Bananas

A time of change ensues. I am taking a vacation – an unheard-of thing! When I drive, it is to Go Somewhere: Arrive With Purpose. A vacation is an odd thought, a thread unspooling to a time free from commitment.

Driving for hours has been usually to change living localities. I’ve taken off cross-country more than once, my car loaded so much it’s a challenge to see from the rearview mirror. A pleasure trip has not entered my purview for an extremity of time & I cannot call one to mind right now. Vacations were always unaffordable & impractical. Jobs didn’t allow for distanced outings, spending time elsewhere, finding restaurants & bathrooms. My destination always top of mind, my going somewhere has purpose & I don’t dawdle. I am almost frightened with the thought of uncommitted driving.

I think of myself as grown-up; but strangeness & novelty still take getting used to. Um, isn’t that oxymoronic? I find it intense to “change my mind” & grasp onto just going somewhere. Of course I have a destination in mind. My trip is two-part as I prefer driving 4-5 hours a day & not the full distance there in one go. So planning for stops enters. Of course I can bring along my own foodstuffs & stick to the highway as I’m wont to do. This time I think I am ready to perhaps leave the road to explore.

Who is this me? I’m ready to befriend her & let her take the lead. I need to free that inner child who hopped onto her bike & just rode around.

I’m reading The Lioness of Boston, by Emily Franklin. The heroine has just served bananas at table. No one knows how to eat them tho they understand they cannot eat the tough skin. They slice the fruit into coins & use forks to separate the inner flesh. Grandmother mischievously breaks hers in half & peels it, eating with her hands. Who am I? Lady of the house or grandma?

When I return from this trip it will be to a fast-changing situation: my manager has resigned from the office. Unlike some other places I’ve worked years ago, I cannot take on her duties to keep the place running. It’s up to the President of the Board to hire someone licensed / authorized to keep things running. I am an assistant in an HOA. I am concerned with the everyday of who signs the paycheck, personally, since I can only do my little duties of issuing parking, preparing applications, answering the phone & such. Paychecks are beyond my pay grade.

I am due to figure out preparing bananas.

Road-tripping will be a grand intro as I’ll already be out of the box, so to speak.

There’s been no ripples in my pond for some while & I’m at a loss whether to don Wellies or Nikes, or just dig out the bathing suit.

Wish me well, dear readers. I know I’ve got this & I have some alternatives to access as needed. Obviously the singularity of change is the first go-to from which issue so many more.

Prying myself out of the Henry Chair is Job One.

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I’m Still Here, Mom

You’re not, though. I miss you. You were the only parent I had & I sure didn’t like that much when I lived in your home, but ‘only’ suffices that sentence. I remember so little: I recall so much.

I wanted a mom who held me & coddled me a bit – one who knew about hugs & how good they felt to a little kid. One who was focused on my dreams instead of her duties. One who wasn’t a bit like you – my stern disciplinarian, my comptroller, my uber-mom of legend. Breadwinner, emotional shredder, mover & shaker of all…

You were dealt a raw deal, Mom. Daddy cheated, or so the tale is told. You had to live with awful in-laws who thought criticism rhymed with breathing. You were never good enough for my ne’er do well dad & I’ll just bet he made off with your heart in a hurry & kept it in his footlocker for a longish time. You were as wronged as any country song & as put-upon by a disapproving family as ever a one was.

I really don’t know the details & my imagination isn’t up to the skill it would take to even make these up. I only know you did your your best by all of us as one by one we also beat you up in the unseemly skirmishes of kid vs. parent. In our imaginations we vanquished you to neverland while our reality included completing that chores list every day.

I know you found your treasures at work where accomplishing tasks excellently was the least of it. I know I wouldn’t be who I am if the course of events hadn’t followed exactly what you wrought them to be.

I made my own mother-mistakes & I doubt anyone finds the way easy as it was set down by family. I spent far more time seeking than finding, that’s for sure.

I hope you forgive me, too. It took a seance to hear you say, “I didn’t know what to do with you!” And that’s ok since I didn’t know what to do with me either.

There’s an old one on the books says “they did the best they could with what they had” & there’s a reason cliche’s ring true. Somewhere a cosmic throat-clearing is taking place. Somewhere we’re going to meet for percolator coffee & snowy pizzelles, & laugh our asses off at what we did.

Set the date, Mom, & I’ll be there to set the table!

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The State of Carol B

So, I heard an acquaintance now has a gentleman friend. Hell, what are boyfriends even called at our age? There should be a designation, some kind of species nomenclature, a Latin genus or specie name… ‘Widower’? That implies a lot, but so does ‘lover’, ‘boyfriend’, ‘gentleman caller’ – Or maybe I should just say, ‘She met a guy.’

I puzzle on this, as I do on many things. I often end these puzzlings with musing “but no one’s interested in me”, when the apt truth is I live like a hermit crab & sociability has become harder to prise into. If someone presented as being interested in me, would I even know how to react?

Somehow I doubt I am that original individual who can figure out the male/female conundrum – I’m as fixated in my ways as any oppositely sexed individual. Which name is unfortunate, implying oppositional or uncomplementary to. In heaven’s name, why would I want to be THAT to a companion on my life path? Opposition implies a clash & non-agreement & tension lining the fringes.

I have known relationships of legend, where male/female remained united for years. But only by reputation after all, not by experience. I have frequently said my car loans lasted longer than my marriages.

Perhaps one answer to that query “why not me?” is that pesky word “never.” As in never met the guy, never thought enough of belonging with someone else, etc. I could go on but everyone over 6-1/2 already knows the drill.

I have many attractions to engage another. These have been thorougly reviewed in the 375 other posts on this blog.

I don’t dare say what I’m saying here, but the truth is so darn changeable. I have trouble getting hold of only one capital T truth before it morphs in shape & meaning. Truth exists in one hundred states besides air, water, solid. Somewhere I crossed over from the ifs, the maybes & the coulds into the nevers without really meaning to. It became a continental drift which has taken me decades to recognize, let alone plan on reordering.

In this moment, this iteration of me, I’m unsure how a change becomes a focus or even a consideration as it’s not been in the “I’ll think about it tomorrow” bag under the bed I dream upon.

I do love romance, thoughtfulness, caring relationships. I mist up at couples holding hands, especially when their other hand is clutching a cane. I thrill at the “falling-in [L-word] part, awakening to potential & joining & finding that piece of puzzle which I thought to be only my shadow.

It remains an unexplored universe for me & I don’t consider time travel too outre’. I like my self pretty much now; it’s taken a long time to do so.

There may come another who will love me & invite/allow me to love back as best I can. Wouldn’t that be a joy & such fun & a blessing in manifestation!?

I have no idea how to prepare for such an event, however. Or how to accept it, or how to make room for this possibility. But love wouldn’t concerned with my dancing around on the topic, right?

If circumstance brings about this benediction, I accept the blessing & keep the balance. So much of my life has been a surprise party, what’s one more guest at the table? One more candle on the cake?

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Raw Material

There remain unedited spaces in my soul

Where I have not scratched out words & written others in,

Spaces where erasures don’t occur & bold lettering of

Initial thought stand like trees in a forest –

Some broken off halfway & left in splintered hope

Some hyphens with no matches in balance

(the dashes where anything can yet be brought to play.)

There are whole nurseries of thought seeded in good soil

Awaiting the nourishment of attention, the light of consciousness

To life the greening leaves & show the shoots.

I’ll get there, if not now, then When.

Beginnings are rugged. From where I sit, so many seem

Truncated by circumstance & limitation.

With the advent of the future’s imminent arrival,

I wonder about setting off with good shoes on an

Untrodden path.

I sit on the edge of the bed, tying them on,

Adjusting the tongue,s couching the heels, breathing

Through more beginnings.

I keep thinking I’m at the end of the roads

So many rolled up to this place

I walked them all in my mind if not in real space.

Good thing thoughts are good as deeds!

The locus of my discontent is blurred over

By satisfactions well-achieved & homespun,

Sometimes homely, somewhat overlong in arriving.

I have stopped shrinking, telling others I am instead

Condensing.

Potentials gone awry

I could call my biography,

“The Road Never Traveled”,

The Gospel of Carol, rounded

Upon itself, stuffed into a clay jar

Out in a desert cave

Of some interplanetary space.

Such dreams I have had, such adventures,

Such scenery I have seen, such white waters skimmed

On a slippery raft where I clutched

The edges with broken nails &

A grin, one eye closed to face that

Future rushing up & around –

I have blasted & blurred through

My life & savored & slept its reality

Wholehearted.

It’s been one epic poem that has not ended,

This time on Earth – one Norse saga after a

Shakespearean couplet pretense at closure

(but more commentary.)

The words I cast nets into the starred universe for

My Milky Way of rhyme, meter, song & story

Always aglow out there in the where.

So many tools I did not pick up to learn their function

So many clouds I did not call a shape to

So many stars unseen, but burning in their planetary way…

I am an old woman now, at a campfire once blazing,

Now a steady warming ring, keeping company,

Distorting light into what I wish to see.

Though diurnal, my senses blur with coming daylight,

Quiver into the energy of a society where I earn my way.

It is at the 4 a.m. hour where my whiskers twitch awake

The words come like some rogue wave

Washing away the ordinary, flooding the town

Where I learned to build my world on stilts

Or be flooded off in splinters.

I blink, therefore I am.

The world of my perception changes with each

Open/close of these tired eyes.

Just when I think the  horizon on approach

A bell rings – like the old typewriter margin bells –

The lines shift & withdraw as I cast the words

To draw it back again, one tug after another

While towing all else behind.

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A Very Little Heaven

I am happiest when I am in heaven.

Fortunately, I am a woman of simple tastes

So this is easily achieved:

A place to be unbound in thought

Tho thought be all routine – do this, do that.

My heaven has a little job that earns me what I need to pay my way

In this material world.

It has friends who remember me once in awhile

Who share a call or a note.

Heaven is a place where debts are small, rewards are great:

Where mystery can remain unknown & evil cannot conquer.

My heart knows peace here.

My life means a world, my word a life.

My place is a corner to sit in, a   book with real pages,

Coffee & pasta with my own sauce.

Every moment I greet with a breath

Is heaven.

May it always be so.

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Unprovoked

I am so small: a midget-mind of tiny, round stature.

I crave what I have not achieved:

My book to entice others to read what I write,

The weight-loss program from Jesus, or maybe Mary Mag who got to walk off her calories in rope sandals.

I don’t have fame/fortune/freedom to practice

Traveling, walking in crop circles, napping in the King’s Chamber for what dreams may come.

I don’t even have someone to talk to about these things,

So perhaps that is first.

I’m not polite anymore

I can barely hold myself in check

When things aren’t going my way.

I often say I’m feral & others think me joking

But I’m not, really.

And I don’t want to hurt feelings,

But when you’re in front of me & cannot say what you mean

Your analogies falling flatter than Florida panhandle,

When your ideas cannot leap even a curbstone

Your life is a cartoon of uncertain nature,

I haven’t’ the patience to await your figuring it out.

I walked out of a movie yesterday filled with the F word, with suffering women & girls riding fast horses, dismounting into their mothers’ shoes…

I practically ran out of church today after a lackluster, energy-less, error-filled display of what was purported to be a DNA upgrade. My own DNA slipping away as I sat; the woman next to me with eyes closed – sleeping? Meditating? And I would have likely kicked her bare feet escaping. Now I will take the end seat always…

As the uninspiring talk droned on, I chafed, rearranged my purse, tapped my legs: anything to keep from simply exploding into a bloody mess on the padded chairs in a wedding chapel of a room. Bloody hell! Chained by politesse.

Captive to still life when I want to simply walk out walkabout.

I need a teacher: a leader, a healer, a crone, a hero.

All is divesting, I drop endeavors like heavy rocks no longer to be carried – out of volunteering genes, out of knowledge of how to deal with the knowledge I have even as I acquire more.

I have put myself in a small place & caught fire.

I have put myself into a whisper while harboring the biggest voice in the world.

I watch those I perceive making a difference from a new place now.

From being born to teach, I see I was born to learn

But no one to instruct me, no one to act out new understandings, no one to see it my way. Three no’s form a knot.

What would I tell someone in my position?

Don’t be still anymore.

Dance it out.

Do something.

Begin.

Become the beggar at my own door.

I have wake-up nightmares of inability to resolve:

People want to steal my car & I cannot turn it on to drive away.

I am being chased but my feet are mired.

I am screaming as I make no sound at all…

Classic Freudian interludes of uneven nights.

New information I cannot apply yet, yet must use.

Me & the world

On the edge together

Kicking our heels over the chasm.

Understanding what it is to fly

Waiting for the wings to grow in.

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Bookville, USA

I envision a town where all the streets are named for book topics – Mystery Ave or SciFi Way.

All the stores are bookstores & you can live atop a spiritual bookstore in bliss, soaking in the emanations rising from below, setting your mat atop the Yoga Section for best results, or settling your jack chair over the Meditation Collection with its quiet hum of “Om” rising up.

You can walk along Cookbook Alley for dinner ideas, or Home Improvement Row to learn how to build – what else? – a bookcase.

All the books loitering in basements of libraries, in attics of septuagenarians, in back rooms of houses all over America can be sent here – any book in any condition is free to mail in for repair & residence.

Tiny glass carrels line up like lampposts, an ergonimic desk & supportive chair in each, while wallpapered cells with one comfy recliner and a perfect reading light are availble for rent in Parkbutt Place.

You’ll find skin care on Beautiful Street or banking hints on Money Road.

Are you with me yet?

Heading into town will be strip malls of opthalmologists, opticians & optometrists along Tosee Highway. Restaurants serving only symmetrically arranged food for color & texture branch off on Foodies Lane. Stationery stores will line Papers Boulevard along which reside cul de sacs of Penn’s Way.

Just imagine being able to dispose of old books which is a haunting connundrum for many, by bringing it to a box in the library or post office which can be sent off at no charge, sorted, spruced up, set lovingly into place for display. Every year there will be a Penny Plus Sale to keep things in circulation & set the flow for the following year. Libraries will finally have a resting place for all the donations of outdated novels. Any topic ever written about will be found in its own setting, like jewels.

All roads will have a turnoff for Bookville. Tour buses will be lined up outside town limits & free jitneys available for tours, or to visit the restaurants or stores.

I could spend a day or a season, or a lifetime there. I would live above the Self-Improvement Stair in constant hope of betterment, jog in Grammar Park, cycle around Tours Trail.

[Sigh] Okay. I’m home now.

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Evil Is Obsolete

Let’s get with the Program, boys n’ girls,

let’s move this show along the road

shovel up the shit we left behind,

pretty it for the next ones a-coming,

let’s re-mind ourselves of how we were sold it would be

bring forth the betterment of mankind

reach into the back of the pantry, moving all the unused illusions

to the heap in the dumpster.

Life is so much more than what we make it

miracles are always the most ordinary of all that is

regardless of the fuss we like to make ’em…

It’s really hard not to smack back

but if you know who you are & what,

the need to do so dissapates a lot

Just get up, shake it off, brush off your lapels

pick up the flag

signal the start-up music

listen for your cue

march forward

don’t look back – history ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

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The Midnight Papers

SPIRITUAL CREATIVITY: PLUG IN!

We practice life mostly along its edges. Who among us emerges stage-ready, the award waiting only our perspired (inspired) clutch & craving?

I walk the riverbank, longing to be in the Flow. I seek the source outside of my own Being – an ultimate & ulterior stupidity (cupidity)?

Yet this is fine.

One becomes wise in discovery, that wisdom is a, if not the, goal. Putting on music for creativity, then settling an activity atop it muffles an intricate rhythm already in expression. I apply the brakes to examine the flow. How many do this? What matters the number, as I’ve noticed I’m only concerned with myself right now. In (at)tending to myself, I tender to all.

The great God of creative force has only to reach to tap me. I don’t need that cattle prod anymore!

If I search for the god of my being, how may I do so other than becoming a prayer?

I am at the stage in my life where returning to Source is a real goal. Returning to the boundary I crossed over into birth, I  burst out from life influenced by this truth. Back & forth have I gone into the arms of & out again – a reflection of Spirit as powerful as the reality. It all is Spirit! Crash! Boom! Bang! Then resettling with a sigh.

The breath coming from deeper inside releases more of my inner  being out to share. One writes to become real & writing at a time when the blind are in power makes for the impulse to become compulsive.

I cannot say Amen to this life while the prayer is in progress!

Sometimes I’d like that: just once to arrive at a goal that does not springboard me, catapult me, back into living more life. This is nonesuch – nonsense.

My life won’t end when I write my epitaph. An ending is a revolving door, after all. I go round & right back into it, whatever that proves to be.

I admit it is nice to take a breath & think it a compilation or summary. Yet each one is a summons for the next. That next one may bring my keenest & best future to me & why not?

BUSHWHACK LIFE!

Capture it, lasso it, for it’s long past midnight; all conclusions foregone. A period becomes instead an ellipsis, the next thought pulling into a station I thought a destination, As Bilbo said, “The road goes on forever.”

As a Journeywoman of life, I have sought & provided comfort, meals, ideas, feelings, responses & so much more. The continuum of flow belies dead ends. There is no respite from or for life.

Like the old couple leaving the theatre, I turn to myself & say, “Always is coming next week, a good show!”

LOVING VS. FORCING

Love is not necessarily the savior it’s touted to be. Oh yes, love can be so much. But love is also the opportunity to be better, gain more, progress faster. Love & its admission (a hairline admission there) still implies forward movement. It’s slowing down to smell the roses, noticing a flower blooming on the stalk while below is its upside-down mirror on the sidewalk. Instead, we acclimate to speed, to diagnosis & concurrence.

It’s the rarest who respond to disparagement & pain with creative sparkle. Pain is a self-absorption of its own, the body becoming experience. Pain can be the truest digression from living in Spirit unless it is found to be a gateway.

What do I live for? Why do I count forward from my half-birthday to the full? Is this for the very young & the somewhat old? Why am I compelled to tell my age to strangers – a kind of egoic brag – I made it this far! – doing it my own way, with my own vocabulary & dodging the blocking of circumstance. I found the workaround to life & stuck to it!

I am lifelong a morning person. A day begun at 8 is already half-done. I was once annoyed with awakening at 4 a.m. but I have found this a gift: silence, potential, an intake of innocent breath. Pre-daylight is pure. Animals pad ancestral paths to water. The moon hangs separate from earth, earnest now upon its own journey, inviting the sun to follow. This time is the shifting of the energetic Tide, in to out. The breeze freshens to fill limpid sails limpid in dreaming.

My Spirit & my body are less entwined, one seeming remote to the other. I push back the covers & reopen the conversation. The invisible dances back lightly, wrapped in shadow. The divine brings itself to awakening organically. There are no responsibilities at this time of day, no drives to take, no clothes to don. Naked is okay at 4 a.m., sealed in my room, wrapped in my thoughts, standing at the foot of the bridge, about to cross over water. The invisible Divine waits, holding out a hand with its invitation to Light.

Flutters in the interior breeze bring tiny eye movements – I think I see bits of light at edges of dark, I swim from dream into carbon-based life, replacing dreams with solid tangibles.

Life is never ordinary. I won’t believe that in a million years.

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No Matter the Dream

Did I really mean this life?

broken … but they all say that’s how the light gets in

so I don’t really mind at this age, this stage.

I wandered as if in God’s Maze

my life unfolded like a treasure map

one state after another

of mind, of heart, of locale.

Each a singularity of itself.

I had a purpose once,

I think.

It decentralized as I began finding meaning all over

in the darndest places.

Could I combine the moments,

like some hybridized montage where I’m a central character

I would take the love of the men I shared mine with,

the jobs where I shone, accomplished,

the mornings mirrors were kind, jeans fit, my cheeks had color

I would take the triumphs & tuck them into my bag,

slinging them over my shoulder to ponder later.

I know I’d be kinder, sing more, take less umbrage

but these go without saying. Wouldn’t we all rewrite a life

leaving out anger & sorrow? Just for the hell of it?

I learned from it all but these moments now,

ah! this now is like no other

this walk finds me resting more in the scenery

observing with old eyes all that I see around me new.

There seem no shiny destinations

when each day has a fold of glitter to shower over me.

I never got the pony, or the little red wagon

Or the kind of love I could understand before I

declared it over & done & begone.

I fled so many lives – relationships as well as timelines.

I skittered across the universe, a pinball played by the hand of God

Pinging each bumper, racking up points like a pro

Winning Him prizes, the kinds found in CrackerJack boxes…

Now I feel around in the drawers, pawing old glories, faded triumphs

Brought into the folds I peeled off to get to the meat of the matter.

Now I get to the place where everyday is so routine I must love it so much

that I know it by heart.

No matter where I journey in dreams, I wake in the same body

the same bed, readily living

the same day

Ready to bring it to life once again, to make it a li’l bit different.

There will be one so perfect it will signal an ending

A rightness to wander off from all I know

Into the palace of wherever it is Next to Be.

For me.

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