4/30/08

 

I’ve identified a huge source of frustration and angst in my life…which is...not knowing what I’m doing at any given time.  So, I probably need to explain this a little.  Maybe not knowing what I’m doing is equivalent to being out of the flow.  It feels like it is.  But I say not knowing what I’m doing because that’s what it feels like first to me, that’s how my little (ha!) ego feels about it.  Here are some examples of how I experience this in my life: 1) driving around, not quite sure where I am going.  I am a little embarrassed to say this, but I actually find myself in this situation sometimes.  I’ll let you wonder about that, and wonder about me now.  I often find that the flow finds me, and I end up going somewhere where we have a fun creative unique experience, that could not have happened had I not been willing to just hang in there till I had the hit on where we were to go, and this then cancels out all my fears and worries about wasting time, feeling out of control and stupid, and I get another lesson learned in how patience pays off.  Even if I was impatient throughout the learning of the lesson, but forced to hang in there with the experience because the other option, which is usually going home, is what inspired me to get out the door in the first place.  Not to mention the problem of wasting gas, but this gives me a headache, just like I get when I worry about wasting water when taking a long shower, which I love to do about once a week.   ( it's not even funny how this is such a birth and embodiment recapitulation.)  Okay..2) parenting.  There are some parenting moments where I find myself honestly, having NO FUCKING CLUE about how to proceed.  These moments are as hard for me to breathe through as when hearing screeching nails on a blackboard.  It is as impossible for me to relax in these moments as it is knowing someone I know has a tick on them and it has not yet been removed.  I am severely stunted I’m realizing in the department of going with the flow when I can’t see the path ahead.  All I see is haze, or fuzz.  It feels either like I’m paralyzed, or in a briar patch.  If I can move at all, I’ll hurt myself, and usually everyone around me, with some sort of violent response to the moment.  And now I ask, where is your faith, heath?  Why do you abandon it in these moments?  These are the moments it was created for.  It is becoming clearer to me that I might need to get a little more comfortable with just sitting still in these times.  Maybe?  And now 3) sex.  I have a hard time when we’re doin it, and it’s just not really doing anything for me.  i worry that it will be just another donation to the man, and I come away unsatisfied.  I realize that sounds like a very bitchy thing to say, and a lot of people might ask, what’s wrong with making a donation to your man.  Well, all I can tell you, is that for me personally these days, I must be tapping into an ancient female wound around sex as a sacrifice we make just because we are women and that’s our role, we serve men.  This is a collective wound on our planet, and it’s really up for me now.  so when we’re in bed, and I can see there is potential, things might get good in this meeting we’re having, but they might not, it’s then that I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know where I’m going.  Am I going to have a good time, or a blah time?  Sex is just not the same for us girls.  Guys can enjoy ANY kind of sex it seems..the emotionless kind especially, no problem.  Once the ride of the first few years is over, and the PEA is gone, sex for females is tricky. 

 

So, in identifying this major source of frustration in my life, I am hoping to bring more consciousness to these experiences, and maybe tap in to my faith a little more, trust in these moments where I don’t have a clue what to do or where to turn.  And see if I can wake up and live in them.  Let go, and just watch as the flow inevitably takes me yet again into it.  relax and play like these horses i've gotten to know.  they just live.  in every moment.  do they even realize how lucky they are not to have an ego trying to hijack their life from them?

O's shirt

spring is how much grandmothers love the babies.....claire, tell little doughnut in there it's gonna get more love than it knows what to do with.

the shirt for olive.  i started it when she was 6 months old, and just finished it, she is now 10 months.  i really like to sit on projects for some time.  i call it my gestation period.  as opposed to stalling or not following through, or whatever other negative spin i could give my snail's pace at finishing projects.  i do like snails.  maybe i'll make a snail next.   she looks beauteeful.

pink love, shadow love

4/23/08

 

spring.  Mawmaw, I can’t help but think of you when the trees turn pink.  I’ll always remember when i was a little girl, into favorite color poling, asking you what yours was.  It was always pink, everytime I asked.  Not just ‘pink’, but a thoughtful, soft, felt, ‘pink’.  This is my 2^nd spring without you here on earth.  We used to always talk about what flowers you were planting in your beds in the spring, and then when I started planting my own gardens, I got to, in return, tell you which flowers and plants I was planting.  i used to didn’t know one flower name from another , but you’d tell me anyway.  And then over the years, I started learning, and then one spring, I realized I knew every flower you named, and I’d start buying those flowers just because I knew you liked them.  And now zhi, at 3, knows the names of almost all the plants in our beds….she seems to love learning them, and then repeating their names whenever we see them again, or whenever she spots them somewhere else.

 

The past few springs, I’ve been noticing the way the colors start appearing.  Purple comes first, in the crocus….then gold and yellow crocus come in with the purple.  Then come the yellow daffodils, and the yellow forsythia, and these little purple flowers that look like tiny hyacinth, but I don’t know their name.  (I just looked it up, it’s called grape hyacinth.)  Purple and yellow, waking up the crown and the belly.  Then I see the red tulips….and the white flowering trees.  Then…….i see….the pink.  Certainly, The most beauteous sight I know, the pink trees.  Light pink, hot pink, the flowering cherries and crab apples??  There is just nothing quite as pleasing to my visual sense as the pinkness in those trees.  It is soft.  It is sweet, it is innocent.  It is fresh, so so so fresh.  It feels grandmotherly to me, to see a tree, a grand form of plantlife, come out with this tender showing of blossom.  It is just how you felt to me as a grandmother, mawmaw.  Ova eulalia staley.  Your name even feels pink.  And along with this pink, comes the freshest youngest green of the trees that are ready to leaf.  Oh it’s almost too much.  To come from the starkness of winter, and then find myself in the blooming of april.  I keep imagining, what it would feel like, if I’d literally slept all winter, and then woke up to this….what a happy feeling it would give me. 

 

Part of me wishes I could just sleep through the darkness of winter.  This winter was a little bit too intense and dark for my enjoyment.  But it’s not all about me, in this sense.  Or what is probably more accurate, is that this is one of those instances where I don’t necessarily know what is best for me, and maybe I will learn to embrace winter someday, like I can spring and summer.  Maybe I will learn to see the great importance of shedding the leaves, retreating, and sleeping for a season.  And as Barbara said to me this winter when I was fretting it’s return, maybe I can embrace the beauty of the exposed skeletons, the nakedness of the trees.  I can mentally understand the need for this, but when it comes down to it, I struggle through the cold dark months for the most part.  I hide and do not expose myself easily in the winter.  I dream of spring  and flip flops all winter long.

 

 I wonder if this has anything to do with me embracing my shadow. shadow, dear, I know you wish everything could just go black…and you wonder why there are no black flowers.  But, There are!!  I even planted some by the peach tree.  Some amazing black tulips.  Shadowgirl, I can see you in your black combat boots, enjoying the sight of these black blooms.  And then I can see you slowly, so slowly, beginning to enjoy the others.  And I can see lightgirl, slowly, so slowly, enjoying the comforts at hand during the winter….and this is a stretch, but maybe someday, actually finding pleasure in the chill ( I do love to chill!) of winter.  I remember growing up, the way I saw winter, was that it was the time of year I got to wear sweaters, and layers, and that was my favorite way to dress for some reason.  I’ve tried to see it that way again, in order to find some kind of joy in the dark times, but it doesn’t work anymore.  I now love summer clothes more than any other.  Maybe I’ll just do like zhi, and wear my summer clothes all winter long, only admitting it’s frigid outside when I have to leave the house.  That girl wore her tank tops and sundresses all winter long.  no amount of reasoning could get her to dress according to the season when we were home, where it was warm.  But enough about winter.  welcome spring flowers.  From the bottom of my heart, I rejoice with you, to the return of the light.  And shadowgirl, lightgirl got you a new summer dress, a gray one.  I hope you like it.  It will look nice with your boots.

4/7/8

 

the tick on david’s back left some mess behind and now he has these gross black sores where it bit him.  What a fuck fuck fuck. David has been pretty cool about it, with a few kind-of minor panic attacks, but so minor I don’t know if they were attacks, or just waves that he surfed pretty smoothly.  i am thinking about chimps and how they groom each other.  I found the tick on Saturday morning, but as we were going to sleep i noticed this bump on his back, and rubbed it and thought, hmmmm, I didn’t realize you had such a big mole there.  He said he had done the same thing.  So I saw it in the light in the morning and immediately pulled it out with his travel knife pliers.  Which he had randomly grabbed on his way out the door from home….we were in a hotel and had nothing but this.  It worked nicely by the way.  But I’m thinking about how we are not intimate enough with our backs to even question a sudden big mole that we’ve never noticed before, that it didn’t get our immediate attention……  a chimp I feel like would have checked it out right away, right?  I even painted a sign for us to see in the bathroom every day just a couple days before to remind us to do tick checks cause I had found one on my clothes that day.  They are such Fuckers.   They are so gross, I get the willies almost every time I just remember finding one on us.  I think I must have a little tick energy in my shadow somewhere, cause they really really make me squeam.  But how could I have not been awake enough to have the thought come through, oh remember it’s tick season, that might be a tick….you just painted a sign to remember to do checks.  Come on!  Heather.  Some of your forgetfulness or, just simple lack of sharpness lately has been wacky.  See how kind I’m trying to be to myself.  I’m not going into the beating myself up place.  If this turns into some kind-of serious illness or disease, I am gonna have a fuckin heck of time doing this, but right now today it’s manageable.  David is going to an infectious disease doctor today to look at his back.  I mean, a black sore, actually 3 {it must have bit him a couple times before settling in (I can’t even write ‘settling in’ without squirming )},that is not a scab, but a festering blackness on your body is too much to just watch  without someone trained in sores like this to give you an opinion.  Antibiotics were started last night. chimps never take a day off from grooming, do they?  If they did, I bet it’d be a sign of disassociating from life.  some kind of emotional depression.  We’ve disassociated ourselves from nature so much.   We live in these clean houses.  Boundaries.  They are so easy to sneak through.  And so easy to allow sneaks through.  I am wanting to wake up around boundaries right now, all aspects of them.  Hello armadillo.  I wish we had armadillos in these parts.  I loved seeing them scatter through the forests in Arkansas. 

Zhi had a tick too, which my mom found, because right after I found david’s I called her to check the kids immediately.  Every time we’ve found them on the kids, they are at the nape of the neck, right at the base of the skull…SUCH FUCKERS.  Zhi has not grown any sores.

 

4/9/8 

 

David went to the doctor and it’s some kind of bacterial mess.  with the antibiotics, he’s feeling better too.  His arm and shoulder aren’t sore anymore.  It’s like he got a snake bite.   Who wants to come play in our yard now????

RELAX.

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO DO THIS SOMETIMES?  who are those people who don't put any pressure on themselves?  i want to be one of them.  i need to meet some first though, so i can study their method of keeping things nice and easy and fun.  okay, well until one walks into my life, i can day dream about having no pressure put on me.  but then i think of the animal world, and the sweet little sparrows that get gobbled up by a cat or a hawk, and the sparrow has his own sort of pressure....gotta find food for the family, and stay out of the cat's mouth.  and then the cat or the hawk is hungry too.  and it's always a bit of a 'i need it now, and the longer it takes for me to find my next meal, the hungrier i'm gonna get.'  pressure is everywhere.  it's not escapable.  so, it's our relationship to pressure that makes us all unique in how relaxed or stressed we are.  my homework from barbara this week is just to relax and have fun, and see what happens.  hmmmm.  i am realizing what a dadgum tense rigid tight serious nitpicker i tend to be.  lately, like in the past few days since my last accupuncture appointment, in which my practitioner suggested i treat myself really tenderly, and with the love and concern i would for my babies if they came to me telling me they have headaches, when i have my own tension headache, i have been talking to myself in such a sweeter way.  i didn't even realize just how hard i am on myself most of the time.  HARD.  so the answer to the question, why can't i relax?, is really pretty clear now.   i'll let you know how i feel after a week or two of talking nicer to myself. mmmmm.  you are so amazing heather.  you're the fiercest, coolest, kindest, loveliest girl i know.  i love you, heather.  i love you so much.  you are awesome.  you are my best friend.  i'm glad i know you.  thanks heather for sticking with me.  ha.  but seriously!

fear.

love.  

jesus seemed to be able to choose love.  i love love, said my sister.  i love love too.  why does it feel, seem like so much fear gets in the way?  is fear more powerful than life?  am i more powerful when i am in love, or in fear?  trust.....a joke it seems sometimes when you give it to anyone other than yourself.   it just sets you up for disappointment.  but if you simply love and forgive another, you are free, right?  but what about when you are repeatedly betrayed?  and then broken.  ah, to be broken is freer in a way.  a lot less to hold together.  nothing to hold together.  broken.   come on.......free.  not attached.  not bound.    sharp and free.

on my mind

getting drunk. with friends.  i don't mean just having a drink.  i mean drunk.

laughing.

completely relaxing.

good deep sleep.

soup.

trimming my fingernails.

hot hot summer.

marijuana.

sage.

tobacco.

pretty loud led zeppelin.  and lynyrd skynyrd.

mushrooms, the fun kind.

freedom.

expansiveness.

release from tension.

earth energy.

hot hot sumer.

fun fun fun.

my man's birthday.  the 40th one.

improvisation.  

video recording myself to get insight on the way i hold my body.  my physical tensions.

erykah badu.

the smell of hair, when it hasn't been washed in days.  i kind-of like this smell.

hand lotion, for colorado winter skin.  the hands and butt.

funny people.  funniness.  belly laughing.  

bees and honey and flowers.

new knowledge.

the healing power of a good friend.

gratitude.

luck.

blackness.

getting the perfect degree of  drunk.

soon.