Unraveling

I have become a third world country. What does that mean? My life is rimmed around a definite high each day & I get to choose what it might be: A morning walk, a sunny place to sit, a terrific book to be lost within… I take my bags to the market to fill & since they are infected with Covid, I get to do this myself. I could probably take the world record in holding my breath in time to grab a few things at the market. (Can’t even get into the only other grocery in town – which is Walmart – with the lines & what not. Thanks, China! In so many ways, thanks! I find it interesting that my bags carry the virus & my face: not my hands sifting among avocados, not my jacket which l has brushed up against all kinds of possible hosts, etc. You know that rant could go on for a couple of days.

I get to choose from my five or six winter outfits – an exciting moment! I am not permitted to buy any other clothing which cannot be acquired from my [Chinese] Walmart; thus supporting the overt providers of Covid. Interestingly, I am not hearing of gigantic death numbers from the virus in China. Did they flatten the curve?

I am singled at work for not wearing a mask. The fact that I find it very difficult to breathe or do quality work while wearing one – that my clients give me permission to not wear one – that they themselves feel put upon forced to wear a mask on a massage table where they must breathe deeply for maximal benefit rendered irrelevant by conflicts of science & con-science.

I am tired of seeing Fauci’s face. His Hitler salute is not a raised arm, but an index finger pointed upward as he calls the shots for my life. I read Switzerland is doing fine, South Dakota is doing fine… Herd immunity is proved out. Statistics are down (even the CDC says so) but for whatever reason, I wear a mask to every store. Which amounts to the few open here in town – Chinese Walmart, Chinese Family Dollar & Chinese Dollar Store plus a couple all-American hardware posts.

I am wearing down. I hate to say it. I dislike admitting defeat. I miss our small businesses. I miss being able to eat a meal I did not prepare myself. Last night I didn’t even have dinner & infrequently in my life have I gone to bed without dinner like some truant. I miss friends, entertainment, the occasional movie, drives to nearby old West towns to spend my dollars on postcards. I have put about 400 miles on my car since March – an invitation to an oil change had me laughing as I tossed it.

I’m done with conflicting news, one source telling me I’m dead so just lie down already, another telling me I live in Jesus, a third assuring me the Pleiadians are en route in answer to my thumb stuck out over the horizon of Earth, a fourth to say the Pleiadians are sitting to one side watching “the show” & unwilling/unable to help. Pleiadian Uber?

I will live as long as I live & no longer. It is up to me to make these days reactive or passive. I think of it as “clapping for Tinkerbell” where she will fade from existence without applause (a cheap crowd participation trick.) I am down to one hand clapping.

I want to get back into gear. I want to tend my volunteer duties, travel at will & with a way, get a definitive reply when I reach out – because it seems as things have slowed down, no one is keeping up.

Nothing is normal & I want some semblance of that back!

Oaths: Legalities: Legal Ties: Insights

This is the part of my life where I’m allowed to be funny, to be creative, to talk to people using language I’ve spent a lifetime developing. Instead it was “Shut up, it’s The Covid” at all times.

I do not consent. I am literally of a different mind when it comes to all of this talk/script going on/playing out. I am fiercely for health in everyone, for all of us to be mobile, active, determined, forward-facing … (what’s your add to the list?). I want the freedom to be outrageous at times, to wear hats with plumes or belts with bull riding clasps. At this time of wanting these, I am in the mindset of wanting them is having them & not doing them. Did you follow that? Thinking about as doing? My excuse & acceptance…

Anyway, I am an actress who’s quarreled with the Theatre that loved her & this is never done other than with Drama (which is usually an emotional subset of Trauma.)

I am a woman who sees her debts as decisions & perceives debt on levels seers do. There are times when I’ve scattered paths like pennies & been found to round off miracles. That there are people who love me despite the boundaries of love I usually reside beyond, amazes me. And I love back!

I have done Lover as spider woman, creatively exploring & ultimately deciding no one’s mind except mine needs to be present in my present. What I love best about being Present to all of this allows it to interrupt & re-present itself. That can always bifurcate, but I’m quick to categorize & ‘opinionize.’ (The next layer to peel away is that opinionizing. The Lovers of the deck have always been, for me, 1) being alone or 2) being with another. Tumult survives no matter how much oil is poured upon the waters – on the “wanters.” )

I’m a lion in my own world, but a kitten on the screen door for many others…the one with claws dug in so tightly to pry her off is to exercise fearlessness at peak levels. I’m up there hanging on, trusting the view of what I see will be the view when I’m again out there. You know, when I’m older & after I can locate the alleys. When I find a reign to Queen.

Eccentricity is an aura of everyone in Truth or Consequences. The amazing blending of eccentricities is what we feed upon & enjoy its dancing, blending/braiding. If we don’t know you, we do know of you. And are perfectly willing to leave it at that…until we get to know you – which often happens by simple propinquity.

I think this started better than it’s going to end. In an acknowledgement that each of those Present moments made up for the rote of life, that each enforced “rote” is now sustaining me where I in-dwell, in-habit. It’s an admission of being Ok My Way. If I’m okay with me, there’s not much need for all else.

We are all re-solving our Vasanas.

Schwinn Twin

I’ve always been the bent spoke in the wheel at that violent angle proving vicious to lower limbs, Perhaps this is why I kept distance from others.

I guard my independence fiercely; it has a presence others may find bristling. But nothing is as it once was as I soften. Trouble is, I’ve already driven off hope of merging in polite society.

Expectations brown & fade, providing nutrients for a softer medium. I still hope to grow. I really tried to stay on the beaten path, but being born in wilderness outs too readily. Once I walked city streets, though, blending in.

Now I’m torn between returning to my roots & simply getting comfortable where I am.

Now I understand knowledge to be hollow, “can’t” to be a form of surrealism, certainty to flex, Life to be a wild & untameable event.

Pre-Post Covid

A long set of poems borne of lonely anger. Covid is not my illness, but it may have bested me – financially, figuratively & finally. Were I suicidal, I would already be dead of it. See my images as your own but don’t dwell here long. Love, Carol

THE DISEASE OF UNEASE

How can I not miss all that I miss?

A body so warm beside me

The wash of the sea

That salt-morning light

A family

So soon it all changes

Once again the more & the less

Will lead me a dance divine:

The motherless child

A fatherless girl

A sister-less life

A brother unknown –

The nights like this:

A season at end; another not begun

A time of silvered stars

The rime of the horizon

A single setting at table

A single serving.

I no longer complain or marvel

I am simply through it

Through with it

I long for a bosom

To weep upon

A tickle to laugh, a limerick rhyme?

I yearn for a life which will never be mine

My nights spent alone on the staircase of time

Not poems that wait till the last word to rhyme.

STEEL MIMICRY

Bold as brass, I steer forth upon my course

Unstayed by wind, by aching hands

By sullen feet

My eyes sore of missing faces

My heart salted by loneliness & faintly sour

Faulted by sinecure of sin

I have climbed over decades

Searching an easier path

Than this, uneven stone & shale.

I have bared my soul a thousand times

Only to redresss it, bringing it home

To sleep beneath my pillow.

NOTES

The music defines the moment

One key on a piano

Tapping against time

The days all lit. I gather change about me

Cashmere in comfort

I see my way clear to home

While night approaches

A feral cat, seeking succor

A black thing with green eyes

A pat upon its head

A sufferance for food.

A narrow bed

I am grateful to rest into

The universe hangs upon my wall

A purple swag of planets to behold

A memory I live at the center.

THE POST-COVID WORLD

A 50-50 chance

Of having a car

A place to live

Food to table

I am no soldier

Yet somehow signed up to march in this lockstep dream

Before the lemming rush

Before the bodies take, wingless, to air

I have my life lived already

Enough to spin in front of me

No matter the height from which I fall.

THE READING

I look to you, my divinations

The round cards before me

Shaping a Celtic Cross

You unfold a fervor of vision only

Dizzying with foresight

My place in the middle

Where spirals emerge

A past with a future

Equally in balance

The to & fro of tidal life

The iron in my blood magnetized

To what I cannot say

By what I will not do.

I am agreed to stand the middle

To straddle lies & truth

To make my unequal way.

I remember the solitude of perfection

Once the pattern

Now tilted all a-side.

HOME ALONE

Now defined by idleness

Not sanity.

I feed a neighborly cat

I water sixteen plants

No expectations left

In polite society

For such an isolate as me

A hermit in the cave of time

Lacking the charcoal to

Slash a day – one day

Upon the wall.

And in this heartless stripping away

A promise is uncovered

A fan of words to hold the heat of hell at bay.

KEENING

I know I am enough for heaven

To gather wings around me

To live in former gravity

My pockets full of sins, like rocks

Will wings be strong enough to carry me?

Is even God enough to forgive the unlived life?

“I AM INNOCENT!”

I supinate my palms

One arm crooked, trembling with effort

“You cannot accuse me!”

But my voice is lost in the courtroom’s

Bloody effulgence of noise

The judge looks away

Shifting papers for dates & times

My wrongdoings rendered evidence

Disappointed to find me

Still sequestered to life

Without parole.

THE YOGINI & THE TWICE-BROKE ARM

The yoga chart behind the door

Bought in faith

The mounted visual aid

My self-improvement swear-in

Dust takes longer to gather there

My twice-broke arm cannot hold the rag

Let alone wield it true.

There was a time

I would have bulled through to be a Hero

To attempt a headstand on eternity

Now? Not even Happy Baby!

I am yet recovering from Shivasana.

IN POINT OF FACT

I have no refills

The pens run dry

Down to pencils

Yellow & thin

Reluctant to record my life

This is what is left of me:

A disembodied voice

A nursery rhyme unremembered

A fool to even care

The last to recall my name

Will end me once for all.

ONCE UPON MY TIME

I only wanted a chance to tell my story

To bare my breast, not beat upon it!

I only needed proof of life

Beyond my departure from it.

I guess coming in without a plan

Except to be here

Was a poor idea

An existential fly

In the non-existent ointment

After all.

GROWING

So this is what it means to age

A pick & choose among the words I’ve swept before me

Blossoms baked & dried in the sun of another’s regard.

I even forgive myself this confessional moment

This bedraggled accounting in want of smiles!

I forgive my independent ways

My chancy decisions

The long dusty distances ventured from home.

I forgive the litter of life

The loitering debts, the trespass of my passing

My feet remain unbound

My vision unhindered

My grim will, undeterred

To live my way

To live light & shadow

In all of it, the only me

The best I know to be.

CHURCHES

I remember when I prayed aloud with many

Rather than alone, on paper

Furtive, a dark morning becoming chill

Soft notes playing.

I remember gathering like minds together

Under a domed roof

“Be still & know”

Where I sit amidst a chorus of cactus

A muted hum accompanying all grace

Needing no permission to sing

(Now all subversive in song

Transmitting death on a holy note…)

I have lived in times when children were ripped

From my arms to die by the sword

I remember when I did not look down

Till the hand on my neck forced me

I knew these words, tho not how to write them

I knew these formulas, results never changing

But I have less to live for now

So I write them with impunity.

Come, cut off my hands

Dissect my heart’s four chambers

Brain me unsensible.

I am impervious to curses

A stalwart divinity of One.

I have lived a life seeking eight noble truths

You cannot harm the God in me

Nor divest the Goddess in every cell.

Come, do your bloody worst

I am a stringy old woman with bad teeth

The perfect victim

My findings will never be that for which you search.

My submission will ever be a taint upon your hands

I will not even hate you tho I’ve left love out of it.

Wherein I dwell – that innermost altar you’re seeking to augur out?

Still intact & whole as a Temple

I am barefoot for I stand on holy ground.

THE DOGS BEGIN TO BARK

Brought outside their bedroom dens

Urged from oval, braided rugs

Where their paws tapped a Braille of dreams

Packs & pacts forsworn

Rudely chained to guard posts

In the chill of Autumn mornings

Barking to fill the spaces you once held.

HABITUAL HUNGER

Humanity stripped from inhuman times

Truthsayers hoarse in accusation

The walls of communication

Lined in silk.

But truth wears sturdy shoes

Stands impervious to false victory.

You cannot have the morning!

You may live in the land of no clocks,

Yet all I hear is ticking.

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.

 

 

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.

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.

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