a marital fight

I just saw david for the first time, as someone REALLY separate from me.  I mean similar to how separate a stranger can feel, similar in the way that I felt enough space between us that I could see him from another perspective, from a farther back perspective….and what I saw, is a man wanting to make sure that his boundaries are healthy strong and in tact…and the way he did that was by wacking them all over me, hurting me in the process.  All I asked is if he’d do he dishes before his kindmen meeting, and he replies with this, “I never ask you to do the laundry, you just do it when you get to it.”  This is funny right?  And another way of saying, “I don’t want to clean the kitchen now.”  Why couldn’t he have just said that?  Why couldn’t I just see that that’s what he was saying, in that moment.  I have a feeling that if I were witnessing this argument taking place between some other couple, I would have totally gotten that, right away…..and I wonder if I would have just watched the couple go through the same dance we did.  Which was me saying, ‘this is not a threat, just a question that was on my mind.”  And him saying, “well, in the past you asking me a question like that means, ‘clean the kitchen or I’m going to do it and be pissed the whole time.’”    Ok, dudes.  What’s the big deal.  Distill it down to, “kitchen?”, with a sweet little glance, to give him a wiff of the energy he loves about you……and he looks over and just says, “I live for cleaning your kitchen,” in a deep smirky sexy manly way.  And then slowly walks into the question, I mean kitchen, and cleans it while cracking a few jokes, looking beautiful and introspective most of the time, but also casting a few eye glances my way to let me know he’s also staying present with the room.  Mmmmm, so hot.

 oh, no...is this beginning of my first trashy novel??

taken

so brief, and so beautiful this break from my house of influenza.  when is the last time you did not step out of your front door for 5 days?  

coolness....that's all i can think of but it has nothing to do with what this post is about.

1/6/8

a monumental day….olive’s first stroller ride. Olive’s first tooth burst through the gum. Max and zhi’s second bike ride………I can’t write now cause I am tweeking on kid energy.

1/7/8

hoakay. Today, The beginning of our attempt to find to find rhythm in the midst of max and zhi going to preschool, which we all of a sudden, in the fall (I mean autumn, as well a kind of *fall* from life as we knew it), found it impossible to do. For all of December I stayed home with our munchkins. And now it’s January 7th, and I’ve let them out again! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! They’re out, in all their easy preciousness that we got them swimming in again, in a school yard, albeit a Buddhist schoolyard, but still a school yard nonetheless. a small little replica of the big wide-world, sort-of, and they’re going to bring home all sorts of horrifying behaviors, we know this. Maybe they’ll bring home some beautiful sweetness too? Yes, I like to focus on the shit for some reason. Actually I don’t like to focus on the shit, but I sho do have a habit of doing so. They’re going to bring home all sorts of horrifying germs too, most likely. It’s life on earth, I guess. If we want to dance with others, we have to be able to stand up to them, with our own selves streaming out. We have to be able to see others and their illnesses, without absorbing them into our skins, everytime. I mean, I totally get how we find ourselves in a deeper way, how we have to seriously grow our roots to keep standing in our bodies when we get sick, or all of a sudden under someone else’s spell. It’s often a huge growth opportunity. But it’s a lot of freaking work to constantly be learning as much about ourselves as we can, to constantly be focused on anchoring into our own ground, so that when we are up against another powerful, dynamic presence, our own does not feel weak, see-through, and flittery. And we all needed a break! I’m just not sure it was a long enough break. They never are, though.

As I see my kids struggle with this, and I mean max really, I see myself riding the same wave, paralleling him. I’m Finding more of my weight, and more of my lightness all at the same time. How funny that we need weight and lightness to feel balanced. Ummm, well, that is almost a universally known statement, or at least here in boulder. But still I never thought about it like this……… I’m picturing an archetype-type fat fat heavy dark hairy growling man (why a man?) as my weighty grounded anchored physical body, there’s no way he’d blow away in the wind. And then to balance him out, there’s this little bird, a little fairy butterfly girl, that sings and dances and eats royal jelly and pollen and honey all day long and sleeps inside a buttercup at night. They need each other, they love each other, they are each other in an honest-fearless-polarized-strange way. This is what I want to remember for max too. When he is totally repulsing me with his spinning, or his dirty dirty dirtiness, I want to remember to look at him very carefully, and find his physical body’s connection, however solid or weak, and also find his spirit’s connection, however far-out, or touchable. And just go from there…….but also find my own connections, and relate to him in terms of these simple dynamics. Ooooooh, it’s kind-of a lot to track. Maybe with practice it will just become my new first language! Maybe it already is and I am just deciding to speak it again. We’ll see. We’ll wait and see.

1/8/8

I have to burn things…….Even if it sometimes could be considered wasteful, because I sometimes burn things that could be potentially useful to somebody. But anyways…..i have to burn things sometimes. Today I burned somebody else’s old dead dreams. For whatever reason, I ended up with the material of their stillborn? Creation. It needed release, and the way I typically handle these types of materials is to just burn them. I love my fireplace….she is always up to help me out with these little stuck, stagnant, dead physicalities (not a word). Thanks dragon lady. Thank you very much. My kids are also up for helping me out….happily throwing in whatever random object is needing release. 

sister sister

love my sister........that's all i want to say.  i love her.

oh, and there was this little bird that sat at the top of a tree outside our mom's house all morning long on christmas day.  in the heavy falling snow, it sat there, occasionally flying off, but coming back to perch on the same tiptop branch everytime.   i kept noticing it, and pointing it out.  i loved that bird's role in our day.  don't forget about the birds, sisters.  they are frisky little survivors, even on the coldest day of winter!

the gelato troll!!!!!  he lives behind that deceivingly cute door in the gelato shop, that might open its doors tomorrow.

coat tree!!!  look back at the last post to see how it started out.  i found the fallen branch when we were out triking one saturday at the little open park lot near our house.  i have been wanting to make my own coat tree for years.  i love it so much.  i need to drill some holes in the lower part of it and then add on some branches so the little people can reach to hang their hats and coats on their own...... i am all about what they can do on their own, especially in regards to putting away their things.

12/2/7

my kids…….i love them uncontrollably.  They push my buttons like NO ONE else. I need space from them, but I fear that the people they are with when I’m not there are contributing to their unruly behavior.  For example, at school, they learned potty talk, kid-trash-talk ……….they jump out of bed after the babysitter has read them their 3 night-time books, just to mess with her.  but then I think about the time I was at the trident with zhi, and I was engrossed in conversation with a fellow adult, and not really watching zhi, and she was helping herself to teaspoon after teaspoon of honey from the honeybear on our table.  Finally the lady I was talking to clued me in to what was going on.  I told zhi to stop taking honey, no more honey, I said.  I turn my back to continue our conversation, and there she goes again, helping herself to more.  What does it take to get a kid to listen?  Spanking worked for me as a kid, but it also made me closet my spirit  in a way that stunted me as an adult. That little firey sprite in me is an essential element in my soul’s balance…….uncloseting her has been extremely difficult, I can compare it to the pains of childbirth.  All for a part of me that was already born before….that’s just too much work to do over again.  I can’t and won’t do that to my precious babes, who are so beautifully free and wild.  But that still leaves me pondering how to teach them to respect their authorities.  Yesterday, I hated yesterday, but I was almost literally begging them to listen to me.  Lame.  I was in tears, I was broken. I told them I was not feeling strong, and I bared my naked self in all her ugly tiredness that she was trapped in yesterday, and they actually listened.  They went on to have a sweet harmonious day.  I can’t believe that that’s what it takes to get them to listen to me.  No way.  So when I am having a strong, hell-yeah, take-the-bull-by-the-horns kind of day, why are they more challenging to my word?  Questions I may never get the answer to.  That’s okay. Cause I know I will keep at it with them.  They are my loves, my unconditional loves, that I will work with forever and ever and ever.  I want to say with pleasure, and I do mean with pleasure, but I also know it’s often with frustration that results in me grinding my teeth at night (my dentist made me a night-guard), and it’s often with extremely uncomfortable feelings of hate for our dilemmas that I can hardly admit to feeling sometimes.  Hoooo, deep sigh.

 

Work.  It’s just hard work sometimes, and it usually pays off, I’ve seen from my almost 31 years of experience.  It’s worth it is what I’m trying to remind myself.  It’s so so so worth it.  

a coat tree to be......

11/26/07

 

happiness comes from contentment….the quote on my tea bag.  Hmmmm.  I do love feeling or being content.  How do we come to contentment…..how often did my dad feel contentment, without drugs or alcohol?  For me, I know I feel mighty content after doing a little work, when I am taking a well-earned break, everything just feels aligned and right.  I feel content when I take care of my body and feed it often.  I feel content after a good conversation.  I feel high, grounded, and content when I am inspired…….well, sometimes not so grounded, the source of inspiration for me for so long has been from above, and I must admit it can overwhelm me.  That really makes me wonder about inspiration from below.  What does that look like, what does that feel like?  I have been on a year long journey, pretty much since I became pregnant with olive, on getting myself grounded.  The idea of now finding, and hearing my soul’s song on the ground sometimes, as opposed to always coming from the heavens, is very attractive.  I have seen a definite correlation to when I am grounded, or my soul/spirit body is fully integrated into my physical body, and when I have good connections with others in a physical form….. cats, humans, birds, bugs…..it’s so much easier.  So, my point, I kind-of forgot, but it was something about how so far the ground has shown me it is a good thing, and it works well for me.

baby girl

hmmmmm. Olive. I smile just writing your name. I need to write about how you smile, and how I’ve woken up to your smiling face for the past 4 months or so….you were an early smiler. I actually feel like I saw you smile when you were an hour old, and then every day after that I kept seeing it, but told myself there’s no way a baby smiles that early. And then your dad said he thought he’d been seeing it too. It became very clear that you were definitely smiling when you were about two weeks old. I will never forget, this exchange you and I had in the studio, when you were 2 weeks old, and I put on the lonesome sisters, and started crying thinking about mawmaw dying, and your’ being born, and then just feeling a wave of realization come over me around all of our preciousness, vulnerability, and mortality. you were just hanging there in the sling. I looked down at you through tears. you looked right into my eyes, and gave me the clearest, brightest smile I’d ever seen I’m pretty sure. And you still do this all the time. You just did it, you awoke from your little trident nap, looked up at me, smiled, and fell back into sleep. You’ve also had this little habit of awaking from sleep just to make sure I’m there, and when you see me, you drift right back in. sometimes you do this when nursing. You pull off for a sec, look up at me and smile, or just look into my eyes, and then pop right back on like a little animal. I am in love with how comforted you are by my face. And I am in love with waking up everyday, looking into your eyes, and smiling together for minutes. then zhi wakes up and comes in, for more minutes of smiling…..followed by max. dad has usually gotten out of bed into the shower by this point, but he’s there for the first bit, and then catches the scene while getting dressed, as we all lay and emit love for each other….and then at some point either you or I start to feel a little clustered, and have to end the party. Those big kids have a way of getting excited that is a hard to hang with for long first thing in the morning. That’s how we start our days, olive. It is a full on treat, little hummingbird that you are. Little joy, baby love. I am in love with YOU. You are at the moment smiling at two women at the tables across from us, and they are smiling back, and waving at you. I have a feeling you’re not gonna be a shy one.