Blue Moon- or- What it is About the Mountains

Dad and I have undertaken a road trip for this holiday weekend.  Since he's The Bob and the Boss, we took his car- a stick shift.  And since I'm the Kate and the Kid and CANNOT drive stick, I was left with heaps of time to page through magazines, read, observe, chat, and THINK.

And I finally figured out at least part of the mysterious/soully- magnetic appeal of the mountains, the appeal that they have on my very essence.  They are empty.  Not, I mean, in a literal sense.  The mountains are, of course, filled with plant and animal life; with seasonal and spiritual life; with graciousness, grace, and Nature.

They are empty, in large part, of people.  People don't bother with the mountains because they are hard.... Hard to develop in a widespread manner; hard to claim in any humanly practical.   They are impermeable, impossible- they are impregnable.

Which brings me to my next realization.  I tie myself to the mountains because they represent for me, more than any other natural ecosystem, the true inability of mankind to conquer or own nature.

Sure, we can maul, destroy, mine (oh and mind we do, blast we do, excavate we do), pave, build, rebuild, rebuild again after that next hurricane, that unseasonable and infinitely unpredictable snowstorm- but there's just no way of beating her.  Nature is the great survivor.  I look at the mountains, the scenic views as Dad sails by them, and I see permanency.  I see immortality and strength beyond human capability.  I see Nature winning once again.

All of this I am pondering on this most auspicious of occasions- the Blue Moon- or second full moon to occur in one month.

Cheers to that, my Dearest Darlings. 

Another Two-fer:

'The Trouble with Old-Fashioned' and 'The Trouble with Being a Nutter'

I'll get to the trouble with being Old-Fashioned in a moment- Let's begin with the singularly odd trouble of being a complete and utter Nutter.  And yes, I do revel in that rhyme scheme.

The trouble with being off your rocker, off my rocker, as it were... is that it's completely and utterly exhausting and at the end of the day you really really want a lobotomy.   Sometimes I wonder if, indeed, a major brain reconstruction (consider the physical more than the figurative here) is not the only way to rid myself of these demons once and for all.  

The trouble with being a Nutter is that you just cannot process reason in a way that is reasonable.  In fact, you cannot process reason at all.

------------

On to it, then.  The trouble with being old fashioned... oi, where can I? where do I? begin?

I am ready to move forward.  I am ready to be a big girl in the big world again.  Alas.  The big world is so big now that one must engage the Internet in order to meet someone.

NO.

I refuse.  Literally.  I. Re. Fuse.

I literally cannot stand the idea of having to use a dating service to meet someone.  How fake, how fraudulent, how manipulative do we allow ourselves to be when we only have to answer to the almighty Internet?  It frightens me to consider how many relationships are standing on such fragile and not-necessarily-truthful bases?

I joke sometimes that I go to Trader Joe's, Earth Fare, and Whole Foods to troll for men.  But the truth is that I would a million times rather meet someone shopping for fair trade bananas than buying me a drink at Girls Night Out or regaling me over the inter net with emails about saving a boyscout troop from a marauding grizzly bear.

The trouble with being Old-Fashioned is... Honesty.

Until Next Time, Friends- Be Calm, Be Brave, It'll Be Okay.  

Sometime in the Next 365 Days...

I'd like to imagine that the gal you see here has spent the last year
or so recouping in a bar somewhere in Europe, eating the finest of
foods, drinking the best of hard liquor and languorous wines,
learning a new language, and delighting in the anonymity
of health, well-being, and a quiet mind.

I'd like to imagine that whatever corner of the earth she has been
hiding in, she'll be ready to leave, to come back, when I eventually
meet her.  Re-meet her.  

I'd like to think that I am going to to come face to face with myself somewhere in the world.  Sometime in the next 365 days I'd like to come face to face with the self that I have spent so much time annihilating, pushing around, and starving.  I'd like to meet the self who was once mostly happy, most of the time.  I wish that the self who writes in her diary about self-dismantling and deprecation; the self who disparages and desecrates; the self who hates; could meet that other self.
I wish they could meet so that I could merrily write something happy- something that my Aunts would approve of and my father would begin reading again- and have it not be forced, not be a lie to try and convince people that I am on the up-and-up.

I hope they meet and remember that once, not even so long ago in the grand scheme of things, they made up the same person- the same whole person.  The same whole, mostly unfractured person.  I want the self who, depressed, takes anti-depressants every morning to meet the self who didn't need them- and remember how golden she was; they were.  I want them to stare at each other, acknowledge each other, and embrace each other.

It does not matter where she went or what she was doing while she was there.  She needed time to be protected and I needed time to fall apart.

Even in how bad I've been, there has still been goodness... there had to be.  Sometime in the Next 365 Days I have to believe that it will once again be mostly goodness.

Until Next Time, My Friends.

Signs

I used to stand by my much voiced opinion that I may be the worst example of a Libra of all time.  But then, today, I considered it a bit more personally and took on a challenge.


Let us begin at the beginning- Libra, as defined by Merriam-Webster, is the seventh sign of the zodiac, in astrology.   No big.  Pretty run of the mill.


Until you dig a wee bit deeper.  The Libra sign is represented by the Scales.  And here we have arrived at the fun part- the part which leads me to regularly state the aforementioned opinion- the Scales, Libra, is all about balance, symmetry and balance.  Ha.  And let's face it- I am categorically the least balanced person I know.  I am not being dramatic- no need to reassure me or molly-coddle me- I am not NOT the definition of a balanced human being.


Keep going into the definition of my sign and you find that Libra's are of 'positive' quality: expressive, extroverted, masculine, outgoing.  Muwahaha.  Not exactly, right?  I am non confrontational to the point of being painfully introverted and my expressiveness comes only with the written word.  I am shy to a fault and usually play the wallflower unless I know the people that I am with.


But read a little closer and my self-deprecating definition of 'worst Libra ever' falls apart.  For Libras fall under the Air element.  And I am nothing if not elementally air or ether.  Always moving, always thinking, doing, humming and buzzing, sustaining.  Vitality, although it does not always appear that way, courses in these veins of mine as though it truly is air moving in them.  If you follow that link I provided for air you will find this sentence nestled far down the page: Air personalities tend to be kind, intellectual, communicative and social; however, they can also be selfish, superficial, vicious and very insensitive to other people's emotions.

Oh yes.  I am selfish, self-centered (again to a fault), superficial, and vicious- when I want to be, I am downright terrifying.  The air and fearsomeness of a hurricane. 

Libra is also one of the four Cardinal signs.  Here is the superficially driven part of this blog: the Cardinal signs drive the seasonal changes.  They are the hinges of astrological world- the power signs.  Of course I am one of these Cardinals.  Even though I am negative and swirl through this world with a kind of immense and overwhelming disdain- I am powerful.  I am powerful in my negativity, I am powerful in my existence- as unusual as it may be- in my spirituality, beliefs, and ideas.  I am power.

So I humbly retract my statement.  Perhaps I am not the face-value of Libra, indeed I am definitely not. But I am a Libra.  And I am fascinated. 

Until next time- look up your own signs.  Follow the maze.