To Have Strength, One Must Be Strong

Over the course of two hours this morning, and by two different medical professionals, I was referred to as 'intuitive, insightful, aware, and intelligent.' These are not bad things at all.  On the contrary, I have been called much, much worse and by many, many people.

But none of these qualities that apparently (currently) describe me are what I have need to be, what I want to be, described as: 'strong, resilient, undefeated.'  Understand (I do) that these are the musings of a silly, sad girl whose silly, sad world is trembling.  I need strength.  I crave strength- an inner power which holds that silly, sad girl in place while that silly, sad world trembles away.  I desperately wish for those around me to remember me as a person with a backbone... Hell, even to be remembered (remembered!) as a person with a personality would be nice.

Let's face it.  My intuition does not come from some grand intellect but from half a lifetime of living with ghosts.  And if I were truly insightful, truly aware, and truly truly intelligent, I probably would not be traveling down this earthshaking road (maybe a stronger word than 'trembling' is necessary) that I am on today- gleefully destructive, ruefully and distressingly marching with purpose.

The Only Difference Between a Rut and the Grave is its Depth

Classy.

While I am not entirely sure who first said this gem, I am absolutely sure that it applies to my current state of being.  Absolutely sure.  The only difference between a rut and the grave is its depth?  Yes.

In other news, it is the first day of September.  And September is my month.  All mine.  I selfishly and wantonly claim this month.  Yes yes, I know that it's my birthday at the end of the month and so it's really not surprising that I would have such an affinity for it.  But September is the beginning of Fall, it's the start of goodness and apples (and apple cider!); of fires and feist and witching.

Am I still inching my way toward the grave?  Yes.  But maybe it will become a little more shallow for September.

Cheers, Friends.

Two-fer- Decisions, Decisions and Songs

I decided to do a two-fer-one today.  Two blogs, one post.  It has been a long week, a longer night and the longest time.  Enjoy:

Decisions, Decisions

It's funny, but every time I write a blog I have some difficulty coming up with a title.  Today's options included: 'Wearing Thin', 'Setbacks', 'Bravery', and 'Integrity', amongst others.  None of those have the effect that I want for this entry in particular. So I went with the considerably more neutral 'Decisions Decisions.'  Because that is my life lately.

At any rate, let me get on with it.  I have begun the process of phone-calling, refunding, promise-breaking.  The promises I am breaking are mostly ones that I have made to myself over time- be strong, be a fortress, keep what is yours and yours alone to yourself.  Be better.  Go to Maine once a year, every year, for as long as you both shall live.  These promises I made... I made over time and as a result to many odd and probably mostly juvenile events in my life.  But they are mine.  Which is why these decisions that I must make now are so difficult.  I do not want to break my word.  Especially not to myself.

But some things, I suppose, break.

The decisions that have been left to me, and I mean really left to me alone, are few and far between.  Most of them have been taken from me one way or another.  Return to work?  How about a hurricane instead?  Move to New England?  How about you'll freeze to death by your second night because there is nothing left of you?  Do yoga...? mmm... I don't think so- you have tendinitis in your wrist!  So I make the aforementioned phone calls and ask for said refunds.  And then I grin and bear another promise that I have broken.  And I don't have the heart to make any more to myself just yet.

The decisions I get to make are more along the lines of... run two miles today? or Four?  Clean room? Or attempt to bake banana bread?  Pretty low-key decisions.  I suppose that's just the way of things right now.  I hope only for right now.

Songs

I know that everyone has moments that are defined by songs and songs defined by moments.  So here is my current list:

I have been listening to a lot of Mumford and Sons lately.  Especially this song.  Listen carefully- there is a line which states 'it seems that all my bridges have been burnt- you say that's exactly how this grace thing works.'  That line, that line sums up what daily runs through my head.  Especially now, especially after all these decisions.  If you get a chance, this song makes me cry every time I hear it.  In a good way, I guess, because it is hopeful in it's own very British, very dour way.

Bon Iver, Bon Iver, Bon Iver should have first billing on this list of songs.  He's been saving me, of late, without knowing me or caring for me.  I can't stop listening to Holocene.  Because I am not magnificent.  And because I have never cried so hard in my life and because hearing a male voice say these words is so much more emotive and heartbreaking then even she could be: his cover of Bonnie Raitt's classic.  If I could pull the covers over my head and sleep the rest of the year away, I'd have Bon Iver singing my lullaby.

Adele's second album 21 kills it.  The angry girl in me likes to blast Rolling in the Deep.  Of course, then I run out of energy and need something a little more restorative.  Enter more Bon Iver.  Really, you don't even need a link here, just youtube Bon Iver, pick a song, and it will be amazingly intuitive.

For the pop addict in me... Oi.. I am loathe to admit it but... The Script have my ear.

Cheers Friends.  Alas, I am not able to report on the Jesus Christ University signage of late.  I do wonder what they have to say about the 'Monster Hurricane.'  Probably something incredibly deep and powerful.  And damning.

And not at all intelligent.

Okay, until next time.

Bodies in Motion

So this Sir Isaac Newton fellow may have been onto something.  Bodies in motion remain in motion until acted upon by an outside force. First(ish) law of physics.

I am not, by nature, a still person.  Once upon a time I hummed with vitality and power- I was a Newtonian constant- always in motion, always moving, always always alive.  And my oh my, how the times have changed.  For now I am sitting at my parent's kitchen table, nursing a glass of wine and pondering that first law, oh Newton.  And what an important law it is.

You see, I have recently kept myself semi-alive (a kind description of my current state of being) through a series of events (the outside force) that have not only stopped me (remain in motion until acted upon by...) but have literally halted my previously powerful motion so completely that I have to worry whether or not I will ever start moving again.  It strikes me as so odd because I went for a long run today.  The physical motion is there.  It's here in my fingers as I type and remain true to my promise of honesty.  It's here in my foot that keeps bouncing in worried energy.  It's here in the goosebumps that raise on my arms under the kitchen fan.

But it is suspiciously absent otherwise.  The emotional side of me has stilled.  The mental side of me has stilled.  All in some desperate bid to survive against this opposite force.  I know everyone goes through it.  I know that.  But who is really honest about it?  Who really takes the time to expose themselves?

Newton was right.  It takes a powerful, equal force to stop movement so completely.

Wilderness

A few summers ago one of my many roommates and I were sitting in the kitchen of our New Hampshire cabin and discussing how to go about impressing self-important owners of a fair-trade coffee shop in order to procure some gainful employment there.  If you have ever met self-important owners of a fair-trade coffee shop (especially one near an Ivy League) then you can probably imagine the direction this conversation took.  One of the questions on her application demanded that the potential employee identify his or her "favorite three syllable word."  I'm not kidding.  It was a no-brainer answer for my roommate- or-gan-ic- duh.  Beat that hipster Ivy-Leaguers.

The question led to a further pondering of favorite words, in general, and what those words mean. Think big- the ideas captured and conveyed in some single words are more powerful than any treatise of words in the world.

My favorite word is 'wilderness.'  I adore that word.  I am enraptured by that word.  I identify with that word- I used to use that word to describe myself.  It has been some time since I have been able to do that, but it was a part of me once, a strength that sat in the core of my being and sustained a part of my spirit that was, to be redundant, wild; the part of my spirit that was singularly unique, impossible, and entirely untouchable.

Wilderness; deep, dark, threatening, angry wilderness.  The untamable other.  The passion!  The power!

I have loved it for so long, I think, because it's presence is permanent.  To move onto a much more esoteric plane- regardless of the road humanity takes, wilderness is a haunting, hunting thing that follows us; traces our movements from some inky place in the dense shadows.  It stays on the periphery, but it is there always.  It's constancy is like a gift, in my mind.

In this context, wilderness is a measure of honesty- confronting it is an act of bravery.

Some Secrets

I have been thinking- isn't it funny how the pronunciation and syllabic emphasis of a word or phrase changes it's entire meaning?

For example- 'some secrets', depending on how you stress the words, could mean several things.  'Some secrets' as in 'hey, those are some secrets you're sharing with us!'  Or 'some secrets' as in 'hey, I've got some secrets to share with you.'

But no, today's title is a softer 'some' and a defeated 'secrets' as in 'some secrets are not meant to be shared.'  Some secrets are meant to be squirreled away in some dark corner, left to gather dust in the recesses of our minds.

Some secrets are meant to haunt only the person keeping them.

Cheers, Friends...  and look, it was almost more cheerful than my previous post?

I am the Brutality of Vision

I am sitting in a coffeeshop at the moment, trying not to feel bad about eating a cookie when I have barely eaten anything in about a week.  Welcome to the heartbreak.

The worst part of being an eating-disordered creature is the inevitable, cyclical, sickening slide back into it.  It hurts; it strains the soul; it creates desperation where there should only be acceptance.  Whether this slide is a result of an impossibly bad week (in my case this time), an offhand comment (has happened in the past), or a stomach flu that makes you remember the twisted satisfaction of starvation (has also happened in the past), it is not a happy experience.  In fact it is such a collision of the physical and the emotional and mental that it is impossible to detail.

I don't mind sharing this because I am fairly confident that most people I know have some idea of my own deeply distressing problems with myself.  There is no good way to explain what one goes through when one's brain and body begin to mutiny.  It is weird- obviously.  On a side note, I am sick to think that some unfortunate individuals glorify what I do to myself.. but I do it over and over as if I glorify it as well.  I don't like it but some grooves in my brain are worn so deep they are almost comforting in their exhaustion.  And there you have it, the most upsetting and inhuman part of the game- that self deprivation, deprecation, hatred, starvation and cruelty, can actually be comforting.  Yes.  And sometimes I am simply too exhausted otherwise to fight back.

I know this all seems rather depressing.  And it is. And I apologize for the fear and distress that people may feel in reading this.  But, and this should not be a news flash to anyone, sometimes life is less than thrilling.  Sometimes it is truly a bag of suck.  I have turned over a new leaf in life (is that the saying?).  I am not, by nature, a dishonest person.  But this past week, if nothing else, has caused me to believe that the only way of getting out of bed in the morning is to make a promise to be honest to everyone about everything.  No more fudging the truth.  No more painting over the painful parts solely because they are painful.  Pain is a part of the universe as much as you or I.

The difficult part (as if it could actually get more difficult than what I have already written) is that promising honesty necessarily means promising brutality.  It means promising bad moments and unhappiness and sometimes cruelty.

But there are worse things in life.  See above.

Until next time, friends.  Oh, and everyone calm down.

Nous Sommes Tous Sauvages

There is a story that kicks around colonial history on the post-highschool-probably-post-university-level.  I have heard it a couple of times, but I studied this stuff so it was inevitable that I would trip over it at some point.  It is a story that more or less devastates the very western-society idea that Europeans took colonialism by storm and didn't look back- that they more or less ruled the roost.  

The story:  as France colonized the interior (think the Mississippi River area- all the way up) she employed men known as couriers du bois as fur traders/trappers.  These wood runners played a strange roll in the vast but shrinking wilderness.  They were the connection between the "civilized" French or European world and the "savage" Native American.  And here's the thing- they chose the Native American world for their own.  As these men navigated the very complicated, sometimes treacherous space of fur trading, international relations building, and survival, they actively chose to mutate toward the "savage" culture.  (And there's the rub- they gave up the lives that Europeans were desperately trying to transfer a)to the New World and b)to the natives themselves and they did it gleefully).  Because, as the fur traders rapidly found out, the Native Americans set the rules for whatever game both sides were playing.  They set the rules and then didn’t tell the French, English, or Spanish how to play.

But that is not the story I want to tell.  The couriers du bois, having assimilated so well into the native cultures, began to think and feel like their Indian brethren.  So it should not have surprised anyone when a small French settlement was attacked, it’s inhabitants basically massacred and an ominous yet telling message carved into a tree (of course, it’s always trees): nous sommes tous sauvages.  We are all savages.

Why am I telling this story?  I know, it’s morbid and weird and makes me sound not a little gleefully macabre.  I’m telling it because the education system in the United States needs to start telling it.  It need not be a story kicked around graduate school for all the cool kids to know and no one else.  The colonial education is fairly limited in the US… apparently much of its history is fairly limited… oh say, until the Civil War.  Newsflash- a lot of other events shaped the identity of this nation before it was the United States; a tremendous amount of ‘stuff’ happened before the North and South decided they didn’t want to be friends anymore- so give it up.  Give it a rest. Look a little further into the past of richer and more eloquent commentary on the human condition. 

I’m telling this story because I love colonial history and I hate that Native Americans are pushed out of it as savages.  There is no greater insult than to tell a developed, beautiful, complicated and highly individual culture that it is a savage one.  Savages?  Really?

I am telling this story because it came up at work the other day in the context of “why don’t we tell more of the Native American story?”  An excellent question anonymous visitor.  We don’t tell more of their story because, again I’ll blame the education system here, we don’t know how to.  And even if we did, we certainly don’t know how to do it in a way that coveys the grace and power of their story.  Native Americans were not passive victims in the colonization of North America, but active participants.  The eventually were victimized to the point of devastation, but they were there with the Europeans the whole time.  And they were strong; and, and I can’t emphasize this enough, they set the rules.  The cultural exchange happening in the colonies between cultures was not one sided.  It was not all Europe all the time.  It was much more equal than that.  And if it takes me telling a ridiculous story about identity change in the wilderness to get that point across, so be it. 

Now, I understand that people reading this blog know all of this.  There are like 5 of you who actually bother keeping up with it.  And you all know me well enough to have heard it all before.  And let’s be honest- you are all intellectual enough to get to these conclusions all by yourself given the right amount of detail and fact.  I am hoping that someone will stumble up on this someday and have an epiphany.  And that he or she will pick up Richard White’s The Middle Ground or Alan Taylor’s American Colonies and learn something that pushes their ideas of colonialism to the breaking point.

I am telling this story because we are all savages.

Having a Coke With You *

*The original version of this blog was written on the back of a copy of 'The Waking' by Theodore Roethke.

I had never before heard of Frank O'Hara.  But.  I do have a guilty pleasure for bad, I mean truly awful, tween romances and sometimes it pays to be idealistically and naively invested in the idea that movie love can be honest and somehow translate in real-life love. That is to say (rather ashamedly) that the other day I watched "Beastly." Starring whatever young Disney pop-royalty is currently making pre-highschoolers drool, it is terrible.  Really.  The only reason I won't say "don't waste your time" is because this terrible film managed one moment of goodness (well... two if you could the use of Deathcab for Cutie's "Trasatlanticism" in the soundtrack) when it introduced me (and probably millions of pre-teens who can't possibly appreciate it's subtlety) to Frank O'Hara's 'Having a Coke With You.'

What this poem did for me- the reason I am waxing stupidly profound on it- was two-fold.  It made that leap from movie love to real-life love and it reminded me about poetry.  Could I be a little more vague?  Probably. But I will try to explain.  This poem captures the iridescence of love- the shimmering silly sweetness; the rarity of it; and the impression of revolution- literally, the world revolves around this love that you feel and the person for whom you feel it.  And what's really important is that 'Having a Coke With You' is a poem- it's the real thing written by a person who (I sincerely hope) has felt these real feelings.  It's not Hollywood, it's hope. It's hope that people can love (romantically, platonically, whatever) with depth, power, and a fullness that seldom seems possible in us human folk.

Perhaps I am too young.

Then there is the poetry part.  In my musings and movings-around, my rush to be everywhere all the time, I had forgotten this other love of mine.  I have read, enjoyed and written poetry for ages now.  It is wonderful, fine, short-form literature that has the short-form capacity to challenge tremendously what you know and want desperately to be true.  And then my love changed a bit.  It grew, developed; mutated into a beast of unfathomable consequence.  Who knew I, the Ice Queen, could FEEL?

In college (after my deeply wounded departure from organized religion) I bought a small, paperback TS Eliot reader.  It became my bible.  Eliot's 'Gerontion' made sense to me in an unusually visceral way.  Ash Wednesday blew my mind.  The power of his work is fairly universal but for me it was also ferociously personal.  A case of "right time, right place."  Derek Walcott came next, in all his post-colonial glory.  Carl Sandburg (I kid you not, 'Have Me' defined love for me.  It should be the dictionary definition); William Carlos Williams; don't even get me started on Rilke and how alarmed I was on finding myself craving his densely religious work.  I don't believe in his God, but I do believe in his words.  God, Rilke!

All of these poets crowded into my heart and my brain.  They made me THINK.  And I did them the ultimate injustice.  I forgot.  I forgot to pick up my books, their books, and love them.  I forgot to have my breath stolen.  I just forgot.

And then I was reminded... ironically enough, by 'Beastly'.  Seriously.  But you take what you are given right? I was given a Coke.

Cheers, my dears.

See that?  I'm a poet.

Salt and Beauty

I went to the beach today (Coquina Beach on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore), for the first time since Australia.  I listened to the waves, absorbed the sun, enjoyed the sensation of the sand shifting beneath me.  I could hardly concentrate on the book I need to read for work; I was too distracted by the feeling of peace.  The page goal I set for myself slowly fell away- 'I've got loads of time,' I thought, 'I may as well swim while I can.'

So I hopped in the water.  It was cool enough to be refreshing but not life-threatening cold.  Which is what I prefer- sorry New England, purple just isn't my natural lip color; it just doesn't suit me.

I waded in, slipped under a wave, and allowed myself to be overwhelmed by the feeling of connectedness inherent in ocean-play, in the way the world sounds under water.  I have done this same thing since I was a child.  There is something primitive about letting a wave crash over you.  I become part of the salty sea, it tightens its grip on me.  When salt water fills your ears you can actually hear the beating and beautiful pulse of the ocean swirling around you.  It is what perfection sounds like (fear not my non-beachy friends, the mountains are still my heart.  If I could slip beneath a mountain and listen to it as it crashed over me, I would.  But there are some logistical problems with that one- me and the mountain both being solids and all... and the fact that a mountain falling down on top of me would probably have some negative results... like death).

There are literally too many ways to describe the duality of peace and power inherent in the sea.  Lucky for me I have an entire season here to think about it.  That is, when I'm not thinking about the sign changes (clearly meant to inspire deep psycho-spiritual self-debate (flagellation?)) from the Jesus Christ University- because apparently the fun just doesn't stop there.

For you folks playing the home game:

Last week let us know that "God wants full custody, not just weekend visits."  Pat's favorite so far.

This Week: "Judgment day is near, settle out of court with Jesus."  This one took me a minute or two.  Until I realised that they didn't mean "church" when they said "court"- they literally meant Gods Almighty Court of Judgment Day Where the Big Screen of Your Life and Plentiful Sinning Plays for ALL TO SEE- or "Rapture, Inc." as I like to think of it.

Cheers, friends.
Come see me if you get the chances- milkshakes, mosquitoes, and supernatural warnings await you!