Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Blog Blipped
sigh....Nothing like having this morning's blog writings erased by the temp loss of internet service. Well whaddya gonna do. I'm heading for the studio...that's what I'm going to do... but not before bundling up within an inch of my life, as the wind is amping up. Gonna be a fierce day and I want...no NEED...to paint.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Mountain Climbing
Been away a while. I like writing...but the creative juice has been pouring into painting. I've got 3 "in the oven" now with a 4th that I'm wrestling with...cannot get the drawing the way I want it...it's the "Woman of the Andes" and I have been trying to downsize her and she won't have it, so I need to paint her big which is what she seems to want. There are the technical aspects to painting, as in I've been painting on masonite board...2'X2' and 2'X4'...but now I have to paint her on something bigger...looks like a canvas for the larger size, as the masonite board will be too heavy to manage.
Felled by a flu virus apparently. It moved in slowly after a huge dental appointment last Tuesday. I had a cervical spine surgery in July that now requires me to take an antibiotic an hour before any dental work...and that seemed to cap the globe and my immune system crashed. I think there is also the reality that grief had moved in, too. I'm still sorting and sifting the myriads of feelings...places in me known and unknown that presented themselves with Joseph's death. I was not a parent...I didn't bring a child into the world, so now the more distant perspective is that I was going to be a grandmother...and I had no clue how I was going to be able to manage that...to live it. And how to be the mother/grandmother to Brandy and Paul and all the mystery of all of that. Joseph's death somehow punctured that neurotic obsessing. None of that matters now. So I've allowed myself the discovery that there would have been a delicious role I could have played in this little boy's life...and that maybe I'm not the monster my mother needed to paint on me. As I sit in this garden of a new reality, there is a large measure of the grief, not just for the loss of Joseph...I know his soul is making the journey that is intended for him....but for Brandy and Paul. I feel them so keenly and when I wander into the place of the empathic knowing of the hugeness of their journey to receive this pregnancy that culminated in such tragedy, it undoes me. They are greatness in their soul presence in their ability to hold the anguish of this...I can only visit it piece by piece.
Thanks to the gods they are gifted cascades of synchronicities such as the memorial service yesterday at Mariposa. A greater tragedy would be if they could not be aware of the spiritual bounty that is laid out for them each day...in small ways and large, such as yesterday's gift. We get so much when we're able to hold the tension of both the wonder and joy AND pain and anguish of life...and there they both sit in the middle of that. They embrace their grief and they embrace their joy in life and I know they will be...and are just fine. And I am doing the same...not as gracefully maybe...but that's been my life's story and journey to learn. And so here is another chapter.
Winter is here in spades. I think it is the inevitable stamp of aging that to my surprise, I am not welcoming its entree. I'm feeling the weight of it. The cold is a challenge to me. The snow...as much as I want it and know that the land needs it is a challenge to me. Life in New Mexico is not for wimps and I know that and relish it. Am I up to it now? Too bad, as my soul depends on the "food" that is here, and somehow I must find a way to navigate once again, the steep challenges that have been mine to climb since earliest years.
Felled by a flu virus apparently. It moved in slowly after a huge dental appointment last Tuesday. I had a cervical spine surgery in July that now requires me to take an antibiotic an hour before any dental work...and that seemed to cap the globe and my immune system crashed. I think there is also the reality that grief had moved in, too. I'm still sorting and sifting the myriads of feelings...places in me known and unknown that presented themselves with Joseph's death. I was not a parent...I didn't bring a child into the world, so now the more distant perspective is that I was going to be a grandmother...and I had no clue how I was going to be able to manage that...to live it. And how to be the mother/grandmother to Brandy and Paul and all the mystery of all of that. Joseph's death somehow punctured that neurotic obsessing. None of that matters now. So I've allowed myself the discovery that there would have been a delicious role I could have played in this little boy's life...and that maybe I'm not the monster my mother needed to paint on me. As I sit in this garden of a new reality, there is a large measure of the grief, not just for the loss of Joseph...I know his soul is making the journey that is intended for him....but for Brandy and Paul. I feel them so keenly and when I wander into the place of the empathic knowing of the hugeness of their journey to receive this pregnancy that culminated in such tragedy, it undoes me. They are greatness in their soul presence in their ability to hold the anguish of this...I can only visit it piece by piece.
Thanks to the gods they are gifted cascades of synchronicities such as the memorial service yesterday at Mariposa. A greater tragedy would be if they could not be aware of the spiritual bounty that is laid out for them each day...in small ways and large, such as yesterday's gift. We get so much when we're able to hold the tension of both the wonder and joy AND pain and anguish of life...and there they both sit in the middle of that. They embrace their grief and they embrace their joy in life and I know they will be...and are just fine. And I am doing the same...not as gracefully maybe...but that's been my life's story and journey to learn. And so here is another chapter.
Winter is here in spades. I think it is the inevitable stamp of aging that to my surprise, I am not welcoming its entree. I'm feeling the weight of it. The cold is a challenge to me. The snow...as much as I want it and know that the land needs it is a challenge to me. Life in New Mexico is not for wimps and I know that and relish it. Am I up to it now? Too bad, as my soul depends on the "food" that is here, and somehow I must find a way to navigate once again, the steep challenges that have been mine to climb since earliest years.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
I was 5 years old when I was initiated into the mountains. We were living in Grosse Pointe Michigan where my father was the manager of the Grosse Pointe Hunt Club. Grosse Pointe was and probably still is the tony suburb where motor money lived. He taught people to ride, trained horses...Charlotte and Anne Ford were once his students. My mother got sick in the winter/spring of 1948...a pneumonia called Friedlander's bacillus and wonder drug penicillin wasn't touching it. They thought she might die and in a desperate measure decided to try the new wonder drug, erithromycin. It worked. But for reasons a 5 year old is not privy to, a decision emerged about leaving the Detroit area...and maybe the fierce winters of the Midwest. I don't know but I do know I had a tonsillectomy that spring and one of the motor magnates offered my father a position managing the Roaring Fork Ranch in Carbondale, Colorado...and suggested that a summer in the Rockies would help my mother restore her health.
And so we headed for the Rockies and my memory bank is still punctuated with images and feelings from that magical summer in the Roaring Fork valley. Monika tells me that the Roaring Fork Ranch still exists and my heart is good with that.
Something got constellated in me that profound summer. Of all the memory fragments and pictures, the most vivid was the day that I danced for the mountain. Mt. Sopris, one of the fourteeners, as they are called in Colorado, overlooked the valley and the ranch house picture window framed her in all of her snowgarbed glory. I had access to a little victrola and remember placing a 78 recording of Manuel de Falla's Ritual Fire Dance from his opera the 3 Cornered Hat on the victrola...carefully placing the needle on the record...and then dancing for the mountain.
Fate must have struck the gong in me, for that memory lives still and while it took a while and more years of life, eventually I knew that I had to live amongst the mountains. I absolutely had to live amongst the mountains. There was another brief sojourn as a child...10 years old returning from our life as Army dependents for 3 years in Germany and my father was stationed at an old cavalry post above Salt Lake City...Fort Douglas, where I went to sleep, awoke and spent the day defined by bugle calls. We were in the Wasatch Mountains then and I flourished playing outside winter and summer, being wild things with other kids galloping around in the high mountain crystal air and surrounded by the magnificence of the Rocky Mountain west again.
There was another long...very long hiatus and it wasn't until I was 45 that the mountains found me again...this time the Cascades and the Olympics of Washington State. I was seized again on a vacation trip to the Olympic Peninsula and spent 10 years that went by too fast in the bosom of the mightiness of ocean and mountain.
The next stop was Southern California with 3 years as a stranger in a strange land and then, inevitably, the mountains found me again. A trip as a seeker took me to northern New Mexico in 2003 late spring for a vision quest. I had found horses again and this experience joined me and the horse in the spiritual quest for finding my dream again. And again the mountains seized me. I had passed through New Mexico as a 7 year old on our way to Germany that fateful year, and never forgot it in places that my mind didn't remember...but heart and soul did, and in 2004 we moved to Santa Fe.
What is this journey down memory lane about I'm asking myself now...this morning...tapping away on the keyboard? And the answer is immediate...that the mountains hold me. They are big enough to hold me in their embrace and to keep me present in how the magnificence of the wild world is as essential to me as breathing. The land teaches me...it has always been my nanny of sorts...and I cannot live away from it. When all else failed, the land nurtured me to health and healing and spiritual tracking. I lose my way in an urban setting...adrift, aimless and at risk for losing connection to my Soul.
I needed to be with Brandy and Paul desperately during these early weeks after the calamity of Joseph's death...but need to be in the embrace of the mountains again to settle me...calm me...love me...replenish me. I cannot be who I am without being planted amongst them and it's so crucial that I never forget that. I didn't know that so much when I was young...I didn't know about the Indigenous Soul until I ripened. I've spent so many years learning to feed myself the right food...but I'm back home again.
This time I'm staying.
And so we headed for the Rockies and my memory bank is still punctuated with images and feelings from that magical summer in the Roaring Fork valley. Monika tells me that the Roaring Fork Ranch still exists and my heart is good with that.
Something got constellated in me that profound summer. Of all the memory fragments and pictures, the most vivid was the day that I danced for the mountain. Mt. Sopris, one of the fourteeners, as they are called in Colorado, overlooked the valley and the ranch house picture window framed her in all of her snowgarbed glory. I had access to a little victrola and remember placing a 78 recording of Manuel de Falla's Ritual Fire Dance from his opera the 3 Cornered Hat on the victrola...carefully placing the needle on the record...and then dancing for the mountain.
Fate must have struck the gong in me, for that memory lives still and while it took a while and more years of life, eventually I knew that I had to live amongst the mountains. I absolutely had to live amongst the mountains. There was another brief sojourn as a child...10 years old returning from our life as Army dependents for 3 years in Germany and my father was stationed at an old cavalry post above Salt Lake City...Fort Douglas, where I went to sleep, awoke and spent the day defined by bugle calls. We were in the Wasatch Mountains then and I flourished playing outside winter and summer, being wild things with other kids galloping around in the high mountain crystal air and surrounded by the magnificence of the Rocky Mountain west again.
There was another long...very long hiatus and it wasn't until I was 45 that the mountains found me again...this time the Cascades and the Olympics of Washington State. I was seized again on a vacation trip to the Olympic Peninsula and spent 10 years that went by too fast in the bosom of the mightiness of ocean and mountain.
The next stop was Southern California with 3 years as a stranger in a strange land and then, inevitably, the mountains found me again. A trip as a seeker took me to northern New Mexico in 2003 late spring for a vision quest. I had found horses again and this experience joined me and the horse in the spiritual quest for finding my dream again. And again the mountains seized me. I had passed through New Mexico as a 7 year old on our way to Germany that fateful year, and never forgot it in places that my mind didn't remember...but heart and soul did, and in 2004 we moved to Santa Fe.
What is this journey down memory lane about I'm asking myself now...this morning...tapping away on the keyboard? And the answer is immediate...that the mountains hold me. They are big enough to hold me in their embrace and to keep me present in how the magnificence of the wild world is as essential to me as breathing. The land teaches me...it has always been my nanny of sorts...and I cannot live away from it. When all else failed, the land nurtured me to health and healing and spiritual tracking. I lose my way in an urban setting...adrift, aimless and at risk for losing connection to my Soul.
I needed to be with Brandy and Paul desperately during these early weeks after the calamity of Joseph's death...but need to be in the embrace of the mountains again to settle me...calm me...love me...replenish me. I cannot be who I am without being planted amongst them and it's so crucial that I never forget that. I didn't know that so much when I was young...I didn't know about the Indigenous Soul until I ripened. I've spent so many years learning to feed myself the right food...but I'm back home again.
This time I'm staying.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Another day, another blog entry. Maybe. I'm sitting here in front of the blank screen wondering what the heck to write about. Do I WANT to write...do I want to excavate some unwanted or prickly perspective. I want to be peaceful...I want to feel serenity in my day, in my home, in my life, in my relationship with my husband. But today I don't. I could feel it coming on last night...a pothole opened up triggered by another interaction with David that was benign on the surface of it...but that was just it. It was just another surface...superficial interaction that leaves me raw. He cannot meet me...that's the simple language. He just can't. And I live at a deep level and I just can't stay on the surface. I just can't. Some part of me hopes of course for the rapproachement if we just keep at it...it *I* just keep at it, but that is not a reality. It is...as David would say...what it is, and so I try to be peaceful about it. But not today.
I read Brandy's blog entries and now there is not only sadness in me but anger. Damn the heavens and what the hell is this anyway that this couple who is a happy couple...who have a good relationship...not perfect because where is that anyway...but GOOD...loving, solid, mated. They have the family that children should be born in to and what the hell is this anyway! The brutal hand of chaos that truly does underlie life chose them...and whatever karmic check needed to be written befell them. I hate this...I so hate for them and for me to have to endure and dig for the meaning that chimes in the deepest levels of the psyche when hell and heaven fall on our heads. I so hate that so much of my life has been spent in the journey and process and some crazy part of me wonders if I contaminated this darling woman and her husband with something about my fate to be living so in touch with the brutal hands of fate that are also part of the dance we must live if we are human.
I have had to boil and distill most of my life experiences down to find the jewel that is left after all the heat, sturm und drang have drained away. I shake my fist at the gods and yet know in my bones that I dance to their tune and for whatever reasons, I was chosen to have to live on this level of the deepest river, the darkest night, the most dismembering of life because I've got what it takes to make the meaning of it. To bring it all back in more civilized form. What the fuck...
OK so today after a morning round of errands, I go back down to the studio. I want peaceful? Where that's were it's at. It is where I "bring it back"...where the chaos and pain and bliss begin to come through the paintbrushes and pencils and pens. I have to wrestle but not so hard these days. The muse in me is winning the battle with the Saturnian Animus who sneers and dismisses my visions and dreams and need to paint them. But that battle is just another one of them that I can't lose or I lose all the meaning of living my life at all. And so, it's back to the studio and back to the work that is mine to live. It isn't the one I chose...but it is the one that IS mine and so ......
I read Brandy's blog entries and now there is not only sadness in me but anger. Damn the heavens and what the hell is this anyway that this couple who is a happy couple...who have a good relationship...not perfect because where is that anyway...but GOOD...loving, solid, mated. They have the family that children should be born in to and what the hell is this anyway! The brutal hand of chaos that truly does underlie life chose them...and whatever karmic check needed to be written befell them. I hate this...I so hate for them and for me to have to endure and dig for the meaning that chimes in the deepest levels of the psyche when hell and heaven fall on our heads. I so hate that so much of my life has been spent in the journey and process and some crazy part of me wonders if I contaminated this darling woman and her husband with something about my fate to be living so in touch with the brutal hands of fate that are also part of the dance we must live if we are human.
I have had to boil and distill most of my life experiences down to find the jewel that is left after all the heat, sturm und drang have drained away. I shake my fist at the gods and yet know in my bones that I dance to their tune and for whatever reasons, I was chosen to have to live on this level of the deepest river, the darkest night, the most dismembering of life because I've got what it takes to make the meaning of it. To bring it all back in more civilized form. What the fuck...
OK so today after a morning round of errands, I go back down to the studio. I want peaceful? Where that's were it's at. It is where I "bring it back"...where the chaos and pain and bliss begin to come through the paintbrushes and pencils and pens. I have to wrestle but not so hard these days. The muse in me is winning the battle with the Saturnian Animus who sneers and dismisses my visions and dreams and need to paint them. But that battle is just another one of them that I can't lose or I lose all the meaning of living my life at all. And so, it's back to the studio and back to the work that is mine to live. It isn't the one I chose...but it is the one that IS mine and so ......
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
I missed posting yesterday. It was one of those days where there were only a few breathers between errands and appointments. It was all good stuff...just runaround stuff. And today is a lite version of it, but I needed to check in albeit briefly...I do not want to lose touch...I dare not lose touch with myself . It's not just the grief from Joseph's death that needs tending, but the other process ...all of it...and life rolls along. Mind and heart and soul need constant tending...weeding and feeding...and I've been very slopping about it...careless and casual. Not good...
And more later....
And more later....
Monday, November 16, 2009
Feeling my way these days. I am too deep in the process of grief, shock and awe...bewilderment and surrender...to be able to see the forest. I get intimations...how big this baby's death was and is to us all and for me. But I can see and feel things...subtle shifts in discovering what is really important as in loving presence and being in it with my friends, family and David in a daily way. Something is coming easier now with David and I doubt that I can explain it. There is something more soft in me...more accepting...feeling that whatever shape and form our marriage is, it is ok as it is and that somehow I am loving David just as he is even as I wish there was so much more.
There is some strange clarity in all of this...like the shock of Baby Joe birthing and deathing in a 37 hour period was some poignant clarion call to get straight with what's important and that it's love that is important and to not hold back even as imperfect as whatever it is between yourself and your beloved may be. And somehow that is flowing out to David and it's not hard to do. It is so new and such a strange place to be in.
I have drawn my image of Joseph as he makes his way back to the Boundless...the limitless cosmos. I prepped a 2ft. by 4 ft. masonite panel with gesso...it has become a ritual as I begin the process of creating a new painting. I am so loving and appreciating the embedded ritual in this ...that I am invoking the blessed and beloved Muses to sit beside me and in me and support however the process must unfold. It was so hard to begin the sketch of Joseph. The pencil was like the probe into the heart and artery of grief but begin it I must and I did and somehow it came through...and the tenderness I feel is so sweet to me. It's also very clear to me that Joseph was/is a mighty and ancient soul who wasn't going to tarry in this incarnation but was like a shock trooper of some sort who was going to jar us into wakefulness so that we could fully receive what he came in to deliver to us humans. It seems that the best that is in us...those of us who have come into connection with this mighty process...has been mobilized and none of us are unchanged by this. None of our lives will ever be the same...
There is some strange clarity in all of this...like the shock of Baby Joe birthing and deathing in a 37 hour period was some poignant clarion call to get straight with what's important and that it's love that is important and to not hold back even as imperfect as whatever it is between yourself and your beloved may be. And somehow that is flowing out to David and it's not hard to do. It is so new and such a strange place to be in.
I have drawn my image of Joseph as he makes his way back to the Boundless...the limitless cosmos. I prepped a 2ft. by 4 ft. masonite panel with gesso...it has become a ritual as I begin the process of creating a new painting. I am so loving and appreciating the embedded ritual in this ...that I am invoking the blessed and beloved Muses to sit beside me and in me and support however the process must unfold. It was so hard to begin the sketch of Joseph. The pencil was like the probe into the heart and artery of grief but begin it I must and I did and somehow it came through...and the tenderness I feel is so sweet to me. It's also very clear to me that Joseph was/is a mighty and ancient soul who wasn't going to tarry in this incarnation but was like a shock trooper of some sort who was going to jar us into wakefulness so that we could fully receive what he came in to deliver to us humans. It seems that the best that is in us...those of us who have come into connection with this mighty process...has been mobilized and none of us are unchanged by this. None of our lives will ever be the same...
Sunday, November 15, 2009
The next day....
Today is a day I decided to begin a blog. It's an interesting concept that the internet has spawned among its many children. I write. I write well it seems, but I have only flirted with it over the past 15 years and as I move down the age timeline, there is the inevitable growing urgency to quit stalling and start talking. So here I am staring at the monitor wanting to get into my day and avoid this confrontation.
A terrible thing has happened. A baby came into this world and left 37 hours later. He was to be my grandson. I am declaring that because I am learning from this terrible thing that I had a hard time claiming him and claiming his mother as my daughter. She's not my blood daughter so somehow that makes my pain bogus...like I'm not entitled. What a strange jungle our minds are to come up with stuff like this but so it goes with me. I dared not have children because I knew I would not be able to mother them and I knew that would destroy me. But here I am and was, connecting to a remarkable young woman who I got to call my stepdaughter...when in truth she was more daughter than any daughter I could have brought into the world. And this terrible thing happened that has broken me open. I loved and love that baby, Joseph Henry. I wanted to hold him, smell him...feel his baby hands reaching and exploring. I wanted to be the eccentric Grandma who would teach him about horses and ranch life...let him play with paints and pastels and make his art if he wanted that...show him the garden and the miracle when a seed becomes something so beautiful and maybe edible to frost the cake. I wanted to be the refuge in his teenage years when he needed to "escape" his parents so that he could find himself and his love and belief for them again.
This terrible thing broke me open and there is a different experience of love and need that I am growing it looks like. My tortured and convoluted marriage has somehow found a quiet place to reside in me. I love my husband and have been so hurt and angry about him. But it's different now. Maybe Joseph has brought me the truth of love. You all do know that it is so fragile and ephemeral and requires everything of us to keep it alive and that there are so many faces and iterations of love. So this Baby Bodhisattva has taught me to love and love completely because it is so ephemeral because WE are so ephemeral and we can't have life without love. Not if we're human. He stopped in so briefly and cracked open who knows how many hearts. I don't know why it has to be like this...that it has taken heaven falling on my head to be cracked open but it is true. Now what, I say. Just live...just do this next day as fully and authentically honest as you can, I say to myself. Be happy. Be sad. Life is flowing through you. It's a tributary of the Great River and you can't dam it up or divert it even if you tried...which of course, I have as many of us do.
A terrible thing has happened. A baby came into this world and left 37 hours later. He was to be my grandson. I am declaring that because I am learning from this terrible thing that I had a hard time claiming him and claiming his mother as my daughter. She's not my blood daughter so somehow that makes my pain bogus...like I'm not entitled. What a strange jungle our minds are to come up with stuff like this but so it goes with me. I dared not have children because I knew I would not be able to mother them and I knew that would destroy me. But here I am and was, connecting to a remarkable young woman who I got to call my stepdaughter...when in truth she was more daughter than any daughter I could have brought into the world. And this terrible thing happened that has broken me open. I loved and love that baby, Joseph Henry. I wanted to hold him, smell him...feel his baby hands reaching and exploring. I wanted to be the eccentric Grandma who would teach him about horses and ranch life...let him play with paints and pastels and make his art if he wanted that...show him the garden and the miracle when a seed becomes something so beautiful and maybe edible to frost the cake. I wanted to be the refuge in his teenage years when he needed to "escape" his parents so that he could find himself and his love and belief for them again.
This terrible thing broke me open and there is a different experience of love and need that I am growing it looks like. My tortured and convoluted marriage has somehow found a quiet place to reside in me. I love my husband and have been so hurt and angry about him. But it's different now. Maybe Joseph has brought me the truth of love. You all do know that it is so fragile and ephemeral and requires everything of us to keep it alive and that there are so many faces and iterations of love. So this Baby Bodhisattva has taught me to love and love completely because it is so ephemeral because WE are so ephemeral and we can't have life without love. Not if we're human. He stopped in so briefly and cracked open who knows how many hearts. I don't know why it has to be like this...that it has taken heaven falling on my head to be cracked open but it is true. Now what, I say. Just live...just do this next day as fully and authentically honest as you can, I say to myself. Be happy. Be sad. Life is flowing through you. It's a tributary of the Great River and you can't dam it up or divert it even if you tried...which of course, I have as many of us do.
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