breathing in

breathing in
there is a neutral colored prius
cruising ahead in the middle lane

it/he/she is driving slower than the traffic in the lanes to either side
and their blinker is on indicating an impending right turn.

you slow,
driving behind them
waiting for them to make the move into the adjacent lane
as the distance between you is lessening

and it seems like you are moving in slow motion
even though you know you could not run this fast
or ride a bike this fast
but if feels like you are moving slower and slower
as the cars on both sides of you are PASSING you
and you feel the blood begin to pound in your head and
you scream silently in your head --TURN ( curse word removed )!!!

the prius maintains a steady speed as the distance between your two cars gets shorter and shorter
and their blinker is still blinking at you
taunting you

until you pass them
breathing out.

Eat the cookie to stem the tide of your grief.

Eat the cookie to stem the tide of your grief.
Even the best wound plans
tangle and knot.
Take the time to meditate on them.
Which way would you go if you were a twisted cipher?
What would convince you to lay down your coil and unbend?

Eat the cookie and contemplate.
The chaos will always be there laughing at your attempt to lay the lines down in an orderly arrangement.
Just eat the damn cookie.

Everybody helping.

Bunny: finish number nine

Finish #9 in February. Almost slipped through the cracks. Pattern by Susan b Anderson. Yarn is bluemoonfiberarts left over sock.

Sandy Survivors

Magnolia 

Last year this magnolia bush did not bear leaves nor flowers. in fact many of the bushes and trees and flowers that we were used to seeing return year after year (are those annuals? or perennials? I always get them mixed up) did not return. I lost my lovely upward climbing blue clematis, which I have since learned is a member of the butter cup family, and the fragrant viburnium. The lilacs lost their lustre and the thyme  lavender in the herb patch completely withered and died.
We did not replant or even dig up the lost plants. We ignored them and figured we would get to it when we got to it. Other things took precedence.
     We were pleasantly surprised to see this lone magnolia flower at the base of the once and former tree. It is a cold weather bloomer and there are no others, but it means that there is still juice in the stems and maybe, with some patience and benign neglect, it will return again next year with some more lovely perfumed blossoms. Have you ever smelled a magnolia blossom?
     A couple of weeks ago Mike and I picked up Else and went to the Peconic River Herb Farm in Riverhead and I decided to buy another clematis to plant in the garden. We never took down the trellis and it stood naked and forlorn last season. But when I looked there today don't you know that there is a clematis vine beginning again. So I will look for another place to grow my new vines this summer. And wait for the three summers that it usually takes for a clematis to bloom. They will not be rushed. I wonder if the old-new one will bloom this year or if it will be slow to reacclimatize.
    We also bought some new lavender and some seeds for kale and nasturtium. Looking forward to some colorful salads.
    And sunflower seeds. Mike loves sunflowers.
    Hurricane Sandy took its toll on us in many ways. It was not the worst thing that has ever happened to us. But we are still feeling the effects and dealing with the financial aftermath. Like many many others we found that our insurance was a myth.
    But today, I will not dwell on the losses of yesteryears, but plant some hopeful seeds and celebrate renewal.

Biggie cowl in alpaca finish 8

Finish # 8 in 4/2014

Finish number seven-Biggie Cowl

Happy birthday:)http://www.ravelry.com/projects/marthab/biggie-cowls

Finish five and six Mythical creatures

Keeping track of every little finish. These are both things that I started in the past and finalized this week.

Finished a top

This one has been a BoB for a long time. I finally mustered the wherewithal to pull it together. I will do a pieced backing and it will be a nice twin bed cover. I won't call it a finish until it is quilted.

Paper
I am starting a new project and a journal is required. We live in a world where this conjures a maze of choices. Does one use a looseleaf binder? A scrap book with lovely ten inch square pages ? Watercolor paper? Moleskin? Lines or unlined? Small or big? Digital?(God forbid- but anything in a pinch)(auto correct can be a plus)(although it did just change the word auto to soot).
To the uninitiated this question may smack of self absorption. It may be thought that the author must have bigger problems. Surely there are more important subjects upon which to ponder. And surely right now there are, but I am choosing to indulge in this most enjoyable persuit.
For those of us who do know the benefits of hot pressed v. Cold pressed, flax v. linen, hand made or mass produced, it is serous business. For we know that paper can indeed inform the process.
Legal pad or drawing pad, sturdy enough for water media and collage? or sufficiently elegant for the delicate scratch of a glass pen dipped in brown ink? These are the questions that are occupying my mind this morning as I am hurtling through space on a Saturday morning in car number #### on the Long Island Railroad.
As I write this I am reminded that we are indeed blessed with multitudinous abundance. Jane Austen wrote her manuscripts first from left to right and then from top to bottom in between the horizontal letters to preserve precious paper. Solzhenitsyn memorized thousands of pages in his head while in a Russian prison camp before being able to commit them to paper upon his release.
And so it is with gratitude and with those writers and others in my thoughts that I embark on this most luxuriant and yet not frivolous journey- to find the next blank book in which to collect my thoughts and perhaps to capture some poetry on the fly.
Or maybe I can just look on my desk ( those who know me are snickering by now ) and find that it is already there.

Filene's

Suzy sent a hundred dollars
with which to buy the items on the list they sent from the school where I was sent to escape her sister.

To be plucked from the ever increasing velocity of her maelstrom to land on the solid granite of Vermont's most ancient guardian mountains was the gift of salvation, a chance for sanity.
Sanctuary.
Until it wasn't.

Betsy, the youngest of the three sisters only six years my senior and also my other aunt,
who lived in Boston in 1969 with her lover Tim - their apartment
so close to Fenway that they could hear the fans cheering wildly
if the wind was blowing in the right direction-
took me to Filene's Basement where we swept through the bins of
seconds and thirds and bought me my first ever set of sheets.
They were avocado green and floral and polyester. My father and his wife had the same pattern on the bed in their guest room. I reckon they are there still.
We bought a lime green cardboard footlocker to carry my new belongings- and I kept that footlocker through that school and the next and through college. For many years to follow everything that I owned could be stuffed into that ugly green thing.

I never did have all of the things in that long list. I also never had the lace up boots that I coveted or warm mittens-until the ones that Rebecca knit for me (and thus instilling in me a life long love of knitting ) - or new underwear from elitist department stores, like the other denizens of the boarding schools where I more or less attended, but I was damn proud of that set of new sheets, and the purple towels that I would hang on my cement dorm room walls just to have a splash of color.
And I will always recall fondly that day in Filene's Basement when Betsy and I pawed through the bins in Filene's basement gleefully spending Suzy's hundred dollars.

stairway at eustis st.

Recurring dream:

I am with Mike

or someone else

or alone 
and I need to get back to my home

I am aware that it has changed that it is unrecognizable and 
I want to find it anyway in spite of being lost and

unable to convince anyone else of the need that I have to find this place 

And even when I find it I am not there.

Talking to myself, collage and mary doll finish 3 and 4

Happy February to all

     I wish you all a month of self love and positive inner monologue. May all of the things you think and say to yourself in your thoughts and actions, your voice and the whispers in your head, be loving and gentle and kind.

     That is what I would chose as a superpower. Kindness, so that every one I meet could soften into a state of self acceptance and self love. 

Nineteen. I am a rider of Bikes.

     I wish you all, powerful gentleness and gentle power. And I invite you to say one good thing about yourself, to yourself, each day. I did this during the month of January and it has been a continuous source of connection, inspiration and an anchor of positivity during the long days of winter. Whether you write each day in a journal, or do as I did and write them in the notes app on my phone, does not matter as long as you do it. 

     It is a powerfully simple and effective idea. This is not an idea that originated with me. I read it somewhere that someone did this each day on a piece of paper and put it in a jar and as it accumulated it became a wonderful resource and inspiration and at the end of a year they had a powerful pile of affirmations.  

     I took the suggestion and I am in turn offering it to you. It does not have to be a brilliant thought, just something nice that you might say to a friend to support them. 

One day I wrote that I had a clementine for a snack instead of a snickers bar.

(Eight. Had an orange with lunch today. Making good choices.)

 As simple as that and yet it stayed with me for a month and it was a gift to myself that did not cost a thing, one I could share with a friend at work and now I am sharing with you. 

     Other times it has connected me to things that I had completely forgotten about and I am grateful to remember. 

(Nine. I show up. David Reed  gave me a worry stone when I was 13. Since then I have collected stones from here and there. You will find them in my house, the big and the small. Some from India, from Captain Nair, a co worker t the airline where I worked.  Some from Lenox Massachusetts,  Windsor Mountain School-the stone wall in the driveway. Some from the Housatonic River when Mike and I went hiking on the Appalachian trail. Some I have kept from way back when, maybe even the one from David Reed (who lived on Mass Ave in Cambridge. I passed his house when we were there a few months ago-or at least where it had been.  When I see the stones in our house I recall the context of he time when I received them and it reminds me of who I have been and who I am.)

Some times they are a response to something I have been told and I need to correct it so that I can correct my course and steer where I want to go.

Twenty Five. persevere. I finish things. This is Number 4 for 2014.

Twenty Three. Organized. Miss Dempsey, My eighth grade home room teacher was a fossil who wrung her hands and scratched them constantly. Washed them all day long. Spinster virgin Irish catholic teacher obsessive compulsive. She taught me how to parse sentences on the blackboard, teaching me the organization of language. I have always remembered that was this first thing I liked doing in school.

Today on this first day of February, a month wherein Hallmark and the advertising industry has declared us all lovers and chocolate eaters, I am declaring it a personal month of love for ourselves. We do not need a lover to be beloved. We love ourselves.

(Twenty two. I was born on Sunday, November 4, 1956. I am a cloud in the morning sky overlooking the Gulf of Mexico at 7 am. I am a wispy cloud spirit artist. I am a Healer ) 

Twenty Eight. Today, as I make french onion soup for later, and care for Mike during his recovery and prepare the dough for the non pecan pecan rolls my daughter has requested, I am a nurturer.  

What will you tell yourself today?

surgery for Mike

These are the tendons that Dr. Fealy will repair for Mike. In November he had the Supraspinatus reattached on the left side. This time he tore both the supraspinatus and the Infraspinatus. On the right side. The surgery requries an anchor to be inserted into the bone and then the tendon is pulled up and stitched onto the anchor. Last time they also had to grind the bone down which causes extra pain during recovery. We won't know until he gets out of surgery if he will have had the bone shaved again. Currently he is able to use the left arm a limited amount. It is getting better each day. I know he will be happy to have this over and done with.

Finish #2 2014 dragon

The goal is to finish 14 things.
Pattern By Susan B Anderson

First Finish of 2014

12/24/2013

you are beautiful

all of your flawed furious unstoppable selves

all of your self doubt and self loathing and fears are groundless

you are floating in a medium of unspeakable beauty

immeasurable

unfathomable consciousness

our connections to each other 

are no less than the gossamer threads of angels light

allowing us to be

and be loved 

as we are

we are loved and love

who we are now

all of our pain and sorrow

all of our aloneness and fear of failure

and all of our fury 

relieved

shed like a sad skin

peeled like an orange

to reveal our inner beauty

and all the while 

as you are revealing your inner layer 

you are leaving behind the scent of your beauty 

your fragrant inner life force

instantly recognizable

and you are home 

right where you are 

you belong

wherever you are

this is what makes us beautiful

this is it

not the outer shell that fools worship and discard

but the soft and shaky real you

you are all beautiful

call to action

This year the months have been articulated in degrees of loss. There is no sweet way to say it. No words to use like sticky syrup to make it more palatable. And yet it is how I deal - With words on a page, as though the motions of laying it out in verse or paragraph or simple line will give me enough altitude to see the big picture. And for a moment or a slice of time it does and we cope and we reenter the daily dance with life.

And then we lose another one. 

It seems as though 

the wind shifts or stops

and there is another one, another child put down with a needle or pharmaceuticals or that seductive liar alcohol,

and we lose. 

We cannot win by not engaging

there is only one end to the story.

it is a war we are losing 

or have lost 

this one with drugs

the war that no one wants to look at because we are giving our children away feeding them to this monstrous maw of addiction and we don’t even begin to know how to deal with it because we refuse to look. 

I am looking at you monster. I am looking. 

Here is the thing:

people need to be loved and included and embraced and to belong.

they need to be fed and held and nurtured and told they are enough and treated with respect and 

supported when they cannot stand and told stories 

and offered hope and beauty.

This is what we are here for and we are failing as a culture, we are failing. We are failing to provide the spaces for this to happen in our communities. Once our children are out of school where do they go? 

There is a vacuum happening here and that is where we lose each other. 

I am not blaming parents. I am a parent and have many and multitudinous flaws.

I am also an addict who has lived drug and alcohol free for nearly thirty years. I have first and second and third hand experience with what we call addiction. We nearly lost one beloved daughter from drugs and watched helplessly as other children dabble with mind fucking chemicals. But not silently. Nope. Not gonna happen. Not going to be silent. Not gonna play nice.

I am blaming a culture of exclusion and competition which pits us against each other and a culture in which numbness is necessary in order to ‘function’. where anesthesia is a daily ritual whereby we create enough numbness so that the life we lead becomes endurable; a life wherein we are continuously unwittingly subjugated to corporate greed and indifference and we would rather become unconscious than muster the will to dis engage. we tell each other to “find our bliss” but make it damn near impossible to do so.

I am going to tell you that you do not need beer to be manly, That you do not need champagne to be sexy. You do not need valium to board a plane. You do not need diet pills to make you thin and pills to make you more awake to study. You do not need ecstasy for good sex, and you do not need heroin for anything at all. Please understand: I am not talking about drugs used for medicine. I am talking about casual and "recreational" use of drugs and drugs that hurt people every single time stealing our lives even as we breathe and blink. 

You do not have to clink glasses to celebrate anything. If you feel a need to numb yourselves to celebrate then what are you really celebrating? numbness? 

Use you brain and another way to celebrate. Try it out and you will find that there are so many other ways. For many people, quiet people, introverts and ambiverts and even extroverts, awareness and peace are the best ways to celebrate. Write a story, a poem, a line of code, a recipe, a song, a sermon, a list, a new name for a color or constellation. Take a walk, take a class, tell a friend, volunteer on a help line, join habitat for humanity, go to church or a meeting in a church basement- 
Feel it all, that is the best way to celebrate your humanity- in full awareness of your marvelous faculties. 

I am aware that this is the road less chosen. I am well aware. I am not talking about abstinence, for that is denial. I am talking about living your life in full sail. Fully sentient. 

After the last week I will not be silent. Our community lost two more boys to chemical murder in the last week alone. Two more decimated families. Two more lives brutally denied. siblings who will walk around like amputees and parents who will forever each day waken to the loss of a child: inconsolable. 

And other human beings profit from this. There is no doubt about it. Alcohol and drugs are big business. As big as banks and governments and guns. Think about it. This is the monster in our midst. The dealer on the corner is an expendable zombie foot soldier. The generals live in mansions and are driven around in armored cars.  

Think about it .. take a step back and think about it. It will be one of us, someday, who has an answer. Maybe we already have an answer and just need each one to take one action. 

I believe that the answers lie in building community. That safe community is what is saving people right now in meetings and rehabs and jails and parlors all over the world. It works and it can work for anyone who wants it. There are meetings for every kind of addict from food to sex to pot to heroin - and meetings for the people who love them. There are meetings for anyone who would avail themselves and the words and love and hope and stories that you hear there are what bind us to each other. and that is building community. 

This is my action. My call to arms. Do one thing today to be a sentient lucid responsible human being, and do it without your drug of choice. 

Rest in peace Rory. Rest in peace Michael. Rest in peace Jesse.

November

This month Mike had rotator cuff surgery and Luke had a virus. Mike and and Luke are enjoying a rest together and they recuperate.

watercolor musings or footnotes