bury this woman!” crayoned atop it. Yet this may still come to pass.

Take this month for example – rent increase, insurance due, deferred car payment impossible tho the bank said I could do that in February. I wonder how people do it…same as me, on a fixed income but a floating tsunami of a bill lurking on the horizon. Yeh, sure, I’ve got $500 somewhere, let me check the sock drawer. I’m counting on Valentine’s Day business to float me up n over like some innertube on the vast swells of a cashiered life.

I’m running for office here in town. The other candidates have 4-5 4 x 8′ signs all over the street corners – vote for me!! I have a $20/week ad I’m running, cleverly changing the lines. I was gifted $166 for my campaign. No epic Trump battles of the wallet bulge here.

So, whatever. I move along, steady as a plough horse crossing the field to the barn. I have food to eat & enough to pay the regular bills. I’ll put the insurance on one of the credit cards, grit my teeth & make payments. Maybe I could send the other card to my daughter & say, just charge it, honey.

Hope St. Peter doesn’t run credit checks. Gives new meaning to that old song, “I owe my soul to the comp’ny sto…”

Zebras

Holidays / Holydays

Like herringbone, the concepts fit into a deepening pattern. Whether we wear it outside depends on the size of the bars, perhaps.

What I read is so different from what I hear in the marketplaces. I understand the concept of Agora now – going among the people to gather their thoughts & reality.

Of course, much of what is spoken is politics today. Once upon a time, I’m sure it was religion. Overall, it might be so much more amenable just to discuss recipes.

I still feel I’d like to solve everyone’s problems, resolve the discussions with “my” enlightenment & encourage polite discourse. My single venture at this resulted in total denial by listeners. “That’s got to be photoshopped.” “He never said that.” Not even a sliver of possibility was allowed. Everyone now follows the media’s aversion to research, I suppose. Yet I’m wiser to opt for speaking to like thinkers – while I can’t help but think how much benefit there would be even in basic courtesy among the rest.

Some while back I read that if the Founding Fathers had to debate the points in the Constitution now, we would have no such document.

Could Jefferson have conceived of WIFI? Washington, computers? I secretly smile when I read Trump “writes letters” to Kim Jong Un & Putin recommends his staffers use typewriters for important information.

What price technology? Does it make truth more reliable? Ah, there’s the age-old rub: What is Truth?

Disillusionment has ever lined the outer limits of speaking beliefs which will not seem to manifest. But now it occupies Center Stage.

If it’s more satisfying to identify as a zebra, well, we live in a time when you can simply do that.

Which leads us back to herringbone.

Surviving Life

The beginning is farther away than ever, what with another birthday lining up. I don’t remember the beginning anymore, so much in between is gone as well. How many doorways have I passed through in this life? How many lives have lived me inside out to get me to move? How many put spurs into my sides if they thought I’d best go right then. They never told me about how to keep up with the pinball game: or how loud the pings could ring. Spirit has me on sonar, radar, “lov-ar” & much else. Spirit has turned my stumbles into discovery & my haltings into handwritten considerations of note.  

I keep on telling you I’m the ‘point n click’ gal.

My memory serves in a nonspecific way – tho at times things line up. But these are more holistically geosynchronous –  being in the right place at the right time. Little is contrived anymore. Who’s ready for Truth, really? My truth may not even be in the game, but I’m all for Truth. I like designating my memory to my phone cuz if the phones fail someday, I won’t need the numbers.

I am a Cassandra: a Gift so few hear lightly. I cherish those who do. Truth is the original Playdoh®. I keep my eye on the prize, but I have visions to account for.

One night on a dark drive down a two-lane paved road in Tennessee, my ex & I almost drove into a large body of water. The downhill was making me nervous, I slowed & our headlights caught the black lake in tree-edged shadows. Events like this make me mindful.

I got this far & gray to prove it, yet I’d be hard-put to tell you what I learned. Oh, not specifics. I store details clinically, For many specifics, my mind works more like Hogwarts’ Pensieve, There’s much rich detail for the taking, (Somehow today will turn up in that bowl if I need it.)

I know less about getting from here to there than you’d think. It’s all on record somewhere & I can tap into what I need in good time.

Once upon a time I thought I came here to pray us through the changes or pray me through mine. Early in life, elementary school (about which there was nothing experientially elementary) saw me tagging after nuns, appreciating all that white around their faces that lit them up. Much as I looked, though, I could not find a reflection of me. I was a sponge soaking up approval vastly lacked at all other encounters; even, perhaps, with myself in mirrors.  

I thought of prayer as a pathway again while at Unity where the message cloaked me in raw feathers – uncleaned & sharp-like, bearing bodily evidence of life. I earned every feather I found on the sidewalk & patched together into these wings. Their message of self-divinity was a huge chord wrung from one-note me. So much came together about who I was wanting to be & how to get there.

But prayer was not my path for very long. It DID help me get organized, though.

(While in young adulthood, I listened to classical music by preference. It seems to have adjusted my mind along organized routes. But music is not a talent I have time to master right now – enough going on with the words, yeh?)

At so many crossroads, I paused while a neon sign appeared, “Here,” it said. Well, ‘here’ starts with ‘her” & if you fill in the circumference of the last ‘e’, you have ‘hero’. Heros are avatars: how far up am I aiming? If no sign appeared, I pulled out the scribing pad & began de-scribing it for when you take words apart, energy flames up & out.

Exposure is the B side of honesty.

I’ve been refining all those early shavings I gathered of my life to bring along. They are sparse, flensed of emotion (except when not). There’s a bit of my soul rubbed off & on each. They emerge from the pouch in a rush but some resurface periodically. That’s when I know I’m at crossroads & waiting for the sign.

I’ve been here awhile now & time seems to stretch out like some Silly String Theory. I follow an elusive Avatar: my own Joy.

And she has left some rubbings off on me.

It doesn’t matter how many mountains appear in front of you; the idea is the scale the one you’re on right now.

Thanks –

Carol

Choosing Forgiveness

This August is a scratchy thing to cuddle with, dull & smelling vaguely of rot.

I move in & out of its shadows now. I sit uncomfortably in righteousness, no matter how “deserved.” I may take up a cause in all-fired outrage before I lay it back down in sheepish relief.

Friends march a distant drumbeat, steady, remote, an echo of pulsing stars. At times I read by their light. At times, a cold silence intervenes. I am both instigator & recipient in this…

Over my shoulder, I see all my friendships have been at a distance. The dance of life changes; that distance lends a glow. Even when I was with now-faraway friends, they had little time to include me. This was only noted in hindsight. Encounters could be close & intense, but all succumbed to time’s delimiter. Was it me watching the clock so closely? Since the scales will not balance well, it’s best I revise, review, release, relearn.

A friend, for me, can be counting coup after a childhood of isolation. I am only as good in practice as my experiences allow. Early patterns will assert, loud as a coughing fit at a death scene. For a moment, all is Life! Color! Pageant! Then the pennons go limp to lie along the poles in mournful strands.

I find having few friends acceptable now. And none within reach who understand well what I believe. Where I look for friends, I am likely to find open wounds. I ascribe it to their thoughtlessness for I do not wish to think it of my deliberations. I can decide against being analytical & simply go to sleep to see where the needle points come morning.

At times, friends show me best how to not be in the world. But this is a world I don’t know how to be in anyway.

I understand friends, for me, are part of an atomic structure which holds together only because it repels its own components. They mirror my lesser moments in shimmering tin rather than silvered glass. My truest friend is myself, for when I seek outer bindings, I discover thin connection indeed.

In my cosmos, friends prove a fierce & fragile constant, a note sounded faraway, a Perseid Meteor slashing the throat of night. This is not my lifetime for sharing & baring; I understand so much more now by understanding none too much at all. My soul can be warm & pulsing; it can create music. But the notes are sounded against a toothed edge which cuts with intent to bleed, shaving truth from consequence. I stand stripped of belief, but no more unclothed than I have shredded coverings of others.

I may always be the mote in God’s eye & God never blinks.

Leaders protect the pack. They do not mingle. Unapologetic & tearful, I accept the verdict of my heart. I collect the slings & arrows lying at my feet. The stars & scars I bear alone.

Nothing Lasts Forever

I am caught by the peculiar gravity of life, its sheer & unexpected weight. I am “impressed” by it in the same way a baby duck is imprinted – following whatever has grabbed my interest.

To plead innocence at this age is to smile at the cosmic joke. Yet I do plead it – not for this-now me, but for the “Innocent” I was. Living longer nets strange ideas in the strands of years.

One decision can follow another like that duckling thing but lifetimes don’t necessarily hold to the consecutive rule of being lived in a tidy row.

Nothing is forever but much is for all time. I am equally a liar & a lover. Flip the coin: belief is a single part of the investment I make in life. Investment becomes a vestment for my sacred moments – the ones I really believe in.

Is this sacred? Perhaps. Blessed, certainly. I want to evolve to the next level – or, to play it up a notch, resolve to evolve. Can resolutions lead to re-soul-ment? Yes, I do believe this.

As beliefs & patterns fall away, age wears me differently. The shields cannot always be kept after. Without a certain strategy, these don’t recharge & my energy has resettled into unusual patterns. The last shield to lay down has yet to go horizontal & it must for that next level to achieve.

Age has made me territorial for better or worse. I claim the invisible: the ephemeral qualities of time, space & matter. I claim the insubstantial: grace & true love of life.

I’m just rambling here. The words appear, raindrops from thoughts clouded with unreason; to be reasonable in chaos is a form of stillness borne of movement. As fear is refined & mined for its mixed assets there are gems to be found. To mineralize life, one must spark fertility. When that cycle slows or is discontinued, more rigid forms express. Thing is, with lifelong familiarity, I can flame them where they land before they burrow in. If I anger, they coalesce in heat, pointing here to a heart, constructing there a wall. They are nonetheless fused to the ruthlessness to which I refine my will.

Because my train of thought runs alternate tracks from others, I don’t arrive at populated stations. A strange logic elicits strange results.

This seems enough to say on the topic. I’ll get back to you when I figure it all out.

Random Poems: Unknown Source

All the long, nonpareil days of August, I waited

Walking beaches incessantly

Combing the tides for word from you

Only sea-glass emerged

Not a word formed on foam.

My hems are mud-clumped threads

My boots caked in salt

The flumes of my bonnet blown backward,

Catching the joyriding wind.

Not a whole shell is extant,

Only bits & flakes, a bubble on a wave…

Still I walk.

My sisters look to horizons

Expect me to raise my eyes

But I am stuck in a story of you

Where a single, cool, green cylinder

Rolls to my feet.

I bend & slick off the water

I tremble, using my teeth on the cork

[A faint ‘pop!’]

The fainter smell of your ink

The mystery of your yes or no

Curled like a hermit crab in wine-bottle shelter.

There is only one today;

Always only one me

So fraught with self & simpering love words

They seek me out front & back

They drip from me like raindrops down oilcloth

Run to edges that curl the streams

I wear a Papa Salt hat, yellow in this sunlit Other Day.

I don’t expect a Prince a-riding

I’d prob’ly fall in love with his horse & dash him from saddle,

Leaving him standing bandyleg-beached

As Horse & I gallop, splashing, into the sea.


Time To Rain

Mercury gone retro brings monsoons

But since that last hailstorm in June

Things are quiet.

I feel like a chess piece out of play

Cornered by a pike-poxed pawn

A Queen at bay to the dwarf

But dwarves are Earth & know the caves

What better ally to be sent me?

I throw the ball again to

See if I can hit the sea

It’s all downhill from here…


Dancing On My Daddy’s Shoes

Tho something I’ve never done, seems somehow dug into my memory

Like finding a bone among the feathers

A made-up story about a little girl I never was

Nor can be this life.

And so loved anyway

Still dancing.


When No Belief Was Left

We turned back

The trackless waste devoid of all save Hunger

Beckoned no more

In full retreat, we fled, thankfully

Fragmented among ourselves,

We slept in the ruins

The mild nights belied our inner chill

From all the ice & snarl, we breathed relief.

Alive again to home & hearth. We were

The heathens left alive

As ghosts, alone & insubstantial

To live among the resting of our lives

So packed with promise just before the War.