QUESTIONS

I'm trying to get used to this changing energy of mine. I used to know myself pretty well...I could anticipate how much gusto I'd need for various areas of my life and not think twice about saying "Sure...I can help out with that" or "you can count on me" and I was that person who prided herself on walking her talk or doing exactly what I said I would do. I was dependable, responsible and if I said I'd be there, I'd slog through whatever the mud of the day appeared, to follow through on my word. Lately, I'm somewhat of a stranger to myself and I don't always like this older me. I'm trying to be gentle with myself. I've made one commitment that I feel compelled to follow through on. That's my promise to my sister that I will come down to Salem every other weekend to take care of my Mum. At the time she was discharged from the rehab center after her fall in September, I was unemployed. I decided that making this plan to give Sue respite time and hang out with Mom was the most important use of my time and unemployment was a great blessing, allowing me the luxury of scheduling my life around those biweekly visits. Given my sister is doing a huge amount of caring for her, I look at my offer of Friday afternoon to Monday morning twice a month as a piece of cake. Yet each time I go, I am utterly drained and it takes me a couple of days to get back to myself when I return home. Monday morning when I returned to Maine, I walked outside to put my bags in the car at 8:30 am and I sucked the fresh air in for all I was worth. It dawned on me that I hadn't stepped foot out of the house since I had arrived on Friday afternoon. I...who spends at least 2 hours a day outdoors in the woods romping with Sadie and on many days even more...hadn't set one foot outside. When I'm in Salem, I'm on...and it is easy for me to watch myself get antsy and then tell myself to relax...I can do all that when I get home. Consequently...by the time I get home, I'm cranky and irritable and feeling put upon. I take my books and writing and even some felting down with me for diversion and something to do that has some quantum of solace for me to feel like I care for myself as I care for my Mom. But how do I explain the feeling I have of being drained? By Wednesday, I was ready to do some skiing and I showed up to the Locals Challenge to make points for my team...Rooster's Chicks...but it was another windy Wednesday and the race was cancelled.

I notice my energy level is more like Mother Nature's...it comes and goes...sometimes it's behind the fog on the river...sometimes it is hiding in my long johns and once I put them on, I feel perked up and raring to go. First there is a mountain... then there is no mountain...then there is...caterpillar sheds its skin to find a butterfly within! 70's songs bubble up from the sulpher mud of my heart and sometimes the words are wise. Sometimes they are not so inspiring. Nature doesn't always come through to support human plans either, so I don't know why I expect otherwise of myself. My intensions are good but I don't always seem to have the carry through. I find my words are more often things I trip over when silence might be the wiser song to sing. Today, I'm trying to make piece with my emotional neediness. I burst into tears because I've held them back for some time. I try to make myself available as a volunteer at Maine Handicapped and discover that I am the needy, handicapped person I need to help on the slopes. I am so full of unshed tears that as soon as I enter the scene at MHS, I'm raining...dripping...verclempt...unable to be of assistance to anyone. And I leave having broken my own heart. I just don't have the extra to give...even though to my rational mind, this winter seemed like the perfect time to be a volunteer, I find in truth that I am overburdened just being there for my family. I have to laugh thinking of a conversation I had with Mom before she came home from rehab. She asked me if I missed taking care of people...I've done it all my life. I chuckled and told her no...I'm done taking care of everyone. Her response was...Good...at least you know that. And so much for knowing that because I'm taking care of her anyway. My theory that taking care of people can be an addiction is biting me in the butt. It reminds me of wrestling with the thoughts of being addicted to a person in a marriage. A cool, indifferent attitude is not going to result in warmth and closeness in any relationship. In fact, seeing any relationship as an addiction is dishonoring that relationship. Why devalue love by calling it addiction? Why not see love as a higher truth? I take care of people because I care for them...often they are family. I love and therefore, I care...I care and therefore I take care of. It is true that caring too much can burn you out. But I'd rather be burned by caring too much then be so cool that I am indifferent to the needs of the people I call family.

I'm not going to wallow in guilt for not being able to come through for the handicapped skiers. And I'm not going to assume that just because I've worked at something all my life...it will keep working for me. I seem to be as unpredictable as Mother Nature so the best I can do is to dump all my assumptions about myself and allow myself to flow like the river...sometimes hidden in ground fog...sometimes iced over...sometimes ripping and overspilling the banks with unleashed springmelt. Is a river addicted to flow? I suppose you could say that. But why not say it is the river's nature to flow? Then flow seems like a noble destiny... rather than minimizing that noble destiny by assuming the river is addicted to flowing. Can you think outside the box simply by using different words? Am I trapped by the language I use? Freed by the silence? Mmmmm? Sssshhhhh. Maybe this explains my obsession with removing labels and reframing what I see. Now to call work...play.

I LOVE HOW I FELT

This photo is the view from my kitchen window in January. I never cease to be amazed at the beauty before me and I count my blessings...in fact it seems like an absolute miracle that I should wake up every day and be able to say wow...this is my home. It's a soft fuzzy feeling. As a lifelong keeper of journals, I have noticed that my journaling habit really jelled when I started using writing to understand the complexity of my feelings. Nothing is ever cut and dried for me. There is always feeling and reaction to feeling...superficial feeling and deeper, truer feeling. There's what I tell myself to keep on keeping on when the juice is gone and then there is the underneath yearning for to find the juice itself. Writing is my friend that way. It helps me to feel my way along...to move through the dark and to do so in a way that is honest for me. I've made all kinds of discoveries about myself through writing and I am grateful...yet writing only goes so far. Words take you places and words can be put together to form endless images to surprise and delight. The words themselves have color and feeling and the language has a rhythm and a music. But there are places where words are ineffective. In fact, they can actually cause more misunderstanding than they solve...especially between folks who have a very long history together...like family or a long term spouse. There comes those places in life when the words touch off a sarcastic "blah blah blah" going off in my brain. And focusing on the words that someone says only drives me farther away from the essence of their intent. Communication is a downright miracle but I want to get to the bottom of it all. So writing starts to seem like my old favorite jeans when life wants me to try out something new. I have drawn this view from the window...and painted it in acrylics and watercolors...made pictures with crayons and craypas. Once I even tried to render it in stained glass but that was a bit of a disaster... creating many slivers of broken glass and a feeling of embarrassment because I had tried to do something so complex with a medium that I had no experience with. And so I wrote out how I felt. And I laughed it all off. I am pretty funny.

I was given a gift this Christmas. My good friend April gave me a felting kit. Ever hear of it? I hadn't...though I had seen lots of wonderful creations at the Fryeburg Fair made from fibers, I was not informed about felting. My grandmother made lace. She tatted. And she made our clothes...navy coats with anchor buttons, Peter pan collared dresses that we wore with black Mary Janes...and my grandmother was Love embodied. I tried sewing and gave up because my sister was so much better at it. I tried knitting and after what seems 100 years, I've finally mastered the knit stitch but never learned to pearl. I keep trying because there is some need inside me to express myself in fabric. I want to be moved in the very fabric of my being. I want to live the warp and the weft because I feel the duality of things even in the essential oneness of their manifestation. I feel it when I go to Salem now to care for my Mom. I come back like a shuttle thru a loom and then I'm home again just a little changed but still the same...and then I take myself from home and under I go again, shuttling back and forth adding rows and creating the fabric of my life as I enter the threshold of the Elders. So I got this kit. Felting is applying colored fibers with a special needle to a background of felt or distressed wool. The nature of the wool fiber makes it possible to make one out of many. You can apply small amounts of a color and work it into the fabric to create pictures, birds, landscapes or even small sculptures. I worked on the Chickadee square that April gave me. Oh...it's so satisfying. It's a wordless process...banging, needling, poking, prodding and you can do it by the fire...and while your talking as long as you are careful not to stab yourself. I enjoyed the process so much that a trip to Wrinkle In Thyme Farm became essential. We went up to Sumner on Sunday and suddenly a whole world of potential opened up.

I saw felted squares and flowers and wall hangings and even landscapes. There was a whole pallette of colors to choose and a real felting needle that is definitely the right tool for the job. I thought about my writing. All my soft feeling written on the pages and hidden away. I thought of Sadie and how she turns an open stomach to us when she surrenders to love, making all her tender places open and vulnerable. I tend to cover mine up and pretend bravado so as not to seem overly sensitive or soft. I learned to do that to protect myself in my family of 5 girls. Exposing my softness...the hardest thing about marriage is to become truly vulnerable and open and yet it is that which is most satisfying because that softness, that tenderness...those places that hurt and that dance quietly in the trees where no one can see...those are the places that need to define a relationship if it is to have the strength to survive the aging process. So now I can bang and needle and poke and prod the fibers of the sheep we had the honor of eating thanks to our friends who raised her...and I can mix colors and define spaces and essentially draw my landscape in wool...a warm, soft, project that slowly becomes a fabric that captures the beauty of the vision beyond my window. I'm excited. Suddenly my day begins with more energy. I feel like a teenager in love...right down to the fabric of my being. And the days below zero pass happily while I imagine the potential ways to create in this medium. Thanks April...you have brought so much warmth to my January.

SO MUCH FOR A DOT

Woke up this morning with an image from my dreamscape...I saw a white rotary telephone and in the middle of it there was a red circle...a button to push for emergencies. It all had something to do with my mother and in that sweet place of right brain thinking, I began to let other images color the landscape. A conversation I had with my sister over her MRI yesterday where she said..."There was a surgeon but all I remember about her was her red blouse and her ruby necklace" Then my friend Jill approaching me at the Locals Challenge cocktail party to tell me about a large male cardinal she spotted in her dwarf cherry tree yesterday. I thought of the Japanese flag...a white field with a red circle on it...and our family ritual meal for celebration being sushi. That brought back a conversation in the chairlift with a young man who shared a secret...that in the kitchen at a local sushi place, the kitchen staff likes to cook steaks and hamburgers for themselves one night a week. Then I remembered a poem I wrote about a red spot on a field of snow and the portending...a sad moment for a small animal whose vital fluids left the mark but a triumphant moment for a hungry raptor who seized the opportunity and the moment to feed his strength and to take his meal. That brought back a story from another friend about her dog going missing for less than 3 minutes and coming back covered in fresh red blood. My little brain is perking with the snippetts of images and conversations, weaving some kind of meaning into what might otherwise seem like unrelated subjects. Suddenly, there is a focal point for all kinds of associations.

The fresh snow is falling fast and furiously. It is a quiet blanket that lays a mantle of silence over everything. And in the extra white extra silent atmosphere, an angry redness beats against my right ear as I busy myself doing the things that I've told myself are more important than creative expression...like cleaning, fireplace sweeping, food preparation...anything but creative play when creative play is all I seem to want. There's a red dot on that white field too. And any white field of my life has an army of naysayers hanging around and telling me to wait...wait till the house is clean, wait till the food is cooked..ssshhhh...don't speak up. Oh no...don't mess up. I can hear my 2nd grade teacher with her pointy red polished fingernails pointing straight at me and her witches voice yelling DEAD DUCK. How did Tidiness become the Queen of my life? How did that iron clasp of shuffling around incedental nothings become the important center of my life? No wonder there is a feeling of emptiness in my heart . I've become so adept at avoiding the error of my ways...ie expressing myself honestly and creatively...that I have warded off all the love and pleasure and juice to focus my energies on sweeping ashes, making beds, doing laundry and creating food. In my effort to follow directions for the tyrant witch of my second grade art class, I have censored my deepest uniqueness...put my hands over my ears and pretended to not hear the urges of story coming across the radio waves. And whats really pathetic about all this is that I've been wrestling with it all my life. The effort becomes boring and ineffective. My poor little inner bird chick wants satisfaction. She is tired of going through the motions of freeing up the inner artist and then not giving her a time and place to play.

Sooo...the white blanket of snow...a long awaited storm day and an openness to receiving some help from the universe...I ran outside with my spray paint and made a big red splotch on the white snow to see if there was something there...something trying to speak to me...something I try to close my ears to...and what did I get? I got the open white moment and the opportunity to make my mark. My heart beats a red blotch...a period...a dot...a life lost for a life gained. A red splat is vital...a new beginning...a sun rising...new life in the midst of cold white nothingness...a trail. I placed that red splat at the base of the family totem pole and now it is a prayer...a prayer for the healing power of red to step forward from the backround of white...to take the risk and put itself out there...to say yes to life and to love and Fuck you, to Miss Pelletier. That red spot is a calling...it is a new beginning. So Lisa...take that red dot and turn it into a line. Go ahead. I dare you.

ICE IMAGES

Finally. The temperature actually seems to be in harmony with the month. It is January. Cold as a witches'...slow as mollasses. January is supposed to be cold.  How else to move on and flow into 2012 than to give 2011 the cold shoulder? Yup. It's cold...about 15 and windy. Finally got some free skiing in since the vacation people have all gone home and it's a good thing because the races start tomorrow. I prefer skiing in the cold. It's not that I like to go that fast but I like the sound of the very cold snow...the squeeking reminds me of the sand at Singing Beach. My skis sing. My cheeks pink. My nose hairs crackle. It's finally winter.  And the most inspired artist ever is at work delighting me with surprises of light and crystal shine. That old wild mother is using her tools...wind, cold and contrast...to whip up the most amazing landscapes on windowpanes... and in the woods where ever water travels... and where moments drip into flow and disappear forever from awareness, she has captured those moments in icicles of diamond shine catching light.. and twinkling a pale pink. Ice formations in the woods are extraordinary. The are such a surprise to encounter and when you take the time to look at them, to appreciate the uniqueness of the varied formations, it encourages a mental reflection. How do I freeze time? I think about taking photos. They certainly freeze the moment and reflect light. But so too does my writing...I can think of my journals in the closet as caverns of colored icicles...2010 and all the thoughts I recorded as Stevo moved through his heart surgery and recovery period...notes on my garden and my bird sightings. Poems I've written that consolidate images and metaphor into a form that seems penetrated by light. Surely all those words have come from gusts of wind from the changing climate of my heart. Why resist the cold? It only makes your shoulders ache. I don't think bears get grouchy when they are going into their stupor for winter. It's when they wake up that the grumpiness of hunger moves them out of their slumber. I'm experiencing a first this winter. For the first time, I am unemployed. In a great gift of kindness from the universe, I am not working for money...but I am working for love.

With Mom's change in status after her fall and my sister's recent diagnosis, I find my heart wandering down to Mass. on a regular basis. I'm  committed to every other weekend and I feel blessed to have the freedom to schedule in respite time for my other sister.  But the best silver lining of the whole situation is that I get to ski and write and do my own thing the rest of the time. I can even hibernate if the spirit moves me. And..I can volunteer at Maine Adaptive. Such is the great gift given within the wrappings of aging and challenge. As I concentrate on the exhileration of my first winter's freedom, I am given strength. It's just what I need for my trips to Massachusetts every other week.

As I get on board Winter with Wild Mother Nature, we play with frozen crystals of passing moments and reflecting light and it is much easier to feel the deep gratitude for blessings than the heaviness of heart regarding the situation...and with that gratitude comes a buoyancy of spirit that results from the support of the universe. Janus is a two-headed God image. He is January's namesake and he uses one head to look behind at the ways he did things before while the other head looks forward to the unwritten page of the future and the possibility of becoming something more. Happy page 2012...it could be a whole new story.