This One’s For You, Lover

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

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

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

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

With no place to go, we wound up here.

Visions

Easter has been canceled for 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Horizons Go Horizontal

Facing Beginnings & Endings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Company’s Not Coming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Words to Write By

Words need to be instantaneous as thought to be most effective. They insinuate themselves – one word can start someone off on their own [infinite] journey. There is a need for spiritually healing words, nouns, modifiers, verbs, etc.

These were where the first loopholes were made. Language. Recall the difficulty of “un-seeing” something. What about “un-hearing?”  What words whispered into your various systemic extremities, traveling via the spiritual meridians, even energetically? What magnetized us to point this way?  (We need to teach protecting ourselves as well as promoting ourselves. But that’s a class for a later school…)

Language itself needs to be rehabilitated.

Some meanings need to be relegated as unnecessary, in that cyclical way that language has of hanging out for the next sound bite. Overall, a return to meaningfulness that makes sense might streamline some of the hyperbole.

In our eager push to popularity, we use “programmisms” – sayings by clever TV characters so out there we love ‘em. I can’t give you many examples, but maybe a memory? How many jingles could my generation tap right into & singalong tho we haven’t used Ipana in over fifty years? That’s programming, and we never even knew it.

The words have to be once again made over into a spiritual cast as we learn their power on psyche & the connections to self-mastery that we might reclaim & proclaim ours. Words serve as our way to assert being in the world & practicing that assertion whether timely or not.

Refinement & awareness redirect language – sorely needed right now! The good things seem so clichéd while evil seems so creative. As the balance shifts, we know this happens because the language has changed. My mission & focus is to refine the written word to uphold us every one.

With kind eyes,

Carol

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!

Another Blog from Home Alone

A song is playing that I have always loved: “Walking In The Air.” I used to hear this on WXPN, the University of Pennsylvania Radio in Philadelphia. It was my late-late night listening & rare, therefore. A syndicated show called “ECHOES,” a stream of just-ahead-of-the-curve music. This song is a classic now, but then it was fresh with all the qualities that evolved the genre.

I feel really good – at balance somehow. It is amazing to keep up with everything in real-time. Spritz the plants, keep dishes done, walk outside, keep food carefully prepared & appreciatively consumed. This is what I think is Mindfulness. I feel more aware of EVERYTHING & am surprised to see the same scenery when I look out the windows. That’s how powerful the feeling of moving forward is for me.

… Feels like so much change is gathering speed just behind me …

 If I were fanciful, I’d say the dragons were awakening.

So I noticed this morning that I have replaced scarves all around since redoing the rooms & I now have about 4 inverted pyramids, kind of one in each room. I looked up from my breakfast taco (eggs, cheese, pesto, tortilla) at the whiteboard & realized it needs a star above it -a pentagram. So these shapes are taking place in the house are stargates opening in Sacred Geometry. (I think I’ll make a star on the computer & color it. And tape it up like I’m five years old. Making stuff for Future Self is fun!)

I am still impacted to walk around the house & note all that has changed. I am restless to change up the kitchen – get another table w/chairs & barter this bistro & the huge stools off. As soon as all hell gets fastened up again, I’ll find a way. Stuff’s easier to acquire these days with faster manifestation all the time.

I signed onto Netflix in these days of library privation. I watched a couple of period pieces for several shows before realizing the more complicated the clothes, the  simpler the plot. But I did summon up “Groundhog Day” just to watch this inadvertent masterpiece at this time in my history.

The clock’s the only thing making time around here. I am becoming mindful: I style my hair with appreciation, make up a bit of color on my face, I moisturize & don my clothes carefully, matching up & very comfortable to wear. I put on great walk-shoes. I come downstairs to wash the dishes & pick up the computer. What or whom am I readying myself for? I am seeing each of my rooms as a kind of diorama. I have rearranged the living room by putting the couch under the window. What fabulous reading light & how it has totally opened up the room!

I waited a couple of days to see what else might happen, & then rearranged the bedroom, also putting the bed under the window, opening up the room. I have lived here three years last January & am just now finding how to put together my apartment. The kitchen is next, but that waits for supply to accommodate my demand.

Patterns appear more; stripes change; plants shift & get comfortable; I am actually surprised the views are still the same from the windows all around!

The outside wind scours, preparing the land for spring. The clouds insist on puff status, so we here on the ground realize this is not all ours, but we’re at the tail spot of the universe’s Crack the Whip.

And we bought the tickets a long time ago. Never forget these were the Terms & Conditions of the ride back then.

Actually, since the lifetimes were tied off from each other like breakfast sausages, I won’t say I remember much. Some stuff just doesn’t stick to me & I can still be surprised by what does. Music does.

[Now playing Cristofori’s Dream, to which I wrote a poem once & which, months later someone said when I read that poem: “That sounds just like a song I know.”]

I keep having to learn the anticipation is usually far worse than the application.

I feel like the whole world is holding onto itself – but something’s changing about the grip.

Times of Change are rarely peaceful when humans are involved; yet we keep trying it on, checking to see how it fits. For the better part, humans have leaned into the wind of violence & had it surge around them. For the most part, people genuinely want the best for their neighbors on Earth. I can see where over the years the changes have taken less time to occur & lasted longer each time. This one will make it to the Finish Line – will breathe yet on the other side of that yellow ribbon set to break at our breath.

Let us onward & awa`

If we’ve wished others the wind at their backs, this is the wind to get started on for all of us. Come on, Eternity! What are you waiting around for on the sidelines?

We’re rolling out your parade, flags, batons, big horns & all. We’re warming up right here to either side of you, &

if you don’t show, we get to go ourselves.

We know the way back. It’s boring. Even though all the futures might look alike, there’s one just for me & mine, for me to bring forward all those characteristics, friends, pets, ideas, writings, montages of life I choose to keep & on-go with. And one for you! and you! and you!, a future for you!

(On a particularly downpouring  Nashville day, I could feel the rain pooling up overhead, starting from a disheartened sky. I entered “beaches” on the search engine & angled the screen into my cubicle. I found a beach cam! So I tuned in & watched the waves sigh & spend themselves on an Australian beach. Upon glancing at the time stamp, I checked my calendar, it was a tomorrow there, today here… I was enormously comforted by this: the idea of there being a tomorrow…there.)

Cedar Chests

There is a word for loneliness tho I can’t think of it now. I am the last of my kind: the last of an odd-lot family that never quite matched up. We didn’t nest like Matryoshka dolls. We barely rotated around each other.

Mother watched over the place where we lived. I know nothing of what happened before I got there – obviously, yeh? I know little of what followed since I lived in my own skin with barely a thought for what was outside of me. I lived in books, in other people’s stories, with dogs & horses. The Black Stallion whinnied in my dreams, nuzzled me awake on dark mornings when all there was to anticipate was sitting in rooms with tall windows, in front of dark nuns & recite catechism. There was the beach to ride my bike on, the boardwalk to cruise. There were bushes to pick leaves from to fold & fold to green specks & toss like verdant spitballs.

There was homework & religion & church on Sundays, choir singing, being pulled from class to attend a funeral for a song. There was jump rope in the schoolyard but no invitations to join. There were kids making out in the coat closet, but I pushed back my glasses & walked by. There were sisters of St. Joseph, white-wimpled & less than charming, more like to rattle their beads at you like snakes, dull gold crucifixes hanging heavily at their knees. There were problems & penmanship & geography & “JMJ” on the papers for Jesus, Mary Joseph.

There were lunch bags to open although I couldn’t tell you now what was packed for a sandwich…but I remember loving the chocolate cupcakes far more than the Tastycake Junior cakes. And milk.

There were saddle shoes to tie, clothes to warm on the radiator before wearing. There were teeth to brush & that one sinking soul morning when I saw pinholes in every tooth since I never did.

My mom didn’t mean to be a non-Mom, I’m sure, now that I’ve been a lost-cause mom myself. A generation untaught in the ways of caring for children; a generation to whom a child was an inconvenience & expensive, an appetite needing feeding, a blouse needing ironing at the end of the day when all that should have been left was sleep. There was a child of me who wanted nothing more than to slip into a book & become invisible for to be noticed was to be yelled at for something.

There was a brother in the house, but no love lost or found between. There were absent sisters so much older I only knew their names & their husbands’. There was Everly Brothers music to memorize & act out…”Bye Bye Love”, “Wake Up Little Susie” – these delicious situations for which I would not be accused yet could happen in a song I could sing.

Once someone asked me about my family & I blurted: “The ocean was my mother.” How fortunate the child growing up by the sea! How unbelievably lucky to have Eternity always east of me, China securely buried underneath  – all’s you had to do was dig deeply enough. There was fog to hide in on the beach until the trash trucks rolled near & I realized how foolish this could be. There were seashells to glue fake pearls into & sell for fifty cents outside from the stoop.

There was sand to sweep, figs to ignore, clothespins in a ragged bag on a low-belly rope. There were nor’easters crying over the land, slashing an innocent sidewalk with rain making that short hop from bay to beach. There were fall-down times & climb-tree times & this is all I remember of any of it. My thoughts were filled with guilt – I was most assuredly a big sinner tho trips to confession never took more than a couple of minutes, there were hail marys to count for penance & a Pater Noster to say for stealing Hershey bars.

I had no father to speak of save the one who thought child support unnecessary so Mom would yell about that. But I could do nothing except add it to the shadow bag; somehow it was my fault he did not pay.

I don’t remember much. A Barbie taken from me, so I’d not spoil her wedding dress given by an aunt who first noticed when I needed a bra. There were too-big clothes delivered by the Sears truck. There were always glasses on my face, cat’s frame eyeglasses slipping down my nose.

I wear glasses still. I live in the desert. My mother died alone in her bed, happy not to be in hospital where she thought the Filipino nurses were talking about her in Tagalog. There was a wailing phone call from my  sister in-law when Joe died in Germany. But I already knew he had crossed over as my husband channeled him before the call. My sister Rita died after telling me not to write to her anymore. Sixteen years older than I, we had nothing in common except letters & I cannot recall what I said, but I was rather a melancholic. Teri just died 1/26 but I have heard nothing at all except that she is gone & not a word of closure. Perhaps more guilt attends that.

I sleep well & if I wake for nature, I have a coffee & return, warmed, to bed. I drive a nice car which I may yet pay off in this lifetime but may not. I know nothing still. I know everything always.

My heart hurts at times with all I want to say. I can move heaven & earth with words, but I can make no one listen. I can ask for understanding, but who will tell me they do?

Time contained an endless blue joy of life & a hollow gray empty just on the other side of that.

At the end of my life, I have possessions & nothing else. I have friends but they are spun into their own cocoons. I have stories few have time to hear.

I have words for wings so I fly.

Dividing The Light

So, you can’t be sure whether to take yourself seriously in the current political, personal, emotional & polarized tidal press. Just when we thought there was enough island left for our feet, we find ourselves walking on water … or treading it.

For me, it always returns to water tho I am an Air Sign by birth. There are births to ride out, contractions to control, pangs to deliver Truth which has not been an issue for some time. I am a proud Conspiracy Theorist & have never denied this – usually debunking those who tried to present me as being reasonable.

I don’t operate there much of the time, at least not so much as I pretend. When you start your blog with green comic sans font 14…can much be expected to follow? Yet here it is, greenly growing, one word emerging from another…that birth thing. We’ve paid a great deal to do this at speed now. it takes no years-long process to deliver any longer. What have we given up getting to here? Experience. Time.

I love using power words, like, “I never!” when, in fact, I’ve been slapped with “never” like a wet fish across my salty face any number of times. Vow has fewer letters than “love” but seemingly a more powerful forcefield around it that carries forward slicing into & through that which is love in life. And I’ve got this forming idea I made that vow to me.

How many people contribute to a life & claim it, then, adopting it & modifying around theirs for that – like the old oriental mandate that saving a life is thereafter ever-helping it to live?

How many minds can you change when you realize to fixate upon one mind-set is a limitation of itself? In the sudden snapping-free from the past, I am propelled into the future I didn’t really plan out. But I feel like I’ve written enough of these out to catch up quickly. This mind is familiar: it’s one I go into when Great Change occurs. My upper lip grows cold. Your hands have become ice pops. Indicators of change falling into step with us to later walk with us off the path; this li’l bit of being together & being beige.

This time I have no intended Intent to change. I’m not fixated on much except a Now that requires a differing phase ray of awareness. This “the 6 a.m. wall when only a street light shines in the window & the air is the freshest you’ve breathed in ever your life.” This Right Now.

This.

Right.

Now.

Somewhere there is a strain of Elvis singing “Walk on, walk on with your life.” My dreams have never walked alone, no matter how isolated I felt in them.

Even with no obvious physical change, I change. Here is where I live today:

I turned my living room entirely around. I faced it inward, closing out the world while enjoying its beautiful light & benefit more. Now the light pours over me instead of my facing into it. I did not know the room could look as it does & indeed, it was strange enough to me a manifestation that I could only sit outside of it & gaze at it after making the changes. I still sit on the edges of it, rather than settling into it. (It doesn’t matter what I think if the room has actually become animate & demands to turn around – which I now strongly suspect.)

Many changes are now replacing in my life. The energy itself is chasing a tail out the door to whirl in the general mayhem of a world which most of us here will honk about being separated from. Let’s see, a Libra Air Sign in a time of wind-driven Change, in a movable landscape filled with incense bowls – my house smells of ashes at times.

I monitor my own conversations. I listen to what I say to people or write stuff down. But the only real conversation is the one going on in my head. The song of balance … the computer next to the dowsing crystal, the phone next to the cards. Full court press, indeed.

Dear World of Carol Borsello

Thank you for being here, for continuing to turn in your inimitable & loving way,

The stars shine, imperious & grand. No dogs bark tonight, the breeze is still. Turtleback waits on the moon to reappear so impossibly high above him. All is mysterious night after the unbelievably energetic day.

The plants are happy to be out of Kitty Quarantine. They add to the peace & quiet depth of joy that I feel.

I am a judgmental human, I know. But I am self-contained & of small note in the schema of a world swollen with emotional life.

I feel “zenned” – uncontained. I am important in my little way: people express gratitude that I exist in many ways.

I do not feel sad about letting Fitz go, tho he brought love into the house. Have I once more traded love for convenience to self? It is easy to say life is full of strange disappointments, that it’s hard & lonesome, that our own selves are what we ultimately rely upon. What is lost in that admission is that life also is composed of ineffable joy in the moment surrounded with beauty & knowledge. I am grateful for all it brings me & more so to be able to return that joy in blessing, presence & sharing myself.

Peace is often hard-won at a steep emotional cost. But peace is what I strive for now. My heart is right tho adamantine in expression of what it feels to be “right.” But peace is my striving right now. I’ve never really been an easy person to live with – for myself or others. Yet these others accept me as I am; as I do them.

Thank you, Life, for lessons in love & life in health. My body moves more slowly but feelings overflow boundaries. I find I mourn less…”can’t lose what you never had” is how the cliche goes. Sometimes I do feel I’ve missed so much, yet I live so abundantly in comparison.

Change is always possible…certainly necessary…usually hard-won.

Others express a belief in me & I am happy to be both in community & isolated. Coexistence pays well!

What else, tho, is a human? All imperfect, mercurial, powerful & at times, godlike.

I hope to live to my own measure & to support & allow, to bring forward light from shadow. May my light ever express in divinity of intent.

Amen.