I call the stairs Moriarty, villainous beast

From Thursday, May 9

One likes to think of being valiant, at least capable. Circumstances do not always allow for that. When we moved to our comfortable apartment home in this building with these stairs, I could manage them, carrying groceries, taking out trash, doing laundry. Then I managed them less well, possibly due to side effects of an otherwise did-just-what-it-was-supposed-to statin medication, side effects to which I didn't make the drug connection as they were of slow onset.  I thought it was just me, becoming more, as I experienced it, enfeebled.  Getting along the walkway, down the stairs, across the courtyard, down more stairs, to the car, and then back home to do it all going the other direction was, to say the least, daunting.  I discontinued the medication and began a plan of quieting my jittery mind, strengthening my weakened muscles and seeing what could be done.  I had a target date, today, for an appointment and knew, halfway along the balcony walk, that I still had work to do.  I don't know if the photo tells you clearly how perilous the stairs are and how one needs to be in their best form for either direction, especially up. 

I have visualized myself, strong and sure-footed, I have visualized myself with all lifting muscles cooperating successfully, I have visualized myself steady and graceful and I am not there yet.  I am just not quite there yet and the good news is I knew it, all suited up, willing, as mindful of the moment as I could be, and it became clear that I would be very unsafe - today - making this journey and I want not to feel as though I have failed.  I know I haven't.  I know, believe me, that everything is a process and takes as long as it takes.  I know that one of my greatest lessons is about patience, tied with learning how to be gentle and forgiving with myself.

After calling to cancel today's appointment, which was last-minute and not at all how I like to conduct myself, I went back outside to practice and identify the areas of greatest need.  At first I felt grateful that some inner wisdom told me what my choice needed to be.  Now, a few hours later, the stronger feeling is of not measuring up, not being able to do it as well as I wanted.

This is such a tricky, complex business, being human.  My unwritten manifesto holds many of my beliefs:  that no one other than me is responsible for my happiness, that the high road is never a wrong choice, that things DO work out and I'm still here, that magic is real and is always, always calling to us, reminding, reclaiming, recruiting.  While that goes on, will you picture my feet and knees reaching new heights, my endurance increasing, my strength restored?  That is magic enough for now.

Discover Fresh Start Gum, while Gloria decides to keep it simple

In case you fell asleep under the rhododendron and woke up thinking all the original ideas had been taken, please pay a visit to Fresh Start Gum at this amazing post.

Yes, there really is a bright side of the street.  Be subversively attentive.


Episode 6: Gloria Decides to Keep It Simple

It starts when what used to fit - socks, shoes, underpants - no longer does.  You become a wicked stepsister whose enormous feet cannot be greased, stuffed or otherwise installed in those low-cut red flats that could have come from Audrey Hepburn's closet.  Then the rosy flowered socks, too cute with the cropped olive linen pants, right? now fit like a child's anklets and leave your aging, bared limbs looking like cold oatmeal.   Whatever has befallen the underpants, still new enough that their label can be read with the human eye, they now, even when put on the right way, feel as though they are on backward or your ass has become something so much greater (in a manner of speaking) than it was the last time you wore them.

The poor fit extends to every object that your critical gaze catches, try though they may to become invisible or pull on a quick disguise.  The voice in Gloria's head screams, "Tea SHOPPE?  SHOPPE?  Was I mad?" as she begins to dismantle her sign and discard every business card, menu, coaster, postcard and catering brochure with the offensively-spelled word.  Refinement, Gloria reminded herself, is an outgrowth of simplicity.  Too many flourishes mark one as, if not an amateur, at least one who has not given sufficient thought to the problem.

"I may have to go home and cut my hair off with the red-handled knife," she muttered.  "Everything has become too much."  She stopped herself just short of pitching all of it - furniture, dishes, baked goods - into the sea.  "Even in simplicity," she noted, "one must maintain a sense of proportion.  Damn you, Noel Coward.  It all used to work just fine."  For an abbreviated moment, Gloria forgot that Mr. Coward was part-owner of the map to the bright side of the street.

Cutetape and washi giveaway

Today I am happy to shill for Cutetape, vendor of colorful washi tape, and their giveaway. The particulars are here.  This has been a significantly ponderous week, or week-plus, and my pinball brain is calmed by the beautiful, the NOT-cute cheerful (don't let the company name put you off) and whatever feels kind and intelligent.  I have ordered from Cutetape several times and am confident recommending their products and service, not to mention a paper-freak's dream giveaway.

While you're at it, send some mail art today or do whatever it is that you, and only you, can do.  The world needs you and your mad creative skills out there on the front lines.  xo

Waiting for summer his pastures to change - And some Gloria

For today, perhaps only for this moment since we never know what comes next, it feels as though words I write are my only connection to sought-after miracles, adjustments, magic.  I know the tie is far stronger  than what seems a single strand; my life holds more models for impossible things than I can name.  Crises come in strengths, intensities, or sizes.  This may not even be a crisis and if it is, all manifestations are interior, other than the crying and wild arm waving to say I need to write this NOW, this moment.  Wishing for exterior - or personal, physical - circumstances to be different, feeling let down, even betrayed by something unnameable when they persist is, I realize, a kind of madness and of no help to the cause.  I know better.  I believe we and all aspects of our lives are works in progress, in process, a constant - however slow - evolution from one form to another in growing awareness.  Then we are overcome, overwhelmed by the sense of being eternally stuck.

Some of you may already know this, but it is new information for me.  In creating fiction, besides giving ourselves imaginary friends, we get to pile our uncertainties and, most of all, our process onto another being.  The fictional she wanders the soul's labyrinth while I get to type.  What a wonder.

GLORIA - Episode 5

She thought of him, the reading man, as an inlander though that seemed small-minded.  Of course shore birds, as the natives sometimes referred to themselves, read, they knew literature, their minds retained other information than tide tables, barometric measurements and how to batten the actual and proverbial hatches against the storms that came calling like the big bad wolf.  But he, the reading man, just seemed more, not just inland but indoor.  He was nowhere near as weather-beaten as the men she'd known all her life.  He was just weather-beaten enough, a redwood picnic table and matching benches before they reach the splinter stage.  When she looked at him she didn't think of barnacles or scarred hands, of figureheads who'd spent every day of their sailing lives facing into the waves and the spray as their paint vanished, their features blurred.

As a subject, Gloria had never given much attention to the possible difference between a purposeful life, defined by prediction and pattern, and one less regulated.  It was as though a rock grew up and thought one day it would rather be a kite, believing it had, in its very small bag of tricks, the means to see that dream realized.  THAT was exactly how crazy it felt.

Who we believe ourselves to be, ordering our actions and our days inside the borders we sense, may be a spell under which we've operated all our lives.   The pieces of ordinariness no longer fit together in a logical way.  That the not-too-weather-beaten reading man could begin to unspool someone else's stories and that a combination of letters from an alphabet she learned well before she started school suddenly acquired the power to up-end her was the greatest mystery she'd ever witnessed, let alone experienced.  She didn't realize it was among the Great Mysteries. 

Things she once did by rote now demanded heightened attention.  How did everything suddenly become significant?  Crust is crust.  Peeling, slicing and sugaring the fruit needed the same muscles, the same flexing of fingers and wrists as before but had acquired the urgency of a fading sun with a handful of orbiting planets dependent on its light.  Suddenly, every thought and act had weight and mass.  She wanted to fling her apron over her face, an old family trick for women on the verge.

Soul food

Thought of as The Tearoom of Wishful Dreams, the shelves of vintage crockery and its mismatched prints and patterns,  along with the flowered paper edging, seemed like a miniature, a shoebox diorama, one of those molded sugar Easter eggs with the paper vignette inside and a little window at the end to peer through.  It feels as though by looking, seeing what is nearly hidden in the shadows behind, one does enter another realm, the ideal of time travelers where we find hearts' desires fulfilled, the restoration of what has been lost, our own real or imagined missing pieces.

Color and pattern are like electrodes connected to dormant or dispirited parts; they bring me to life and help me remember there are so many possibilities.  They are nourishment for places food can't touch.  How easily we forget that an unfed spirit will grow listless, begin to droop and drag the rest of us down with it.  I think, as I listen to the truly miraculous rain, not showers, that pelts down here a few days after we stood at nearly 100 degrees of single-digit humidity, that before I move away from the computer and confront whatever tasks await, I will allow myself another 10 minutes - best to set a limit or I'll be at it all day - of true soul food.  Let's get the AAA out here for a jump start and see how that might change everything.  Charging...charging...zap.

Meanwhile, at the rose covered cottage (Gloria, part 4)

Our paths were not intended to be fixed and unwavering.  For that we would run along tracks, never knowing speed's reckless wind in our hair, never allowing the moment of uncertain gnaw when we reach a destination we had not intended, never becoming lost.  Gloria and ambiguity had not been formally introduced.  Her people adhered to notions of sharp words and determination creating a version of wisdom, right choices, surefootedness.  Now as she stood in the shop's pre-dawn kitchen, rolling pin in hand, she saw herself as a photo, sealed to time and place and was unhappy with how little mobility that allowed.  And why was the smell of fish so strong this morning?  She had lived with it all her life, its pungence nearly unnoticed, like the watered-down dregs of smooth jazz playing in an elevator.  Suddenly it had become a twangy and unfamiliar accompaniment to lyrics she couldn't recall hearing.

We become habituated to our circumstances, lurching mindlessly or drifting passively through disappointments and dismay, turning ourselves custardy to fit events as they occur, trying not to see ourselves as stubborn, as timid, as resigned.  The trick, Gloria thought as she experienced near-whiplash at the revelation, was to keep the level of believing in magic constant.  In what we think may be magic but might just possibly be ordinary life wearing its own eccentric clothes, the highs and lows aren't so punishing nor so far apart.  We are able to rely on the unseen, on our memory of it at work with sleeves rolled up, golden hair limp with sweat, its buoyant outlook weightless enough to keep our doubts from sinking us.

  

Further adventures in envelope art

Thank you Shoplet Offfice Supplies blog for these.
A suburb made of envelopes by Camilla Engman