8/4/8

 

 

simplicity is once again on my mind. What keeps me from it?  Right now, I can identify stuff as my main obstacle.  Too much stuff everywhere, material, non-living, often cotton based, things.  Meaning clothes, but also toys, both kid and adult.  I had a big cleaning spree this spring and weeded through a lot of books, that’s the other space taker-upper in our house.    Why why why is it so hard for me to get the amount of things in our house to an amount that feels simple?  I am a typical American in this way, I realize.  A consumer.  But also, I am a collector.  I have a hobby of visiting thrift stores, and bringing home things we might be psyched to have one day, even if it’s in 20 years.  I guess this might be okay if we lived in a bigger house.  But we live in a 1400 square foot home, no basement or attic.  There are 5 of us, and 2 cats.  And because I am developing this new need for space and simplicity, things are not fitting.  I am ansy to clear more out now.  I am excited too.  And then I go to do it and I am kind-of overwhelmed…I am flooded with memories attatched to everything.  Whaaaa whaaaaa.  I am so sentimental.  And I think of the potential in every thing.  I recently cleared out the bath tub toy basket.  The kids never wore the goggles or played with them, so out they went.   I wasn’t thinking about how they were david’s swinning goggles, and cost $40, and that it was almost summer.   So, when I get myself to purge, this is a risk I have to be okay with.

I am.  I will pay for space, is how I am going to look at it.  Purge ….i need help, I want help.  I want clarity so I can make snap decisions I won’t regret.  Once I purged a bunch of old art work I did in college, and of course I’ve missed it numerous times.  I hate that.  But it is a risk I am willing to take again and again in order to achieve a sense of space and freedom in our home.  And now, to top it off, max has apparently developed a card catalog of every toy he’s ever owned, and randomly remembers them, sometimes 3 years after they were purged, and I have to go through a whole run-around with him about it’s absence.  I can handle that though it is annoying to have to.

 

Ah, deep breath.  Deep clear, spacious, free breath.

lucky

I am lucky.  In many many many ways.  Lucky.  Look at my babes.  That right there is as lucky as it gets.  But there’s more.  We have a house, and food, and water, and a toilet.  We have some free time.  I can make my daughter a shirt for her birthday with beautiful fabric from japan, on a stellar antique sewing machine I 

scored at an estate sale.  I have a husband who loves me.  And I love him.  We don’t always see eye to eye.  But we try our damndest  to keep our marriage together.  We don’t have sex really at all these days, but we are trying to get back to a place where sexiness flows between us.  We are not just ignoring the issue.  I want a new tattoo, and I can get one.  I have a sister, who is presently challenging my abilities to keep my mouth shut and refrain from just telling her what to do in her life situation right now, as if she would listen even if I did.  But, I have a sister.  That is lucky.  I had a grandmother who was definitely the all-time best grandmother the world has ever known.  Okay, now that is LUCKY. I have a mother.  And she knows how to knit.  I had a father, and I know without a doubt that he loved me with all of his heart.  I had the coolest best friend a teenage girl could ever hope for, and we kind-of still keep in touch.  I now have the coolest best friends an adult woman could ever hope for, and we love each other.  We really care about each other.  I get to visit with horses every week.  I get to pet horses.  I had breakfast in bed 2 days in a row this week.  I have a spiritual teacher who guides me through situations I swear are impossible when they arise.  I have friends who are older and wiser and share their wisdom and heartfelt love with me freely, I can see it in their eyes and feel it in my own heart.  I can afford to buy organic food.  I am so so so lucky.  I am so so s o sos soosososo so so so oh so grateful for this abundance.  I am in a body, having a human experience.  I can feel people.  I can touch.  I can smell flowers, and I can watch my baby learn how to smell flowers.  I can see.  And I can choose where to look usually.  I can hear, and I can use earplugs too.  I got to have 2 VBACS.  I have paints, and things to paint.  I have instruments and a voice….i can download a new cd right when I decide I want to hear something new.  I have a 4 year old daughter who gave me a necklace she made me first thing this morning.  I have a son who is going to kindergarten this year, who doctors told me may never recover from a brain injury he had in utero.  I can read any book I want.  I can breastfeed anywhere I want.  I can swim.  I can cry.  I have a voice, and I can tell people if they are hurting me to stop.   I am strong, and strong-willed, and can choose to be steam-rolled or not.  I have awareness, and know that if I am being steamrolled, I am allowing it to happen.  I can have a glass of wine.  I can smoke the forbidden weed.  My great-great grandmother survived the trail of tears, her parents did not.  She was lucky enough to be adopted by the whites who forcibly stole her tribe’s land right out from under them.  She grew up and had a family, it doesn’t look like she was a happy woman from the picture I’ve seen of her, but she created life, and I am grateful for her life.  I am now a woman because she lived.  My sister is growing a baby now, whose name is juniper grace.  I can’t wait to meet her.  

 

Sometimes I know people feel jealous of me.  I have to work to stay aware of what I’m grateful for, of what I’m simply lucky to have.  Like, Today.  A july day.  A hot dry bright day.   I have to work to keep from thinking of all the ways I am not lucky.  That may sound so petty, coming from a girl who really has it all, but there’s always more.  The grass is always greener if you look at it like that.  And I have to work to see my grass as beautiful and the perfect shade of green just the way it is.  I do.  If you know me well, you know I work my butt off to stay out of depression and apathy.  We all have to work.  We are all related this way.

yes!!!!!

 

I got the last one.  The very last one.  I just barely made it in time, but I did, and I got one.  There were 3700 of them.  The first girl who got one was a millionare, and it was no surprise, that the next 2300 of the people that got one were millionaires too.  But a few of us poor ones in the 6 billion people who knew of these being up for grabs,  somehow  timed our selves exactly right, and showed up at the only moment possible for us to get through, when for some reason everyone else had to pee or something, and we just happened to dial in at that exact right time!  It was incredible, totally insane that we got through and got one, us!  Us!  Some poor ones!!!!  We got some for us!!!!!  some water.  that's all we wanted.  it's all we want.

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????