Word of the Week - 93

Gustavo Aimar illustration.

Word(s) of the Week: HIDDEN RECESSES

Waters for which there are no charts, roads without signposts, sealed rooms, locked chests, diaries written in invisible ink, we, like the Tardis,  are much bigger inside than we appear.  We are stewards of realms real and imagined, explorers for the ages, inventors, students.  What I know to be true for me is that I make it up as I go along.  How could I do it otherwise when each moment brings new possibilities?  I gobble up information, ideas, images and offer them a home within.  We are capacious creatures, our castles of self containing too many rooms to count.  For whatever knowledge we seek or skill we wish to master, there is space.  We cannot outgrow a curious mind, a questing spirit.

An angel for any occasion

There is much fun to be had with color pencils and rubber stamps, a joy for all seasons.  Experiment with color combinations.  I would be happy, not to mention quite lovely, in a sky blue dress with orange flowers.  Stamp is from RubberMoon.

Word of the Week - 92

A bride's red shoes.

Red platform shoes from the 1940s.

This was the indicated link.

Words of the Week: IN DREAMS 



As I've mentioned before, I don't feel that making other people hear about our dreams would qualify as good manners.  Therefore I won't tax you with the dream narrative,  other than to say a friend took a group of us to a hodgepodge of a book store and before any of us could leave we each had to buy at least one pair of red shoes.

Even if only in theory, no longer so much in practical life, I have an abiding love for red shoes.  In a happiness hierarchy for manufactured objects, they might top the list.

I can only guess at the workings of the mind when suddenly overloaded with information impossible to digest, to process.  What I can say is that the past week brought (as of this writing) two nights of dream movies that warmed and gladdened me, that restored balance when we'd all been tipped overboard, that gave me what felt like real time spent with a friend I see too seldom.  In addition, I was offered the delight of red shoes, tucked under counters all over the dream shop, the Easter egg hunt-style search for the right pair or two, an enormous squash that held pages to a mysterious manuscript and the fact that I was, as I always am in my dreams, younger, stronger and much more able-bodied.

What I assume is this, based on no scientific evidence at all:  rather than shut down in a state of no-thought, my mind, and possibly yours, took me by the hand on a Lewis Carroll adventure to places where the nonsensical made sense.  It took me to spend time with favorite people and things, safe places, sunny or happy or curious places for which I was absolutely present.  If there is some over-arching order to our lives, my sleeping mind drove the getaway car that rescued me from the latest unthinkable events and delivered me to a version of home, home for the heart where I wasn't teetering but steady, from which I could step in the day not fearful but comforted.  Wearing new red shoes.

Word of the Week - 91

Word of the Week:  LOST

(Truth in advertising:  this is a reworked vintage post.  I was 10 minutes from deadline and, well, there it is.)

Henry David Thoreau said, "Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves."  For today, perhaps many days, that is part of my story.  Disquieting news arrived from more than one direction and, even though I feel I've found my way through part of it, bits of me have wandered off.

When lost, panic is pointless. What serves us is a version of treading water, staying in place, yet not idle. And companions, as they might be called, such as flat tin boxes of watercolors or polychromos (is it not a graceful word?) pencils. As I became lost while going about my life in my own home, I, in the only true preparedness I can claim, had emergency supplies on hand, including, in no particular order: a blank envelope, a pencil, a very fine-line waterproof pen, scissors, a glue stick, a sheet of white card stock, a Prismacolor Sunburst Yellow pencil, something red, glitter, color photocopies, paper for drawing, a good eraser, a rainbow ink pad, alphabet stamps. Bottled water and dark chocolate are also recommended to keep one company for the duration.

If there is a trick to what Thoreau described, it is to be lost long enough for awareness to sidle over and sit down, let us get caught up in its story and realize that lost is not who we thought it to be.

The sisters and brothers creep up on Thanksgiving

Ellington confronts the turkey, with thanks here.

Ellington and Henri's parents had to be "away" for Thanksgiving so of course the boys spent the holiday with Ambulancia and Sireena's family, where hi-jinks were the order of the day.   Of any day.  They even traded their signature bow ties for the popular "four-in-hand" in splashy cranberry, roast turkey and pumpkin pie colors.  The girls' father complimented both brothers on their mastery of that sometimes elusive knot.  Dexterous chaps they were.

Had the brothers not been there, Ambulancia and Sireena might have been a bit mopey.  Their next-door neighbor, Nadine, who was in high school, was due to start a Christmas job on Friday.  She, lucky cat, would be working in both the craft and toy sections of the best department store in town, possibly any town, selling doll clothes, crepe paper, crayons, all sorts of gummed seals, ribbon by-the-yard and small metal sports cars with doors that opened.  Nadine loved to, as she called it, "go thrifting" with the girls and their mother and though she was nearly grown up also loved to frolic with the sisters among their costumes and oddities.  They would miss her being around once vacation started but they also envied her hands-on, not to mention paying, job in a retail wonderland.  And she was getting an employee discount.  Great sighing ensued when the news broke.  Nadine knew she would see the girls often as the days crept up on Christmas.

From their existing and not insubstantial stash of new and salvaged crepe paper, the girls made nut cups for all the dinner guests, an assembly that included but was not limited to one grandmother, two honorary uncles who baked the best pies, an older cousin who made them all laugh and first-time visitors their father invited for "it seemed the thing to do."  It was a tradition with him.  Some came back, year after year, while others appeared only once.  Regardless, they were always a perfect match for the party and the girls loved every exotic, aromatic and/or glittering facet of them.  Away from the holiday season, they often exchanged postcards, for which the girls insisted on using fountain pens.

An Ambulancia/Sireena holiday nut cup.  Source.

Henri, being of the most serious frame of mind, asked to say grace and all took turns, as they held hands, speaking of that for which they were most grateful.  Then the laughter started and, over the clink of cutlery accompanied by polite chewing, the most frequently heard sound was someone's quietly issued "Heh heh."

Word of the Week - 90

Pete, the fastest one-man band.

Word of the Week:  VERSATILE

No matter how small the acreage of our fiefdom, we are required to be, among other things, the chief financial officer, social director, tech guy, scheduling secretary, chef, animal wrangler, medical intuitive, boundary-setting parent and guru.  And that is if we are only answerable to and responsible for ourselves.  Increase the population and the list of jobs we must fill balloons to the size of a lesser moon.  We tend to forget that we do, in fact, do it all.

On newspapers in the old days a reporter who took his or her own photos was called a combo man, a title I can claim for the occasional feature I sought out on a whim, no time to schedule a photographer.  Nothing quite like a bright Saturday morning, a classified ads list of garage sales and my husband's Pentax on its rainbow strap around my neck.  We have all worn many hats.

What necessary life positions do you fill on a daily or less frequent basis?  What is required of you, or do you require of yourself, to keep the wheels turning?  Imagine the length of our CVs as we might apply to be the captains of our own fates, if we did not already claim those titles.

"The hidden presence, when we think we are alone." *

Gloria Swanson, because this image is articulate beyond words.

*Title quote from Charles de Lint

“Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.”
― Tom Robbins

There are moments, more would be welcome, when we see or think we see behind, beyond the veil.  Generally no more than glimmers that feel like visual intuition, I experienced such a moment this week, the fleeting sight of how things are, how they may be in the future.  Not solid enough to allow description, the aperture opens and closes leaving behind a knowing, a confirmation, an almost-missed nod of assent that what one seeks is possible, perhaps even at hand.  Surely I am not the only one who is aware of this.

It may be the result of a current meditation course.  Some of the old caulking was loosened and things began slipping through the cracks.  It was an enlightenment I wanted to grab quickly and firmly with both hands.  It could not be held.

I've met the non-ordinary before, we are not strangers.  Listening to a program excerpt by shamanic teacher Robert Moss on active dreaming, he said, "The world around us will speak to us in signs and symbols...everything is alive...find extraordinary messages in ordinary things."

I think we all possess magic.  I believe we are dulled, bludgeoned, by simply trying to keep up with the everydayness of our lives, let alone the monstrous events that slide between us and the sun.  How not to be pulled even further from center, how not to react but to remain grounded, even hopeful no matter what, there's the task.  Perhaps it is to keep us going that we are allowed the rare peek beneath the circus tent.  The acrobats!  The aerialists!  Derring-do without a net!  We ARE made of the same stuff as they, aren't we?  Or did we lose the talismans tucked into our palms and pockets before we were propelled earthward?  Existence can be a weighty business.  We need to believe that nooks of impossible lightness, of goodness, remain, exist, that we have not spent all our tokens, worn the good off all our charms.

These chance sightings of sudden radiance are not corner-of-the-eye manifestations, the sort too-easily dismissed as imagined.  They are real and looking us in the eye, just not for long.  If the soul keeps a journal, I register them there, do my best to digest what nourishment they bring.  I think upon them, then think some more.  Mostly I trust, I believe.  I do not plan to stop.