Bendy, that's a state I want to know better

From Frozen Charlotte

To flexible Gumby

in a mere 67 years, give or take.  If we don't learn to bend, to own, to dive in, to go through (the only way out, by the way), we shatter or seize up.  Word of the day: limber.  If only.

Please, let the grieving begin

Not morning jukebox but dream music, as in, I was singing this and sounding just like Linda.  I know I played the grooves flat on HEART LIKE A WHEEL and went on to abuse the cassette.

What story the song wants me to tell isn't clear.  The dream was fading, the music remained vibrant.  Whether they have anything to do with each other or not, I am being enlightened on how little I know of grieving.  Lucky for me, I don't think there is only one right way to do it.  The operative words, though, are Do It.  Where do I begin when the years and the losses have been so numerous?  I feel like the unintentionally dammed creek, logjams, clogs and impediments, fresh water reduced to a trickle and everything downstream parched and gasping.

Grief unacknowledged is trying to live a full life in smaller and smaller boxes.  It is default adapting just to keep from dwindling to no movement at all.  I've tried to reshape it into a problem with an intellectual solution and it will not cooperate.  Unaddressed, it will never leave.  My best guess is to start writing about it.

Rosa Mira, Ratty and the studio assistants

Ratty illustration by Penelope Todd.

In August, Penelope Todd and Rosa Mira Books offered an illustration of Ratty, the publishing house's sales manager, with any purchase. One could select from existing art or have a personalized work created. I was happy to choose Ratty aboard a raft of color pencils. Instead, Penelope drew the clever rodent juggling for the amusement of my studio assistants, old toys whose photo I had posted. He is only appearing now as it took me this long to figure out how to reduce him to a blog-friendly size.  Don't even ask.

A visit to the Rosa Mira blog will introduce you to their catalog, outstanding reviews and close views of Ratty, his home and work lives.  Please visit, comment, shop, become a blog follower and tell your friends about this New Zealand-based company.  Ratty's adventure, and they are not timid, have only begun.  Penelope's drawings, even before Ratty's emergence, charmed me and called me back to delight in the depth of personality she can bestow on the most functional household objects.

"More questions are on their way."

If the palm readers are of divided minds on which hand tells the story, how do we begin?




The life line in my left palm has a faint and tentative beginning.  Along its journey it becomes shallow, a washed out road, the sort for which warnings are posted about the force of running water.   As this is taking place, tracks from the north appear, run parallel and then merge to form a more emphatic crease which grows deeper as it nears my wrist.  The corresponding line on my right hand is more uniformly deep.

How is it that neither blares, at least to my untrained vision, the events that became crossroads, the fissures where life broke away from itself?  There are no islands I can find that say this is where the temblors struck, setting portions of the land adrift in a sequence of time best identified by change and loss.  Fewer than six years have produced a transformation I can only liken to entering hibernation as a bear and waking up as a collection of parts from three Volkswagens, uncertain if we have what we need to produce, with tools and skills not provided,  one semi-reliable vehicle.

We have, we are, it is all mystery, seeming as unknowable at the heart as around the perimeter.   We trail the poets and gather clues, artifacts of self that we tie up in our hems or handkerchiefs.  At night, the knots undone, we look for meaning in the potsherds.

Summer and space

"The summer had inhaled and held its breath too long..."


I run from tv news, even local programs for anything other than weather forecasts, having lost trust in their ability to tell wheat from chaff.  While I spent this last full summer morning visiting with a life-long friend on what we call the stoop of our apartment,  actual news was being made as the space shuttle Endeavour took its farewell aerial tour above California landmarks en route to LA International Airport and its eventual home in LA's California Science Center.  I caught up with its flight as it made a final circle above LAX, then  began the six-mile last leg from the Harbor Freeway to touchdown.  I loved every minute of coverage I saw: the jumping, cheering children on school playgrounds; teary space program fans lining roadsides and elbow-to-elbow at Griffith Park Observatory; low-level passes above the Hollywood sign, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Santa Monica Pier; a tour of the 747 which impossibly ferried Endeavour across the country one last time.

There is not enough in the news that gladdens my heart.  Today was another creature altogether.  From my junior high science class and our first successful satellite through today's curtain calls for one incarnation of the U.S. space program, I have been among the awe-struck.  I choose to believe that our most extraordinary advances in space exploration await.   I've heard of a 100-year plan being put into effect, something so bold that the phrase "bending the space-time continuum" has been used in conjunction with it.  Possibly apocryphal or my own wishful thinking, I have no reason to doubt that it could be true.  Already I envy the wide-eyed. leaping students who will be here to cheer that mission's completion.

Follow the music

As long as they visit me and until I change my mind, I'm going to post my morning internal jukebox songs.  If the day's volunteer music doesn't offer an intuitive prompt for an essay, you will just get the music, for which there must be some meaning, else why would it be nudging my brain as I wake up?

 It was Freddie Fender's voice that I heard.   Other worthy versions exist.  Today, this is the one.
 
We look at ourselves and the rest of what we assume is reality through a veil, a scrim, constructed by experience, expectation, the presumed safety of not thinking and disbelief in the vast and pervasive role wonder plays in our lives.  Its opacity is an illusion.  On stage, a back light reveals it as the distraction through which we see what is really going on.

I am occasionally,  mysteriously bruised about the arms and legs.  My doctor says it is part of aging, which I find a bit dismissive and insufficient as an answer.  How would I respond if he said my continual bumping against old beliefs, looking for a way beyond them,  left me spotted with patches as green and purple as any black eye?  I'd sure as hell know we weren't in Kansas anymore.

Finding balance in all things might be the greatest component of peace.  Longing, dreaming, striving, planning; wishing for more or different, in our circumstances, in ourselves.  Where is the sky-hook that will lift me out of here, out of myself and chaos I believe is of my creation and lower me gently into those calmer, greener fields?  Once again, turned back with a smile and a pleasant encouragement to BE HERE NOW.  Eventually the choices narrow until one is left with finding not only the good but the answer in what is.  That's a teaspoon of what I may know today.  Guidance or something like it from the morning jukebox.  

Morning jukebox

It doesn't matter if anyone else sees it the way you do.  It doesn't matter if nobody gets it or hears you or trusts you to know your own truth.  It will not match anything in the prevailing paradigm and it requires no more than showing up and doing, yes, the next indicated thing.  Well, that and tuning out everything that doesn't support IT.

We each have a calling, a mission.  It may be the funkiest,  most bizarre and unlikely assignment ever conceived and all we want to do is list the reasons why we're sure there's been a mistake.  There is no mistake.  No one dialed the wrong number.  Yes, it's you and yes, it's now.  Grab it up, your heart filled with doubt.  Think - quietly - of everything that seems small and foolish and unimportant about the task you've just been handed and remember, in listening to our own precious truths, there is nothing, ever, that is small or foolish or unimportant.  Go on with your bad and sacred and authentic self and do it.  Tom Petty agrees.