Monday, October 30, 2006

the internet is sucking out my brain

An hour and a half ago I walked into my room and sat down at this computer to look up a wheat-free pie crust recipe. I just walked into the kitchen and remembered that was what I was doing. I never looked it up. Instead I joined tribe.net and started my profile. Now, to top it all off, I am blogging about how incredibly easily side tracked I am by the internet. sheesh.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

only so much time


I am trying, as usual as my Libra self, to find balance. I have been working more lately, finally. Not that I wanted to be, but I need to feed the family and such, and the big holidays of the summer have drawn to a close, so I am buckling down and doing the work that needs to be done.

What this translates into is that all the time I am now selling for an income has eaten into the time in which I had been doing other things, like writing. I know there is a way for me to do it all, I simply have yet to come upon the magical spell that works to allow the maximum amount of waking, cleaning, laundry, fresh food preparation, dog walking, animal tending, yoga, income producing, creative writing, homeschooling, kid playing, reading, music listening, dancing, activism, socializing, healthful eating, sleeping, dreaming and (hopefully again some day) lovemaking in a day. I believe the magic which will allow me to accomplish all those things exists. I am working on it.

In the meantime, my thoughts today are on the nature of balance. This morning a dear friend honored me by sharing a story, a tragic recollection of a moment in her early childhood, the pivotal moment, an instance of cruelty demonstrated by someone who ought to have been protecting her that has impacted her ability to feel safe for most of her life. I was so grateful she could and would share this with me. So many of us, so many more of us than there rightfully should be, have stories like these hidden away deep in the recesses of our minds and our hearts, hurtful memories that get locked in our cells. I believe that by telling these stories, exposing them to the scrutiny and care of others, taking them out into the light so they can no longer hold their shadowy secrets hostage in our souls that we begin the process of healing.

As I rode home from soccer practice this afternoon, the air was crisp and fresh with that rare moment in fall before all is dreary and moldy and gray. The sun shone through the golden leaves and lit up our way like a hallelujah chorus of light. I was stunned by the regular, constant beauty of the world around me as I am daily. I just think everything is so fucking gorgeous: my children, the sacred earth, our profound gift of the experience of this lifetime, all the exquisite tastes and smells and sights and sounds and sensations that it staggers my soul to know that all of our delight exists amidst such gross destruction and cruelty. Almost every person I know has suffered gravely at the hands of others, most of us as children, most of us at the hands of those who should have cared for us the most, those who should have sacrificed their very lives to protect us, rather than be the ones who put us in harm's way.

So I seek to understand the balance in that? Is there any? Is the beauty and glory of life so immense that the profane and profoundly ugly must exist with it side by side in order for there to be balance? I suppose that's possible, though I am unwilling to totally accept it. Nature herself dishes out enough tragedy in the bear maulings and hurricanes and earthquakes and the thousand other ways she can devour and maim life on the planet for us humans to necessarily have to be in on the action, don't you think? Or perhaps life on earth is so utterly, admirably beautiful that the death wrought upon it by the natural rhythms and cycles is of the same beauty, and it takes the grossly inappropriate abuse, murder, pollution and warmongering we humans singularly perpetrate to offer an authentically polar opposite to all the world's grandiose good. We, perhaps, manifest that dark that gives the light.

Can that be true? I imagine life on earth was pretty fucking stellar a million years before humans made their debut. But did any other life form on the planet perceive it as such? Are we the ears that finally heard the tree falling in the woods and thought to qualify and quantify that experience?

"Wow! That was so loud, it terrified me!"
"I thought it was great. It was such a powerful, thunderous noise it made me feel more alive!"
Humans, we not only perceive, we interpret.

Duality. Do I believe in it? I am drawn to it, the Libran, justice-seeking scales of my psyche ever attempting to weigh things out, make them even, fair. Humans in general love our dualities, all that good and evil and dark and light and yin and yang and yadahyadahyadah. We're fixated. We're obsessed.

So what does it look like in a world, in a world view without balance? Must we have all that evil to weigh against the good? Must a million children go hungry so a million more can thrive on nutrient rich, organic food? Can there not be limitless joy without limitless sorrow? I'm not fucking buying it.

As much as I love balance and order I can feel the Eris lurking inside me, that wild, beloved chaos theory that gives rise to the exquisite fractal rebelling. Symmetry has its place. Order and logic are fine concepts that have taken us far. There is a time and a need for balance, but we have gone overboard, swung our own pendulum too far thereby destroying the balance in which we supposedly believe by believing in it too vehemently. If that has something to do with how the cycle of war and abuse got started on this planet, I am clearing this up right now. There is no way I can accept that all the tragic suffering must coexist alongside the peace and elation. I cast out the pain of the millions of children lied to and beaten and starved and fucked, I banish it from this realm. It has no place amongst poppies and puppies and mountain views and mango trees and moonrises. I see the lives on earth living out a scattered fractal pattern of so very much pleasure mitigated not by a single instance of raw abuse of power. I embrace it, I embolden it and empower that vision to take hold of all that experience, all that interpret.

Monday, October 09, 2006

he still holds my hand

My younger son is 11, and I am 33. I love the magic of numbers and it feels really special that we're both delicious double digits and that I am 3 times his age as 3, of course, is a magic number.

My boys, quite honestly, are awkward fellows. Chalk it up to the combination of being adolescent boys who have grown up entirely outside of the mainstream paradigm: they've never been to school, their mom is a pagan, psychedelic, priestess freak, their dad is a far away, liberal, academic, law student type, their clothes all come from thrift stores instead of box stores and malls, and they live deep in the mountains surrounded by a mismatched collective of neighbors and roommates and lots of animals and holy, holy, wooded beauty. They are different from other children. However, they are doing well with it, awkwardness and all. They are intelligent and wildly creative and mostly considerate and can function pretty well in a group. They play sports and video games, so as not to set them too far apart from their cultural peer group, and they argue and bicker and wrestle with each other, too, the older they get.

But a phenomenon in our lives that keeps occurring that I continue to cherish but wait on the edges of devastation to no longer be true is how blessed and lucky I am that G still holds my hand. He is a strong boy, a triple Taurus, so he's very earthy, almost feral at times, and quite headstrong. His physical makeup is the very embodiment of his bull archetype; he is stocky, muscular and firm, full-faced, and tough as a young bull learning his strengths. His hands are thick and rough with boyhood adventures of climbing trees and digging ditches and building forts. And those hands still reach for mine whenever we walk together. It is nigh on intoxicating at this point; every time he does it I catch my breath, silently so as not to let on at my grateful surprise and glee.

He holds my hand automatically when we walk in the city and need to cross streets. It must be ingrained after all those years that I refused to have it otherwise so paranoid of traffic accidents I am. And yet somehow L quit holding my hand every time we crossed the street at some point in the recent past. I don't remember it; I am unsure how he got away with it because frankly I'd just as soon we all hold hands when faced with the threat of vehicular manslaughter. But L is just as likely to be holding some younger child's hand when we cross now, so I trust him and let him go. What truly amazes me, though, is that G holds my hand out there in public, in full view of the city and whomever may accompany us. This big little boy has not yet matured so much that he even realizes that other boys his age would be mortally embarrassed to hold their mothers' hands in public, and so he himself is not. Thank my lucky stars.

Holding my hand is not just reserved as an automatic response to city walking, either. G holds my hand, takes my hand in his even when we go on our long walks up our mountain. We walk our dogs up the gravel, wooded road nearly every day, and oftentimes the boys carry with them sticks or swords or other, various, phallic implements of destruction as they seem genetically programmed to do. And yet even still, I regularly get the delighted rush of satisfaction of feeling that rough-palmed, chunky hand make its way into my own. His hand seeks mine. He likes holding my hand. He enjoys being close to his mom while he walks. I cannot put my true feelings into adequate words. I feel I am the luckiest woman in the world every time it happens. And when the getting is really good, now that he has grown so much taller, he occasionally throws his arm over my shoulders so we can walk arm and arm, as comrades, as partners, as the best of friends. What sweet bliss-- may it never end.

I wish every mother I know could have the opportunity to experience the visceral bliss of her half-grown son's hand, tough but not yet manly, grasping for the comfort of her hand's embrace. The world would be a kinder place if our boys were all so blessed as to be able to appreciate that safety and comfort and our mothers were all so gratified by their sons' appreciation of them.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

right this minute


The sun is in Libra and the moon is in Aries and my heart is breaking, breaking, breaking. I want my Aries sun forever in my life, he needs his Libra moon forever in his life. How do we do it? How, dear god, do we make it work?

How long will it hurt this much? How long can I take this pain?

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

breakfast

I have a very dear friend with whom I occasionally share meals, and we have this game in which we discuss all the things that happen at the dinner table at my house which could never, ever have happened at the dinner table at his house as a child, for example listening to Led Zeppelin, children requesting additional servings of brussel sprouts or tofu, moms saying the word "fuck," etc.

This morning we were having breakfast and though my friend wasn't here to share it, I imagined the scenario before me was again unique to my household. With plates and mouths full of pancakes and hash browns, my L and my little sister sat side by side, fair skinned and light haired, both in all black attire singing along, word for word to Elvis Costello. It was darling. They knew all the words. They are such cute indie rockers of a like mind, though they are 12 years apart.

It makes me realize what it could look like if I had another child even though my boys are so much older now. I hadn't thought of it that way until I wrote it down. I still have no view of what life has yet to bring. I am open, trusting. Free and falling.