It's a long road

Human beings are hardwired to fit in. There is a pack mentality necessary for survival in the wild that transfers right into what we now consider our modern world.

I think it is most evident in small towns where anyone who is different is often miserable. People like the idea of original thinkers on television and in movies, but unless that thinker thinks like them, many people, especially under educated people don't like them in reality. They find them threatening.

The same is true in the gangs of cities, or gated neighborhoods, or congregations in many churches. Tolerance is often a thinly veiled façade for an excuse to either get rid of, or change anything out of the "norm." The norm being what is believed by the majority, or ones in power.

We are all looking to be comfortable. We want to follow the leader and absolve ourselves from making the hard decisions. It is one thing to pay lip service to the Bible, or Koran, or any way or creed. It is something altogether different to live that way.

Believing there is only one way, or that your way is superior to everyone else's is pretty egotistical. The world has been around for a very long time and the universe even longer. Ways come and go. The way people interpret those ways is very diverse.

We are a work in progress with a long way to go.

Next

My usual way of dealing with unease used to be withdrawal. From the world, from other people, from activity, but I realize that there has been a subtle shift over the last eight years.

Now I find myself trying to do something different when I am sad, or edgy, or just off balance in some way.

I've tried biking, walking, writing, drawing, painting, joining a meetup group, getting together with the Ironwood Ladies, volunteering, even dyeing my hair red!

Like anything, I have grown used to these things, so they don't always help. I know people who would say that they are only running away from my problems, that I should be meditating. Well, I do that too, but at my age I do whatever is necessary.

I may only have a few more years to live and even if I have another thirty, I'd like to do as much living as possible in that time.

So now I'm taking a pottery class and I joined a gym.

Who knows what I'll do tomorrow.

Mottos to live by

After reading Diana Gabaldon's books I became entranced by the idea of a motto, a phrase that described a way of living that was meaningful.

Having tried on several throughout the years I think this quote by Vivian Greene seems to fit me best.

Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass . . . it's about learning to dance in the rain.

Feels right to me.

Our brave new world

Imagine working eleven years for a company. You almost never use sick days and you arrive before five A.M. most of the days you work.

You are cross trained and able to work in most of it's outlets doing most of the available jobs.

You are cheerful, productive, eager and have letters in your file written by people impressed with your work.

Then, on October 26, 2018 you get called into your manager's office at 12:50 P.M. and told that they are eliminating the place you are currently working. You have been a good employee, done nothing wrong, but now you must hand in your badge and they will escort you to the door at 12:58.

Boom!

Eleven years of exemplary work gone in eight minutes! All they give you is a paper stating the above along with a few other details about your 401K and that you are eligible for unemployment. They will send you a check for your unused sick days and you will never step foot in the door again -- unless they find they need you some day in the future.

That is how its done now.

Fact or fate

Life often seems to come in random spurts of luck, or loss, or even strict boredom, but does it have to?

I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

Some things are unavoidable, that's true.

But how I react, or respond, or choose to deal with them should be up to me.

The idea that I have nothing to do with the way my life goes is just plain false.

I can just go with the flow, fight back, change course and do something different, or even just sit and laugh, or cry, about it.

I almost always do something. It's hard not to. After all I am a living, breathing person with a huge repertoire of learned and practiced responses.

The question is . . .

Which one will I use?

In the mean time

I think our country is in the most dangerous place it has been since the 1950's, or maybe even since it's inception.

We have a president who seems to prefer pitting everyone against everyone to uniting the country. In fact that appears to be his policy world wide.

Country against country, what he wants against the law, revenge against justice, republicans against democrats, propaganda against truth. The more stirred up we are, the happier he seems to be.

After all, if the pot is boiling and bubbling enough, no one can see what's cooking underneath.

By the end of four years we may have digressed irreparably back depleting our national resources, our air that we breathe, our safety standards, our idea that we are innocent until proven guilty, and little girls who are raped will be forced to have babies even if it kills them. The rich will get tax breaks, great health care and concessions wherever money can buy them. The rest of us will give up our social security, because there will be no security for people like us.

As the old song used to go, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." Why? Because everyone knows rich people deserve good things and poor people are all criminals, druggies and lazy worthless people like the immigrants whose children we stole and whose parents can no longer be found.

The Dragon

On that first morning, when my eyes closed and my heart opened, my world changed.

I didn't wish upon a star, or find a magic wand.

It was as if I had risen from the center of a crystal lake and discovered I was in a brand new world.

Everything looked the same but it felt different.

Now when the sun came out, the sky was such a brilliant blue it took my breath away.

Things began to slip into place. What could have gone all wrong, turned back on itself and was better than ever.

I discovered loving in a way so fulfilling, so rich, so overwhelmingly warm that it was almost addictive. Not being loved mind you, but loving.

Loving turns out to be the happily ever after in the fairy tale. The magic thoughts that bring about miracles. The invisible way that carries one to Neverland and back again without any sense of time.

Born deep down inside of me it grows like a dragon, spreading its wings and soaring through me on some days and sleeping in the cavern of my soul for other days on end.

When the dragon is awake, there is no feeling on earth that can match it.

Conjuring

I am editing again.

Reading out loud.

Listening to my voice.

Allowing my brain to wallow in the pictures the words conjure up.

And the hardest part is not allowing my mind to drift off on tangents sparked by the words of two great authors, because this is a book by Bestest about one of our great authors and it is rich!

I do twenty-one pages a day because my throat dries out after that, but they are some of the best minutes of my day.

Expectant

I often feel like I am on the verge of something big.

I feel as if something wonderful is either happening and I am just not seeing it, or something wonderful is about to happen.

I have no idea what it is.

It isn't like I expect to win the lottery, or inherit a fortune, or any material thing.

It is more like my eyes are going to come into focus and I will find the truth and the beauty of what actually is and my world will be transformed.

As if I will be turned inside out and within me is everything I have ever looked for.

Not that I am the answer to everything, or anything, but that it is within me to find the way and walk upon it peacefully and with joy.

Weighty work

I have been searching for a twin blanket for my daybed-only bed. My other blankets are huge. Folded in half doesn't work quite right and are mostly too hot, but twins are also really bigger than I need or want and I'm looking for a particular color and fabric to go with the couch part of the daybed.

I've read about weighted blankets for people with autism, but popular now for other people too. The idea is the weight calms you, feels like a hug, is comforting. They have an add where they keep dropping the weighted blanket on a woman in different situations and she immediately falls down in a deep sleep.

So I ordered a weighted blanket and a matching duvet cover to go with my couch daybed. They come in different sizes and weights depending on the person and the place it will be used. I ordered the one that was recommended for me.

I am such a raging optimist.

My first clue was when I could barely haul the box in the door. Still, I opened it, laid out the duvet cover and dragged the blanket over to the couch to insert it into the duvet. Second clue? It took everything I had to do this too.

When I finished, I could barely lift it to shake the blanket into place in the duvet, but I thought, I should really give this a chance. Maybe once it's all spread out it will be perfect! I spread it out and crawled underneath. It felt exactly like what it was. A twenty pound bag of heavy glass beads that settled down around me like a net, compressing all my parts and making turning over almost an impossibility. Now they tell me I will sleep so soundly I will no longer want to turn over?

I think that woman in the add fell down because someone dropped twenty pounds of blanket on top of her. I carefully folded everything back up. (Not easy because it was so heavy.) Packaged it back in the box and managed to get it into my car so I could drive to UPS. All the way there I wondered how I might get both boxes in the door and finally decided I would just leave my hatchback open and pray someone would open the store door for me.

A postman drove up as I neared the building and jumped out to open the door, but his hand slipped off and for one agonizing moment I thought they were closed and I was going to have to make my way back to the car. I panicked and cried out, "Oh noooooo!" Another customer laughed as the door opened and I must have looked elated. (I felt elated.) I stepped into the store and the tall teenager behind the counter rushed towards me to help, but I beat him to the counter where I dropped both boxes with a great sigh.

He gave me a receipt and then went to pick up the boxes. "Oh my God!" He said, laughing. "This is really a blanket? If I put it in the overhead, I'd never get it out."

I found a nice little twin blanket at TJMaxx on the way home and when I have the energy, I will put it on my bed.

Through the eyes of dreams

I suspect everyone has some idea of what they think they look like, or want to look like.

For one reason, or another, most of us don't actually look that way, but we probably don't look the same to everyone anyway. A film star develops a carefully drawn up persona. They have agents and companies dedicated to making sure the public sees them a certain way.

The rest of us are more at the mercy of other people and fate.

My father, looking through the eyes of love, always saw my mother as the bride he married. My husband always saw me as a threat for some reason. I have a friend I see as the earth mother and another I see as a sort of thoroughly modern Millie.

The people in our lives are as much a reflection of us as they are anything else. We see what we want to see, what we allow ourselves to see, what we expect to see . . . and then, we finally see the bit of them we allow to show through all that.

I am one of those lucky people who has a friend who sees me through my dreams somehow. She isn't even someone I share my dreams with most of the time, but she seems to know what I want to be, how I'd like to be seen, who I wish I were.

I love that! She thought I looked like a ballerina when we were young! Recently she wrote about me as "the Pixie Red Head!"

Wow.

Throwing pots

Almost everyone has seen Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze in Ghost working with clay while Unchained Melody plays in the background. If that scene doesn't make you want to become a potter, I can't imagine what might.

Perhaps the idea of creating something out of the earth and turning it into a piece of art, or a dish that you can tell people, "I made that myself" pulls you toward pottery classes.

I was drawn in by both of those and more. I've always wanted to try my hand at making something on a potter's wheel and so I signed up for six classes to do just that.

The first thing I learned is that it is really work! The next thing I realized was that there is a whole vocabulary that goes with this that I have never heard of. Wedging made me break out into a sweat! It's kind of like kneading bread, but in a very distinct way.

I learned to actually throw the clay onto the center of the bat using my arm from the elbow down. I learned that my hands are very diverse tools whose different bones and muscles shape and pull and hollow out that clay in amazingly intricate and difficult ways.

We made two pots and threw both back into the bucket at the end of class, but our teacher assured us that we will make and glaze something by the last couple of classes.

I had to wash my arms and face and clothes, but I really think I'm going to like this class.

At risk

Today Bestest was out running through his neighborhood. Not unusual. He runs nearly every day.

When I visited, we walked his dog through that same neighborhood. Three and a half miles every day with a boisterous white lab whose greatest joy is the few minutes of freedom she has to tree squirrels near the end of the walk.

Bestest never allows his dog to run when there are people, or cars nearby, but we have talked about the way cars and trucks fly through this gated community.

You can never tell whether it is the people who live there, or the people who build their houses, care for their lawns, clean their homes, or are just visiting them, but they tear through these quiet suburban streets on the same ground that six year olds play kick ball and eight year olds ride their bikes and toddlers wander out onto while the parents talk to each other.

I have seen all these things happen.

They are not unusual.

It is only if they happen to cross paths that tragedy could result and turn this little Eden into a nightmare of regret.

We've talked about this, worried for the children, but today it was Bestest who was hit by a car running a stop sign and whirling around the corner to plow into him.

It stopped in time to only leave him bruised and sore. It did not smash any of his bones, or kill him, thank God. But what if . . .

What if it had been a child, or a dog, or a group of children? What if it had run over him? How would any of us survive that? The grief of family and friends and the person driving the vehicle who wasn't trying to hurt anyone, or maliciously break any laws, but who carelessly and unthinkingly put anyone on the streets at risk, could have been horrific.

This should be a warning, a blessed chance to make people stop and think before the unthinkable happens.

The point

What if all of life is now?

Now, I am who I am aware that I am, but I am still that baby who played with her toes and that old woman who sits starring out the window remembering the day, long ago, when her two little boys walked off to school holding hands and wearing winter coats for the first time that year.

I am the woman who belonged to a dream group for years because her dreams are so clear. The woman who has 3D nightmares and leaps from her bed to escape from a nightmare fire.

I think that reality is only now no matter what is happening now, or where I am.

I measure life in hours and days and minutes and seconds when really it might be measured in memories and moments, sounds and scents.

What if ghosts are really there? Not as ephemeral beings, but blurry reality? What if tragedy and disaster could be bypassed by memories and a future when things are not yet bad, or already passed?

What if life is only a point on the graph and within that point is everything that ever was, or ever will be?

Whose perspective would be right then?

What if people, or places, or events seem familiar because we have already crossed paths somewhere in time at a point that is finite and infinite all at the same time?

On a graph of infinity all things pass through each point at least once. And it is always now on the point.

Facades

I think that persistence is probably the most important trait people need to have.

I know a lot of very intelligent people who never quite made it. A lot of very talented people who almost made it. A lot of gifted people who never quite got there.

Not to say they never will. Some of us just bloom slower than others, but it is important to hang in there until you do. Until you reach maximum satisfaction with your own life, or at least stay on the road headed in that direction.

Lots of people want to be there so badly they are willing to fake it. People who cop out and opt for weird instead of successful. Odd instead of even. Facades instead of core. It's just not the same thing.

Maximizing your own self brings a kind of satisfaction and steadiness that cannot be faked. It gives you the feeling that you can stand on your own two feet, strong, competent and able, that you can cope with life even when you don't like it.

Then you can have friends and partners to enhance and polish off what is already good inside you, because it is what you are made of that makes you who you are, not who you know, or what you have.

All the pretty clothes in the world won't make a mud pie into something edible. And all the fancy trucks, cars, houses, and vacations won't buy you real respect, or happiness. These things, as real as they seem, are all ephemeral.

So find that spark in your center and fan it until the real you is on fire. That is about as good as it gets.

A trip to the poor farm

Field trips are for the adventurous -- and sometimes the foolish.

I've been sleeping all my life, so you'd think I'd have it down by now.

I moved into my new apartment with a perfectly good bed, but I have already switched sleeping in the bedroom, now called the office, to the living room.

That meant moving my queen size bed in there and seeing a big huge bed the minute you walked in the door just wasn't right, so I bought a futon couch that turned out to have unnecessary ridges and a hardness factor of ten. I could have bought a bookcase and been almost as comfortable if I'd just laid it sideways on the floor. I got a foam topper, but it didn't help.

I decided I needed a daybed and everything I read said, get a six inch mattress to go with it. I got what I thought was a good one, but after two days I could feel the slats in the daybed.

I began to feel like this was the house that Jack bought. Who bought a bedboard to go with the mattress that sat on the slats that fit in the daybed that I bought. And for over a week I slept like a baby, but now my hip is killing me and I feel like I am sleeping on the board alone (without the mattress, although it is still there. I can see it!)

I ordered a cushy mattress pad, but it isn't even here yet and I can tell I need much more than that. So . . . for the price of two couches, one foam topper, one six inch mattress, one bedboard and one cushy mattress pad I could have purchased one whale of a bed!

The upside is that I know I love my daybed's looks. I know how much trouble I'm willing to go to to make it up every morning and get it ready at night and it will hold a very nice ten inch memory foam state of the art mattress.

Which should get here just before I leave for the poor farm.

Jittery

Too much something's making me jittery.

Lickety splickety jittery.

Like I'm dancing on a wire that vibrating sparks

Sparkely darkely markedly jittery.

Could it be the coffee so dark

Sarkily slarkily cofferly jittery?

Or the text coming in every second I walk

Hoppily moppily sloppily jittery?

Whatever it is I am feeling so jittery

Skittery flittery snittery jittery.

Falling for Fall

I went out to the car a few minutes ago and it feels like Fall might really be here!

I love that crisp, clean feeling.

I even love it when it is damp and chilly.

Fall is my time of year. Time to wear jackets and bundle up in cozy blankets. Time to eat pumpkin everything. Time to be grateful that I am alive and young enough to go walking under leaves of red and gold and even orange.

This is the time of year when eating feels right. Winter is coming after all! We need to bulk up for the long cold dreary days ahead like bears readying themselves for hibernation -- or not.

But anyway I look at it, I seem to find Fall the perfect season. School is in session, the holidays are just kicking off and my birthday is coming up!

Market day

Our society seems to place a lot of emphasis on being sophisticated and cultured, wealthy and upwardly mobile.

Sounds good, but most of that stuff is pretty superficial.

It's also relatively easy to create it as a façade.

We might be better off to look for calm intelligence and patience. Someone who knows how to really listen and hear what people are actually saying.

After that, look for people who follow through. Doing what you say you will do carries a lot of weight in my world. Grabbing hold of the streamers on hot air balloons seems exciting, but who knows where you'll float off to.

All the clever hucksters and snake oil salesmen in the world can sound good when they are in their element spewing off trite, well worn speeches, but once their products have proved to be nothing more than scented Vaseline coating their pockets to catch the gold, people are still dying from the poverty and disease they had in the beginning.

Our world is really not much better off than the villages of old. Main street is just longer and the carnivals are bigger, but the people are still struggling just to get along.

My mother's radio

I just heard a recording of a song from my childhood and I was washed back in time like a salmon swimming upstream.

Warm yellow lamplight pooling around a simpler place and time. A time when I believed the world was happy and safe and flooded with love. A feeling of certainty that someday I would have all these same feelings with a family of my own and life would go on forever, one song at a time.

Which is why music often makes me sad. It evokes feelings that rise up as real now as they were the day I first felt them. It is a time machine like no other, dropping me back into the world of a little girl whose parents loved each other and her so much that they sandwiched her in between their hugs while meatloaf and hot rolls were sitting a yard away. I've never known such complete and perfect love as the way I perceived it then.

My world was small. Our house was smaller, three children in a bedroom so tight that even with all the doors removed, we couldn't walk between the beds without stepping over the ladder of the bunkbed. But we had everything!

A playroom in the basement next to my dad's office. A glassed in porch where I sat on a daybed and watched for the milkman to come with his horse. A dining room where we ate cheese sandwiches with butter and mustard, and spooned up bowls of vegetable soup for lunch.

My own spot in the kitchen where I could actually heat water on a toy electric stove, or iron my father's handkerchiefs with a real miniature iron. Child safety was not what it is today, but I did okay and I learned to cross stitch by the end of that year too. It was probably my first year of truly sentient feelings. Before that I only have puddles of memories.

Here the river begins, accompanied by music from my mother's kitchen radio.

Pity full

I often find myself wondering why people do what they do.

Why do things that make you miserable?

It seems there should be some great answer to that. As if people taking on the sins of the world like a sin eater will make things better for the rest of us. Or by sacrificing their happiness they are helping someone else out. Or something!

What I see is not that.

Most of the time I see a miserable person whose misery hangs over them like a dark cloud causing everyone around them to be, at least, slightly uneasy. Very few people enjoy being the cause of someone's unhappiness and being around someone who is chronically depressed, or sad, or miserable is . . . depressing.

In an ideal world we would just never choose to do things that make us unhappy, but it seems to me that if you are forced to do something you don't want to do then you need to find a way to make it better.

Avoiding the feelings by sleeping, or working over time, or staring at the boob tube won't make anything better. Don't be pitiful. That just makes most people want to avoid you. Be proactive.

Find things to do that are positive. Be creative. Find a purpose aside from being pitiful.

I had a friend who wore forty pound braces on his legs and walked with crutches. He was engaged in all sorts of things and very active in spite of his handicaps. One of his phrases that has always stuck with me was, "Don't be pity full." He was joking, but he was right.

Pandora

Sexual misconduct was so common when I was growing up that I think it was kept quiet because that was the only way you could maintain the illusion that if somebody knew, they would make it right, or stop it, or care about it.

And it was turned on you more often than not with phrases like, look what you were wearing, or look how she walked, or why would she even go there?

Then there were questions. Are you sure you didn't misunderstand? You do realize he has a wife, a reputation, a business, children, right? What do you think people are going to think of you?

Or the implications. You must have wanted it. Did you actually fight? Think of your reputation!

Or worst of all. You do what you have to to succeed at this business. It's part of the game. Everybody knows this is what happens, how badly do you want it?

He's just being cute. He was just teasing. He had to try, at least.

Whatever the reasoning. Whatever the outcome. Whatever the feelings. They were all geared to protect "Him" from the evil Eve, from Pandora, from the witch who would tempt a good man into doing bad things.

The princess and the pea

The princess and the pea story was so much deeper and more complicated than it appeared to an outsider.

The poor princess was only trying to get a good night's sleep, but the whole kingdom seemed to be conspiring against her.

First of all, she was presented with a plethora of tasty treats just before bedtime and having no will power at all, consumed most of them, leaving her stuffed and hot.

Then she heard the weather was going to be nice and cool, so she flung open the castle windows, turned off the fluttering flamingos above her bed and climbed in.

Only to discover that the castle stones were keeping in the heat, the crazy flamingos were chattering away since they had nothing else to do and there was something hard underneath all her mattresses!

After searching through them all she ate the pea she discovered (she was a truly voracious princess) but it turned out that it was the slats in her bed that were keeping her awake. So she had a bed board placed over these, covered it up with ten thousand mattresses and tried again.

And again, and again, and again. . .

A fine line

There is a difference in the way things are valued.

Something that is cherished and looked forward to is a gift no one can deny.

Something presented as an imposition can be exactly the same thing, but dreaded.

I want to be wanted.

I never want to be put up with.

Nobody does.

I think it is better not to have anything to do with someone if you are simply putting up with them, because neither of you will be happy, or comfortable.

Being wanted, on the other hand, is the most glorious feeling in the world.

There is a fine line in between, but one is the road to heaven and the other, well . . . you get the idea.

Better

Famous last words: I think it's finished!

In my life almost nothing is ever truly finished. Unless I am giving it away, or throwing it away, it is always a project in transition.

Creativity, experimentation, growth, dissatisfaction, whatever you want to call the reasoning, I find there is almost always a better way to do something.

It may be better because it feels better, fits better, works better, or looks better, or I just like it better.

But you better bet your money on the fact that it will eventually change if it is around long enough.

All in a days work

You too can put your new daybed together in only seven not so easy steps!

The hardest part? Getting it out of the boxes! They are super heavy and heavily glued, but they do protect it during shipping.

The next hardest part? Trying to follow directions written for myopic chipmunks, using only human eyes.

Only after checking the boxes for parts and throwing them away to make room for spreading out all the pieces, did I discover it said to set the arms on pieces of cardboard in order not to fray them while putting the frame together. (Note: a marble pastry board and silk armchair can replace the cardboard if you are careful.)

Then there is the matter of all the little bolts that need to be put in with a tiny allen wrench. Fifty six of them, some in impossible places to tighten so that by the time you finish (which I have yet to do after eight hours) all the veins in your fingers are broken. (This turns out to be the very hardest part, especially since the hole for one of the big bolts did not line up.)

I have yet to finish screwing in the rest of the bolts or put the slats on. . .

Did I say, all in a day's work? Maybe a week's?

Renewed, refreshed, and resoundingly happy

I haven't been blogging for one simple reason.

I have been too busy living!

I don't think I could have crammed one more thing into the last six days, but it has been wonderful.  I feel alive and renewed and slept all night for two nights in a row, which I haven't done in years.

I have literally walked miles. Uphill and down and lots of steps too!

I have been to a University of Alabama football game, the number one college team in the nation, and watched the million dollar band play at half-time. I counted 28 sousaphones!!!!

I have walked to the best ice cream sandwich shop where I got to create my own concoction of two brownies, salted caramel fudge ice cream, all pressed to warm the brownies and topped in hot fudge!

I have been to one scary movie and watched more on television with Bestest.

I have spent every night sipping Merlot and listening to live music, played and sung just for me!

I have eaten well, slept well, exercised in ways I never dreamed I could and now I am on my way home.

Life just doesn't get any better than this.