Tag: writing

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 Libraries will finally have a resting place for all the donations of outdated novels.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.

2

Watering Flowers in the Desert

I have times of crushing exhaustion. Too tired to even swipe my face free of makeup, I head to bed, catching myself at the last minute to head right instead of left, to enter the bath instead of the bed & clean my face. I sometimes am not as thorough as I want to be, but I do what I can so as not to wake with bits of mascara or smears of eye pencil which I so love to wear.

These times occur mostly after meals, healthy or not. The food, which should energize activity & move me to take on more – or at least finish what I’ve started – knock me out instead. My eyes close over the book & sleep wells up so I nod over the pages. I “lose time,” returning to activity depleted more – the nod-out not even restorative. I nap at 6, wake at 8, returning to the bed at 10. The good news is by 4 I’m back & setting up coffee, brushing Hanna Bell, writing notes to friends… By 5:55, I’m gathering purse & water bottle, heading to they gym to push & pull, to walk & lift, to swing & balance. I come home to fruit & flax cereal, setting out once again for work by 8.

I’ve been blaming age, the heat, my use of a lifelong right eye dominance. It’s difficult, channelling an entire universe through one orb. Tiring (that word again!), enervating. And it’s a lifelong pattern, this losing speed & spunk with darkness. Perhaps it is simply the light inspires me to activity while darkness sets upon me like a succubus. I don’t hear the stopper pop, but the well of energy drains away.

Lately I feel the years settling upon me like a colorful cape fading somewhat. I am exalted by the number I’ve achieved & fearful of losing to them as well. Where this me will go is unimportant. I’m happy with the progress I’ve made, the influence I’ve held. I haven’t built cathedrals, but there are many tiny shelters for hiding away in, there is much nourishment stored in the words I’ve put together, the paragraphs planed from formlessness.

Once a seer asked me if I’d like to know who I’d been in the past, assuring me I was world-famous. Once another assured me I’d have that fame once more but “posthumously.” I live by the sea now; I know tracklessness. I’ve lived in the desert, too, where a footprint can last a thousand earth-years.

That I wink in & out of time & timelessness is appropos to my years. That I may spend more time on one side of the veil than the other is a balance more delicate to navigate when I hold the edge of the bureau to pull on my pants. I once heard a fellow say, “The older I get, the farther away the floor seems to be.” This is a truism as well as a grin.

If the only one I’ve made happy is a random reader, it is enough. If my life satisfied one whim, one promise, one wish, it is enough. If I cannot measure in full any longer, oh well. I’ve built none but stone cairns & buried much beneath them. I’ve made myself happy & had others laugh with me. I’ve taught the light a few things & carried darkness to the outer edges of my life, far from direct experience, leaving it there for the kind of jackals that gnaw this fare to feast well. I am amazed constantly in my ability to move forward when all I want is to turn back, make a pillow of my past to rest upon.

I have no symphonies gathered in a trunk for some child-genius to happen upon, no recipes to feed the masses, no prayers to bring on salvation, except in the personal. My life is an excerpt, a condensing, a draft & a draught of what a life should be, can be, & in my case, is.

That will have to serve.

It is past 10:00. I close my eyes again & pull up the covers. If my life is only a dream: it is Enough.

0

Meditation Return

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cha-ching!

1

Just. Add. Water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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