Happy New Year...now what?

Kathy Mattea - Give Yourself to Love

Video from Sunsong 23.

At the end of 2009 I experienced a strong urging to be more intentional about, more committed to having a blog. In 2009 I posted 33 times. With this addition, I will have 135 posts for 2010, for which my goal was 10 postings a month. Consistency sometimes challenges me. To know this and to turn it into an asset is like teaching two squirming life-forms with nothing in common to waltz.

Half-way into 2010, an urging from the same source suggested seeking a wider list of blogging writers to read. Chance or fortune led me to a group from which I am learning about poetry. With their help, and the relentless encouragement of my brother, I find occasional poetic phrases to elevate my prose. To do more of that is my wish for 2011.

Writing is a river flowing alongside the town that is me. It is a constant, now more independent, maturing almost on its own, while I show up at my day job of trying to find peace and cajoling it into reliable attendance.

Some - perhaps all - of us are speckled with drawbacks, obvious as the age spots on some of our hands. What an assignment, befriending the shortcomings, spending enough time with them to identify their strengths. I am running a drop-in center for those labeled under-achievers. They are surly and reluctant, while wanting so much to find a place where someone can see past their thorns.

To know and embrace the true self, to do the dance of joy every day without that fatal whiff of disappointment turning the air toxic, I believe in this. It is love.

Something in the air

(Written in the morning, posted quite a bit later...)

Fifteen minutes ago I could have declared a monkey's wedding in Pasadena, for it was raining while the sun was out. I hope they started the festivities right away, for conditions changed again. My former husband, born in South Africa, introduced me to the expression "monkey's wedding" for that specific meteorological condition. I always wonder what they serve at the reception and marvel at guests who can show up on such short notice.

Though our storm is moving from west to east, lower clouds were being blown east to west, flying, really, vaporous and transient as breath on a mirror. We are not often treated to cloud formations which assume shapes and travel quickly. I connect those days with kites, since wind is usually a factor. Putting thoughts of damp, cold, stiff and crazy out of my mind, I savored how much I once enjoyed lying on the lawn as the mottled sky reeled, especially if I'd been twirling before I dropped. I knew twirling made the earth tilt.

Storms and positive/negative ions, the expansion/contraction of cold getting colder, have influence on my brain, the physiological one that is powered by chemicals too frequently out of true and by what blood and oxygen reach it. Rain once brought me calm, which may not be the way of it now. I will not allow today to be the determining example of whether or not that is still so. I wish deep peace was always within reach and that the mind part of my brain could be soothed and quieted with sweet mother words.

What has brought me closer to center in the past two days is laughing, the kind that probably makes the neighbors look at each other and shrug, the loud, explosive bark. The ability of humor, of rich silliness to surprise, is one of my treasures. There is no medication better than funny.

This afternoon it was MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000'S holiday offering, a dubbed Mexican exercise in the surreal called SANTA CLAUS. Last night it was my second viewing of THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX by Wes Anderson, a movie I love so much for everything about it from the way Mr. Fox eats his breakfast to his wild, Andersonesque plots of stealth and theft that I, as Pee-Wee Herman suggests, would happily marry it.

I say sincerely that I think I could become a better version of myself if I watched it every day, committing the dialogue to memory and honoring what feels like too much "different" within me with reverence, not rejection. It is joy undiluted, idea and execution, and I am left weak with gratitude that the gifts of Roald Dahl and Wes Anderson, among others, produced this furry love child.

Merry Christmas

I had compiled a list of reasons for having the blues on December 23. For about 10 minutes they seemed to matter, then their smallness betrayed them.

Imperfection, disappointment, discomfort, uncertainty. Please. Is this the best you can do?

It is just another (what we like to call) Thursday on planet Earth, heading into the unknowability of tomorrow. That it is now less than two days until Christmas lets me try and give additional weight to mood shifts of unknown origin.

If possible, I will find a cure for my amnesia by morning. If I don't find one, I'll pretend I did. I am most unhappy when I forget all the things for which I am grateful, all the ways in which my life is abundant.

Growing older is a gift. Maturing past the point of Christmas magic is more than some are allotted. I am not confused. But I drift off course at times, take a wrong turn and find myself waiting behind the bedroom door with my baby sister, tying my bathrobe sash again and listening for the voice that says, "Okay, kids. Come on out." Merry Christmas Mike, Laurie, Barbara and Russ. I have no cause to be blue.

The price of procrastination

Contrary to my overly optimistic plan, putting on my Christmas hat has not added more hours to my days or more oomph to my hours. I am not even close to where I need to be for the deadlines that stir, like waking dragons, on the near horizon.

Waiting for the organic impulse to make cards, maybe a gift or two, rather than bullying my unwilling self into starting them sooner has resulted in (is anyone surprised?) last-minute anxiety. The very thing I worked so intently to avoid.

There is also a non-Christmas project due in another state by the 27th. I very much want to complete it, in the best fashion, and need to allow myself time to noodle.

All of which is to say that I have missed keeping up with my favorite bloggers, missed being able to give myself the option of commenting on their posts. It feels like an accidental exile, not a happy thing.

I miss checking in to see what you've shared and I will return in a more consistent way...soon. Meanwhile, I'm the one with the pencil or paintbrush, those vertical lines between my eyebrows deepening as I try to turn thought into matter.

Slow dancing

This has little to do with Christmas, except, perhaps that the wish centers of our brains or hearts are hyper-activated. Long-ago desires, met or unmet, take form, fit themselves around us. They move in close. In voices sweet or taunting, they remind us of all the ways in which we felt heard, acknowledged, even spoiled. Or they illuminate gaps in the continuum, whatever might have been the piece that pulled our metaphoric room together. Ever the daydream believer, I think there may be a yearning for which it is not too late. Even the possibility is enough to carry me along.

Since I cannot speak for others, I will say that, through my decades, I have displayed a remarkable capacity for getting it wrong. Misreading the signs, succumbing to brain chemistry that is not all it might be, discounting intuition, hastening forth on too little information, doubting that the good which seems too good to be true might, this once, be so. With grace and good fortune, we survive our mistakes. If we don't survive them intact, we still continue as altered, mutant versions of our once-selves.

There is a dance, one slow dance, that never happened. It is 40 years later, will be later still if it ever becomes real. That a brief and ferociously under-fed romance survives to flare occasionally through dreams and conversations, outlasting the Berlin Wall, marriages, reliable journalism, John Lennon and George Harrison, and youth, is, well, my definition of a miracle. An almost sure candidate for extinction, the resilient creature lives on. Who would not love a beast so stubborn.

Picked for the day we shared a bowl of lentil soup and it was playing in the car, what follows is my choice for the dream-sequence dance. It also has Santo and Johnny overtones that resonate for the teenaged part of my brain. Once I play it here, I can return to my normal life, surrender expectations and be happy that I gave a fantasy some air. It could be enough to keep it breathing on its own for another 25 years.

Henry finds a friend

Henry and his mom continue their visitations at Cedars/Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. The were invited to the hospital's recent Christmas party, which included a blessing of the animals. I imagine that all are blessed on a regular basis by those they encounter. Still, this was intentional and festive.

The new photo of Henry, above, gives a better indication of his regal size. He is a big boy. He is also not known to cozy up to unfamiliar dogs. The cats in his home life consider him one of them.

So it was with great pleasure and considerable surprise that his mom sent me photos and the announcement that Henry had found a friend at the party. His new pal is Toby, also a volunteer visitor and, clearly, about the size of Henry's head.

Picture this pair trotting into your room, feel mirth displace any worry you've been carrying. I haven't heard if they will making calls together but the simple thought of it has brightened my day.

What better than a new friend for Christmas?

The season of cardboard

Christmas box rubber stamps from Rubbermoon (bottom of page you land on, then top of the next page.)

Cardboard houses, glittered or sprinkled with bumpy composition snow. Window spaces filled with amber-colored cellophane to simulate the light cast from Christmastime living rooms. These, I believe, are my icons, hold-overs from a 1950s childhood, a few of their swap-meet kin stepping in to replace the lost originals. They've held up surprisingly well. I do love cardboard.

The Christmas of my child heart always begins at the dime store, walking the aisles of creaking wooden floors, seeing myself small enough to call these paper neighborhoods home. In the way that snow globes beckon in others' Christmas reveries, one of these palm-sized, chimneyed cottages set on a branch, next to a bubble light, is a vignette that takes me home.

Image, thanks to oodlesandoodles.typepad.com.