Deus ex machina

Or why pay attention to those intuitive murmurs.

On Thursday, a day of forensically-examined anxiety, a book arrived that I'd ordered on a whim or unconscious directive.  Sandy Steen Bartholomew, Thursday's Hero.

Here are a few of the words she brought:

 "Zentangle (my note: intricate and focusing doodles) can help you stay calm and relaxed, but it also teaches you to notice your surroundings, to really pay attention, to use your hand-eye coordination - also good for balance - and Zentangle can change your thoughts.

"Anything is possible, one stroke at a time."

Doodling (which I think has been discussed at this site before) is something my hand does without consulting my mind.  By involving intentional thought, voila!, something more, something better,  a new tool, sufficient rocket fuel to escape my own twitchy gravity, as good as seeing the cavalry silhouetted against a prairie sky just after hearing the bugle notes that signal rescue.

Here is an example from another of Sandy's books, Totally Tangled.  I ordered it this morning. 

This is my thought process: if sitting quietly, doing nothing that I can detect, brings on a state close to panic, like Pigpen raising a cloud of dust in a snowstorm, I am excited by the possibility of paying deep attention to something I already enjoy and seeing if it can free me from feeling hideously, powerlessly stuck.  We have nothing to lose but our chains.

Black holes and hammer throws

"A black hole is a region of space whose gravity is so strong that it acts like a giant vacuum cleaner in space. Anything that gets too close gets sucked in. When it hits the center, the singularity, it disappears forever. The gravity in black holes is SO strong that it tugs at space and time, slowing down time and stretching out space. Not even light, the fastest thing in the universe, can escape from a black hole."

Yesterday, it was all "walk and don't look back," sung, said and meant.  Today, though nothing that can be seen or even known has changed, my center has become the astronomic phenomenon which even light cannot outrun.  It could make a person feel leaden and stuck and more than a little deranged.


I would not describe myself as mercurial by nature, though others may disagree.  As age and other things overtake me, I believe I am reasonably consistent, maybe even predictable.  Yet following a day of inner peace and happiness, mixed with the confusion that now seems a fixture in our lives, as Donald Trump again, hey, presto!, flourishes President Obama's birth certificate (or so he says) for our scorn and rejection, today I have been called out by vagabond anxiety, thinking this looked like a good place to crash.  


The morning began with email, including an Amazon promotion, books about Paris.  One of them, I believe it was called Everything Looks Like Dessert, prompted me to take the "closer look" and as far as I could determine, the only things that looked like desserts were pastries.  Awake at 3 a.m., I played with letter forms in my journal, a phrase I read yesterday: Do More Of What You Love.  Well, duh.  And I had planned to do exactly that today.  Anxiety had another agenda.


Just now, a phone conversation with a friend, brought up - relative to Earthly swampiness and the aforementioned excessive gravity - the memory of a Kingston Trio song about the Everglades, "...if the skeeters don't get you then the gators will."  I feel the need for calamine lotion and high, dry ground.


Any tolerance I once may have had for whining has been ground to dust.  That includes my own.  Anything I speak that sounds like a complaint causes me to feel that I've punched all my gifts and good fortune in the nose.  And so help me, I see this as a mystery in which we may all be conscripted actors, but if it smacks of complaining, I apologize, as I do if I just repeat myself using different (or not different) words from post to post.


How it feels is like being the ball portion of a hammer throw rig (I think they call them rigs), being swung around and around and then let fly, to land - wherever.  Being made of human stuff, the harder landings are hellish.  I have bruises to prove it.  What I am is misplaced, bewildered and in touch with quite a few people who are going through the same thing, the sense of having lost our way, become unhitched from our moorings.

The ride is not as fun as it looks.



(Hammer throw photo credit: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~zacharyr/zackHobbies.htm and blogger will not let me adjust the spacing between paragraphs, which will tell you something about the state of things.)