Humanity

NOVEMBER NONO- ELEVEN : brain dump

Apologies ahead of time.

I’m not even doing this one in my journal first, its straight to the presses. good luck, readers.

  1. Its Veterans Day here. My dad, my former father-in-law, all of my uncles, two of the men I have dated and cared for, old friends, cousins, these are the men and women who have been willing to do what I cannot. I don’t forget them, or their choices.
  2. My daughter’s birthday is tomorrow. 8 years old. My baby. The times they are a-changing. I’ll be fine.
  3. Its supernaturally warm here, for November and I really desperately want to believe its a totally natural ‘Indian Summer’ but its freaking me out. There is too much to freak out about, still, and I want to punch Donald Trump in his fat head. Get out already. Don’t do some skeevy ‘destroy the country’ move. Don’t. See number one. Be like that.
  4. I’m ducking the real work I have to be doing, and this is like day 4 of that. I have no good excuse but man, I am dodging. I’m afraid I’ll do the work and it still won’t be good enough. that’s the key.
  5. My kids want a real tree this year, which is giving me agita. I switched to a fake tree when the idea of going to a tree farm on my own and figuring out how to put up a huge honker and not have it be a live flame in my living room was too too much. fake is fantastic. but i concede (unlike the fucker.) that there is no smell, and the whiff of cold and Christmas tree is an honest to goodness wonder. Tomten softness and quiet, if you know what I mean, you know. I don’t want to cut anything down, I mean, really. (see #3- hello, we need trees – globally freaky weather) I will sort it out somehow. I do like to keep the damn kids happy.
  6. When you know you are a people pleaser and you can see yourself reacting to someone’s displeasure with guilt and self-flagellation and you can’t stop it. but if you just give yourself another 5 minutes, you can stop and think again. and then you know that time in therapy is effective after all. 5 minutes, as opposed to 5 days. win.
  7. One of the significant sucks about being so profoundly hearing impaired is that I can hear a sound but not be able to identify what it is, and not know where it is coming from. So, living in an old farmhouse with two animals and three children and probably a slew of mice means that I am occasionally in full twitch, trying to figure out sounds to see if I need to respond. Was that a breaking sound? Something fell. Where? Was it a person? Was it a plant?
  8. I took a beautiful bath yesterday. I cannot tell you how long it has been. Literally cannot. My brain shattered all over the yard in the buildup and wait of this election cycle. It is not entirely gathered up yet. Self-care was a grenade in the shed, and the walls are gone.
  9. I’m a little bit proud that I’ve made it this far in the month. Eleven days of writing. Chuffed.
  10. I’m trying to figure out a way to console my Republican friends that involves making politics personal, and its not about Orangeman, its about their serious and stable fear that Democrats are some sort of devil. I just want them to see me as a model somehow, of a different perspective, but not scary. Fear is what is running all of this. It started in September 2001, and we’ve not shaken it yet.
Humanity

Misses (our lists are long)

I miss being able to go to a diner and have someone pour me questionable coffee in a white ceramic mug that I want to steal, each time.

I miss smiling at people with my whole face at the grocery store.

I miss putting my hands on my mother.

I miss LM, but I think its still right, because I missed myself, too, and hadn’t realized the depths to which I had gone missing, again…

I miss not feeling sad sometime each day.

I miss not worrying about the health of my kids, in a death-fixation way.

I miss browsing tangible things, and buying something I can’t assess from a practicality perspective.

I miss being lazy about food.

I miss school busses.

I miss editing and proofreading other people’s stuff. in quietude. in a timely fashion. without interruption.

I miss being able to not go to a yoga class when the kids are away. I miss the choices I didn’t make.

I miss the potential of meetings, to offer more choices in writing, in expansion of subjects, in simple conversations.

I miss coffee rolls.

I miss spontaneous visits.

I miss opening the door to let someone into the kitchen.

The world is going to be different, for quite a while. and I miss the old one, with all its problems, because at least I knew it.  Now I’m missing something I don’t even know. and that gets complicated, this not-knowing of the world.

peace be with you,

uwmfHouseplants Unwifed MotherExpletive

Humanity

Soup is on.

Today i did a writing prompt about the things I tend, what i turn towards, how I tend. I’m sharing it here, because I like the change of pace, and the soup is really smelling up the place now, as well as the bacon that I had to add… ah, bacon. you make my heart sing.

I have added to and edited here, though this news will break the hearts of those who forgive me my ways. (capitalization is just not a thing, for instance.)

  1. Today was the day of the oil change. The making-sure the car makes it through the winter, though i suppose there is no guarantee against calamity, or trees. 
  2. I’m in love with the word TEND. I took a class called that, just for its name… only to run out of money in the end… but i lose a bit of my bonechill every time i see her writings. Women are pretty fucking great. of course it is a woman. Tend? c’mon. 
  3. I’m making a soup today as well, which is not a completely normal happening, but it will be potato when it is done with its time in the crock. I’ve been working at a farm stand and am thrilled to say that my reason, ‘to be closer to food, to cook more real food’, has come to pass. (also, people. and payment) These potatoes are almost fully personified in my mind. They are giving me their pleasure, and sustenance and i am chopping them to chunks and bits. (look away.) I also peeled their skin off. 
  4. The things i turn toward are colored amorphous blobs. Memories, smells… sounds or tactilities, these are the scenes i go towards. I’m so fully centered in my body, but there is all this space around the molten core of me, and i seem to want to fill it with yarn and sweaters knit by people who can, food smells, tacos… you see. It is escaping my typing fingers, what it is i tend towards, how it is i move into and out of the world outside my quiet body. I don’t even know how i have sex, out there, but i do… every once in a while i get a glimpse of a spark shooting off into the darkness, my fling towards connection. 
  5. i feel so insular, my molten core bringing all the self-sufficiency. (hello, they say no man is an island. but what of woman? )
  6. I tend to warmth, there are hats, there are blankets and there are never NOT those things. We have wood for the stove, we have pasta for the storms. It is always tended to. Always. 
  7. I’m not able to, or rather, it taxes me too dearly to slow down my writing brain. It must flow as it does. I tend to fly. 
  8. More colors to tend to in this dying light of Fall. the book i haven’t read, that i probably need to read, maybe. It is green-ly bound, and yellow at the heart. I think my chakras are interested by this.Books Yellow and Green UNwifedmotherexpletive
  9. I tend to personify. 
  10. I tend to leave space, for all the meaning and the worth that come from another. The shared experience that really isn’t. And is, too. 
  11. A season of tending outdoors has ended, and the wrapping up of it into storage, decay, decomposition, is a slow decay in an of itself. I start off strong. Always curious to see what is left to survive the elements, or not. That one hulahoop left by the shed. You see.

 

Humanity

hot apple cider

today i’m very strange. full warning.

  1. hot apple cider, available at the coffee shop. not coffee. and boy, when you ask for it plain, you get a look. however, this is new England and hot cider is a required force on a fall morning.
  2.  cider smells like breast-fed baby poop. i’m happy about that. also glad that it doesn’t TASTE like breast-fed baby poop.
  3.  I ran out of my kitchen (at 8:30 am) because my tenant was there. she lives there. I don’t have any problem with her. I just ran away, because.
  4.  I am afraid to talk to people at the ‘real’ health food store. because I feel guilt for fast food, and high fructose corn syrup and not enjoying cooking, and so I feel a fraud, or like I have to confess. Makes for an awful lot of drama. Sneakers at Coffeeshop Unwifedmotherexpletive
  5.  So many people here are still wearing flipflops, or sandals of some sort. I don’t care about toes but I do care too much about warmth and chilly-ness. too much, I know. but hats are imminent, people!
  6.  there’s all these women with babies under 6 months old. some mommy and me class must’ve just finished somewhere.
  7. plus, its gone from before 10 am to after 10 am and the place is hopping. who lives these lives? I wish they would all stop by my table and tell me. (not really, maybe. maybe.)
  8. I’m too distracted by my phone. memes can be really funny. i’m still tired of snark though.
  9.  I don’t ever want to be around pumpkin spice. i’m a purist. apple cider. i’m going to make a flag for my pickup.
  10. maybe they are nannies. this one does not have a body which has carried a child. are nannies a thing here? maybe i’m in the wrong end of town.
  11.  I have to go back home to take a walk, and to hear me some more Mother Teresa. because. what else would you do while waiting for the work to roll in, right?
  12.  I think a dozen is a pretty good place to stop. I imagine my Lionness getting down with the apple cider too.

(seriously, where the hell are all these babies coming from? there are SO many babies here! a meet-up?)

shitcakes and fuckery. I wrote that this week in a shared space and made two women laugh. and man that feels pretty great.

also wrote that I was a zipper in the wash.

love love love,

uwmf

Humanity

Archetypes and Mother Teresa

yep, you read that right. I’m on day 3 of listening to * Carolyn Myss talk about Archetypes, and how we all can relate better and feel more connected when we use a common language of symbol and metaphor.  (of course, cross-cultural might provide hills and valleys, but Mother, Mother is the broadest thing in the universe, potentially, but is still Mother. Child, Warrior, Student, Saboteur, ) These are elements we have within us, not what we do to others, necessarily.

For fucksake, Mother Theresa wasn’t even a mother, and she was.  right? we dig? Its not ‘literal’, its symbolic, full of meaning that doesn’t even need to be spoken. men can be Mother, ladies without kids can be Mother. whatever.

again, whatever. So, work is slow and I’m looking into the things I love.  I love mysticism, have, do, but because I went to a Jesuit College, I studied a whole bunch of mystics, and I don’t envy them a goddamned bit.*= I mean, we’re talking very very dark trials and tribulations, some including blood and abandonment and hysteria, and super early deaths.  So, you know, not that much of a celebrity thing.

BUT, I love Mother Theresa. And I’ve been getting into the whole ‘Listening to things on tape/phone’ thing lately. it allows me to concentrate in a way that I haven’t for a very long time, almost collegiate-ly.*-

“If I ever become a saint—I will surely be one of ‘darkness,’” Mother Teresa wrote in September of 1959. “I will continually be absent from heaven—to light the light of those in darkness on earth.” *& This site

oh, man, she is my guy. (I know)

and one of the archetypes that i’m learning I have in me is that of the Innocent Child, the Magical Child… ooooh, sparkly lights and rainbows and steadfast faith and oooh, a butterfly!! its not an immature thing, or naïve, but it is a pretty significant part of me in much of my life thus far. And… every archetype has its flipside, or ‘shadow’ and the times when my child is despondent, and believes in nothing, and hides in the blanket fort, are for real.  Disappointment, loss of faith in the goodness, oh man, they swing through and knock me down.

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I am not equating my mood swings to Mother Teresa’s dark nights of the soul. except metaphorically. **

anyhow, i’m freehanding this, and I want to stop now to go back to thinking. so, there. Oh my word, I just started to type something about how my bulletpoints below are hollow but stopped to look up what that meant literally and oh my god, guys, what kind of world are we living in?!

*I don’t know much about Myss or Sacred Contracts, or what not, but I ‘GET’ the idea of archetypes, whether we grasp them on the surface or just recognize them floating under the dock.  I just ‘get’ it.

*=my language is pretty damn funny/punny. unintentional, I swear.

*-let us now talk about the girl who is deaf getting back into ‘listening’, shall we? no? okay then.

*& I don’t know anything about this site but its where I got the quote so I had to link.

**if there is a God, and a ‘living’ Mother T, then i’m sorry, i’m sorry, i’m sorry, i’m not worthy… full on face in dirt.