High plains driver

Driving through the high plains of Kansas is a long and windy process.  Hour after hour of rolling amber fields, broken only by the occasional winter tumbleweed as it skitters across the road.

Normally I like to listen to talk radio when I drive like this, but in the outback of Kansas that is like eating a bad ice cream sundae, syrupy with a few scattered nuts.  Classical music makes me sleepy after a while, so I ended up listening to a Mexican station.  I only understood the occasional word, but the music was peppy and it had the added advantage of not making me angry. 

Signs become incredibly interesting when going through an area like this.  There were the signs posted along fence posts, like the old Burma Shave signs, only these were for churches.  I read them as I tooled along, St. Andrew's Catholic, First Presbyterian, Drunkard Baptists -- wait!  I had to read that one again. 

Or the hand painted red signs advertising the world's largest prairie dog over and over as I drew closer.  The prospect of a fifty pound prairie dog is daunting, but I wondered more about the promise of petting baby pigs.   Always having a supply of baby pigs must require some work.  In the end I did not go see the prairie dog, pigs, rattlesnakes or any of the other assorted animals they offered.

I did eat in a 1950's shiny metal diner, planted at the edge of a small town and run by one woman who did everything but cook and one cook who did that.  It was amazingly good pie and celebrated the end of my prairie journey.

World peace

Love thy neighbor as thyself. 

Sounds simple, but I suspect it is one of the hardest things many people ever try to do.  Not because they don't want to love their neighbors, although the evidence does seem to point that way,  but because it is much harder to love myself than it sounds.

Nobody knows my flaws better than I do.  They have been pointed out to me since the day I was born.  And every self help article, every personal product, every single face I look into makes it abundantly clear that I could be better!

Or at least that was the way I used to feel.   

I've had a wonderful mirror for the last four years.  It keeps telling me how wonderful I am, how adorable I am, how awesome the things I do are. 

Contrary to popular opinion, this has not made me vain and ugly.  It has made me kinder and gentler.  I actually kind of like me now.  I still feel funny saying that, but feeling it is so good.

Nurturing someone is not the same as allowing them to run a muck.  Love needs to prepare us to live in the real world, but to live in it with love requires a lot of nurturing and care.

If we all truly loved our neighbors the way we are supposed to love ourselves, world peace would be endemic.  It isn't, but we don't have to be missionaries to correct that.  We can start much closer to home.

Those people

I spent over 9 hours in the car today, most of  it listening to the radio.  It seems Arizona has found a new way to foster prejudice.  This time in the name of saving religious rights.

Assuming they can pull this off, will it open the door for all sorts of other religious "needs?"  And . . . I wonder how they intend to enforce it?

Will we all have to carry cards designating our sexual preferences for identification?  Heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual?  Adulterer, widow with needs, chaste widower?  Or do they think they can just look at people and "know."  If I try to go into one of these places with my sister, will I have to prove we aren't a couple?  Will it eliminate the ability of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters to eat out together?

Maybe everyone should just save this sort of person a lot of trouble .  Maybe it is time to boycott this kind of business.  Maybe it is even time to boycott Arizona.  I am truly offended by "that kind" of holier than thou person.

It's a jolly holiday with . . .

I'm off on another adventure tomorrow.  This time to Colorado where I expect to show up like Mary Poppins and experience the magic of my two youngest grandchildren.

The soundtrack will be piped in on a giant stereo equipped with everything from Bach to the Beatles and although we may not have dancing penguins, we will have dancing bears and turtles and foxes, I am sure.

Mr. Banks has already been saved and is now a stay-at-home daddy whose thoroughly modern wife goes off to the office when she is not at home dancing with her family and helping pack up the household for the move.

The move!  That is where I come in!  This is my chance to contribute towards the magic of my children living out their dreams and I am so excited for them.

Here's hoping for a wonderful time feeding the birds, laughing long and loud and free . . . and spoonfuls of blueberries to keep the doctor at bay!

Jump in the car and go

The devil is in the details, but if you're going to obsess over the details before they even show up, you could be losing out on a whole lot of life.

I'm not knocking being prepared. but there are fewer steps to being prepared than some people believe.

A working car, a gps, enough money to eat on and pay for a place to sleep, the right clothes, and life's adventures are much more fun than frightening.

So you make a few mistakes!  Most of them are no more dangerous than going around the block an extra time or two as long as you don't panic.  They might even take you into more interesting places.

I find people pretty much the same everywhere I go.  Most of them are kind enough and glad to be helpful, but common sense says I need to trust my own instincts more than those of strangers.

If you can fill your car with gas, read the signs along the highway, and follow your gps: you are better equipped than most of the wagon trains that traveled across the country, you are safer than Johnny Appleseed was as he walked around sowing apple trees, and you are way ahead of Little Red Riding Hood when she went to see her grandmother.

Just pull yourself together and go while you are young enough to drive the car.

The frosting on the cake

My world is wonderful I must admit and I have tons to type before I quit.

Measuring work is a strange process.

I just finished part of a long ongoing project.  It is meticulous, painstaking work that requires lots of time.

 If I measure the actual height of the paper used when it is printed out, it is only about 3/4s of an inch high.

If I measure it by the number of hours I have spent doing it, it is somewhere over sixty actual hours or more, I can only guess at the time I spent on the first part.

If I measure it by the quality of my work, I can only say I feel very good about it.

But if I measure it by the way it makes me feel to contribute towards such a worthy project, for such a good friend, it is beyond precious.

It has been said before, by minds much greater than mine but: Two lives converged on an unlikely road and I switched from peanuts to pie a la mode!

Trusting in the ineffable

Life evolves because of and in spite of everything I do.
 
Sometimes I am terrified by my love of people.  Things can be replaced, but not people.

If I become too dependent on a person in my life and that person disappears, how will I survive?

I have found myself afraid to be me for fear of losing people, afraid to go forward in my life for fear of destroying what I perceive as our relationship, afraid, afraid, afraid.

And yet I know that the way is much longer, much more winding, much more infinite than I am capable of understanding.  Trusting in the ineffable infinite only eases the inevitable.

What will be, will be. 

A conscious belief that the present joy or something better is always on the horizon would give me so much peace of mind, but my humanity has so much room for fear.

Walking into the future is not a choice, but doing it with an open heart is.

Go home young man

Nostalgia is a strange pet.

She gobbles up difficulties and hardships, leaving only the meat -- without the bone, by the way.

Eons of difficulties, years of banging one's head against the wall can all become extinct when Nostalgia moves in.

We follow her along trails filled with selective memory.  Trails devoid of the monsters that once lay in wait for us.  Trails garlanded with nonexistent flowers and toads masquerading as bunnies.

She wags her tail and Snow White sings for us in the far way garbage cans hidden by their distance from the present.

Sometimes it's just best to pat her on the head, grab her leash and take her back home where reality supersedes everything remembered.

Beautiful faces

Beauty is so  much more than skin deep.

It is the light glowing from eyes that have found the serenity of perseverance.

It is the assurance that you will be loved no matter what you do or when you do it.

It is the gentle hand that quietly redirects no matter how many times that takes.

It is constancy and patience, character and a bit of rascality.

Beauty is truth in its most enduring form, emanating outward to those who can see it, not with their eyes but with their hearts.

Resurrection

You never know how far your words will go.

I just read a comment sent to me way back on October 25, 2010 and it still brings tears to my eyes.  That thot was very special to me and to receive such a kind response touches me greatly.

The thot itself does too because it reminds me of a great person in my life, one who shared my taste in books and poetry and desserts and even travel.  A rare woman indeed and one I cherished.

I don't know what made me flip over to look at old comments today, but I'm glad I did.  It opened a flood of memories.  We didn't always agree on things, but we were always agreeable with each other.

Life is rich with differences, both she and I would agree on that, but sometimes it is just nice to have a kindred spirit close by.  I miss her.  There may never be another woman as compatible with me as she was.

Resurrecting old words is a poor substitute for the woman she was, but the memories they bring are warm and sweet and I'm glad I stumbled on them.

The rictus grin

Learning the side step and mastering the rictus grin were necessary parts of growing up a "lady" in mid twentieth century America.

This time honored dance and that particular smile separate me from those people who find making a scene a way of life, or who, perhaps, just need to be the center of attention at any cost.

I was taught, not very gently, not to draw attention to myself.

The idea that negative attention was better than none was quickly erased from both my actions and my thoughts in a world that preceded today's in your face attitudes.  In my world that kind of attention was painful beyond belief.

My feelings are mine and fine, but expressing them is relegated to a strict code of propriety that becomes a shield in spite of its seeming repression.  It limits panic until I have had time to think of a proper way to respond.  For example:  should someone rush into my bedroom and pounce wildly onto the person I am sleeping with . . . I would simply find a way to slip away as soon as possible.  Once removed there would be plenty of time to decide what to do.

Sidestep, smile, a time honored way of dealing with awkward situations, but something that has also made me a connoisseur of smiles.  The Cheshire cat terrifies me. 

I am here

Life is a struggle.  

I don't honestly believe that there is a reason for this.  I don't think I'll be reborn a street person for being bad, or a millionaire if I am good any more than I believe all millionaires are good people or all street people are bad.

I'm also pretty sure that what comes around goes around.  People learn from their own experiences or by watching other people.  Generosity and kindness are powerful teachers, as are brutality and greed.

I don't believe in suffering for the sake of suffering.  I find that counter intuitive to life.  Of course if it makes a person feel better to suffer, I guess that's fine as long as it doesn't carry over onto those nearby.

I do believe that I am here to do the best I can with what I have and sometimes that seems really hard, but when I make progress it also feels really good.

I am here to find my place in this world, a place where I can use my particular skills, confident that this is enough and that all skills are necessary from sweeping the floor to designing space age machinery. 

Today

This is one of THOSE days.

I went down to use the laundry this morning, having stripped the bed and cleaned the bathroom, only to discover the washer is full.  The bad news is the woman whose clothes are in there has two months worth of trash outside her back door and is gone today.  My chances of doing laundry are slim to none unless I move her clothes myself.

I went to the Verizon store and stood in the neverending line for service.  When they finally called my name I was happy to hear I was eligible for an upgrade and okay with the way I would have to do it to qualify.  Then they looked at my phone and disqualified me.  It seems the old phone cannot have any cracks in it.  Mine is a crack with the phone attached.

I drove home pondering over where to put the new giant garbage can the city left in the street, along with two other giant ones and four smaller ones next door, but when I got home, the east side of our eaves, gutters and pieces of roof were lying in the driveway.

I am about to start transcribing.  But I wonder if I am too dangerous to be near my computer.

Its a wonderful life

My life seldom plays out the way I imagine it.  Of course when I was twenty I thought 64 was very old.  I thought by then I would be content to sit around in my living room watching tv and my grandchildren play.

Instead I am volunteering five days a week, driving around the country visiting with friends and hanging out with people I never dreamed would have any interest in me at this age.

In between I find myself sitting in my living room with my daughter and granddaughter, who is 18, eating pizza and watching a good movie -- or shopping -- or hiking.

Grandmas aren't what they used to be, but then my grandma wasn't either.  I am not doing the things she did, but she didn't do the things other grandmas did back then.

I consider myself a pretty free spirit, or at least I did until I met a truly free spirit who drove me mad with the total disregard for time and space that is so important to me.

It's not enough to just want something.  I have to want it passionately!  I have to be willing to do whatever is necessary to bring it about and be able to live with the consequences.

Lived that way, life is seldom boring and more often than not, incredibly awesome.

Love

What a complicated word that has become and yet it is such a simple thing that babies can both experience it and produce it.

Human beings seem to need everything explained in human terms and we are finite creatures, or at least most of us believe we are.  We live.  We die.

We talk about God, but only in human terms.  Like children who need their storybooks anthropomorphized we create a god in images we see around us.  Jealous, demanding, needy, all those petty human elements that cover up what must be the most ineffable power we have ever wanted to know.

The concept of anything being endless is hard for humans.  Milk comes in quarts.  Meat in pounds.  Time in days and weeks and years.  We use things up and then they are gone.

Love, like god,  is ineffable, endless, eternally there for the experiencing.  Manifested in ways both understood and incomprehensible, it rules our world through our understanding and misunderstanding of it.

On a day dedicated to one tiny aspect of love I want to celebrate by expanding the concept.  If the ocean were love and it spilled out over the world, I think it would cover everything.

Foibles and fables

Writing is one of my favorite ways of emptying out the trash.

Sometimes I need other people to read it and sometimes it is better that they don't.

Venting is one of those things often better done in private.  For two reasons:  One, it could be one sided and unnecessarily hurtful to other people.  Two, it probably wouldn't change anything anyway.

The foibles and fables of any given life make it possible to walk around with our heads up and our feet planted firmly in our own private fairytale.  Trying to take that away is both futile and mean.

I don't set out to hurt people and I have to believe others are mostly the same.

We are who we are, no matter the reason.  Learning to live together in peace and with respect for our differences is the challenge of my life.

Sometimes it is a bigger challenge than others.

On the wings of a snow-white dove

Sometimes I wonder where my thoughts come from.  How do those little synapses in my brain translate into words and pictures?  Perhaps even more "wonder-full" to me is what influences those synapses?

Where does inspiration really come from?  Where do gloomy feelings come from?  Is it possible that there is some connection to other souls, especially in intensely emotional moments?

I truly believe there is. 

Even if I don't understand how or why or where they come from, I am driven to try and create paintings of them with the words I have.  I want to find a way to make those thoughts and feelings manifest in my outer world.  To give them the substance I believe they are.

Like the steam of a tea kettle telling me it is ready, my thots are the collective end of something slightly intangible. Flying in on the wings of a snow-white dove, slipping in on sound waves too high for me to hear, touching me in some unimaginable way -- however it happens I can't believe it is all me. There is too much diversity, too much intensity, but whatever it is I am eternally grateful for it.

Sunshine and roses

It is unusual for me to be walking in such a dark place, but today I am.

I am blessed in so many ways that writing about the darkness feels wrong, but I suppose honesty should supersede style.

Life isn't always sunshine and roses.  Sometimes it is swampy and full of toads and when that happens maybe I should just make toad juice.  As long as I didn't have to drink it, it might make me feel better.

I had almost forgotten how hard it could be to be stuck in such a dark place. It has been years since I felt like this.  Honestly I wanted to write a sarcastic, or funny thot conveying the feelings without being in them, but that really wouldn't have been honest.

In the end, I just did what I always do.  I took care of one miserable chore after another, then went to school and finished up some other things afterwards.  Now I actually feel much better.

I suppose that is the only cure --  just do what needs to be done, admit how I felt doing them and get on with it.

 

Faith

There is a tiny window where fighting the good fight makes sense.  Use it to get the attention of someone and then step back, because if who I am isn't enough, then no amount of fighting will make a difference in the long run.

I cannot make someone love me anymore than I can change the structure of my bones.  Love cannot be won, or bought, or inveigled in any way.  Trying to force love is counterproductive.  It is a waste of time and emotions.

There are all sorts of love, each one finding its own level in its own time, but if it is an eternal struggle I am in the wrong place.  I know.  I once spent over thirty years trying to find a lasting love that wasn't there.

I do believe that some love is beyond time and imagination.  It goes beyond the physical.  It is drawn to itself in spite of everything the world throws at it.  It can withstand life and sickness and even death.

Striving for something that isn't there makes me physically ill.  I don't need that.  I would like to say I don't want it either, but sometimes I do.  It takes a long time to have faith in such big things.

Fairy tales do come true

It is possible to live a long and relatively happy life and still get it all wrong, because in a way the fairy tales are right.  It's just not a surface thing like we think, or as simple as it is written so young children can understand it.

Human beings are adaptable creatures.  Arranged marriages work if both people understand their roles.  High school romances are sustainable until one of the partners outgrows the other, then it becomes a simple relationship and almost any relationship is tolerable for some period of time.

We don't need the fairy tale to be content.

People are used to settling.  Fools rush in and all those sayings . . .

But once in a while the fairy tale does come true and then we call it soul mates, or divine providence, or maybe just good luck, but no matter what it is called, it is good -- very very good.

It is more than romance, more than need, more than. . .   and it is rare.  It is comfort that surpasses understanding, security beyond time, satisfaction that fills nooks and crannies until they overflow.

It is happily ever after in the real sense, the one most of us never experience and therefore do not even know exists.

The easiest half

Life is one long lesson.  I am never as advanced, or free, or loving, or anything else as I think I am.

I remember GI Joe saying, "knowing is half the battle."  What he didn't say was that knowing is the easiest half of the battle.

I know what my logical response should be in almost all situations.  It's my emotional response that leaves me in anguish most of the time.

It's almost as if I really do have those two little cartoon characters sitting one on each shoulder. One tells me that my life is sweeter than I ever dreamed was possible.  The other keeps poking at me, trying to turn me green and Kermit was right, "It's not easy being green."

When I think about it, it seems the Tao according to cartoons is to keep looking for the lighter side.

But that can be a heavy thing to do.

Icons and focal points

The power of prayer, the manifestation of meditation, wishful thinking . . .

Call it what you may, I suppose you might even say it is coincidence, but whatever it is, or was, it makes my day.

For months I focus on something I wish would happen and then:

One cold wintery day I find a discarded ornament, a homemade silver sequined ball with a delicate twisted thread wound around it.  My friend scoops it up and gives it to me and I use it to focus more intensely. 

My thoughts, my prayers, my wishes, wind around and around, just like that thread until -- today -- they manifest in this world and come true.

Or maybe it was Saint Joseph.

Healthy wealthy and wiser

Creme brulee cheesecake, bread pudding, mocha coffee, maple bacon, chicken salad . . . I spend a lot of time eating and I have to admit, I love every minute of it.

And then I think that I would like to eat healthier, lose weight, exercise more.  I love thinking about that, but doing it?  Not so much.

I have one friend who says eating healthy is just not satisfying.  I have another friend who says it can be delicious.

I suppose if I like to eat, I need to learn how to cook the things that are both healthy and delicious.

The questions are the quest

My world began in the eyes of a poet who saw his muse crossing the street, wooed her on the covered bridges of Illinois’ soybean fields and carried her away to the ivy covered walls of a university.

I was weaned on the Rosetta Stone and old Irish ballads.  In my father’s world Shakespeare sat side by side with Chaucer and Yeats and these were surrounded by the bones of a past so old and secure that there was no question in my mind what I would be when I grew up. 

I am it.

No more practical now than it was when I was a child of four, my world still revolves around writing and books and the fairy tales that comprise the real world.  I look for the dreamers, the lovers, the people who understand that life goes beyond that round file cabinet sitting under a desk gobbling up electric bills and water bills, grocery lists and used tissues.

I am still surrounded by ivy covered walls.  Shakespeare and Yeats sit sentinel around me as do Faulkner and Agee.  The Irish ballads have morphed into music played on a mellow guitar in the dim twilight of a winter’s evening.

Life in the eyes of a poet never changes.  The answers have always been there.  It's the questions that are the quest.