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.

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?

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.

blue streak

    In seventh grade the girls had gym class in the gym with the boys. We played dodge ball and did some minor calisthenics- toe touching jumping jacks and some running. It was before title IX and females were were not invited into competitive sports. 

      In 1968 girls were still required to wear dresses to school and in order to preserve our modesty and insure that we we not too attractive, we wore gym shorts under our dresses. Mind you, the idea of gym shorts conjures up a whole different image in ones current frame of reference. In 7th grade they looked like bloomers.

from noble savage vintage dot com

They were constructed of a heavy cobalt blue twill and had elastic at the waist and elastic where they ended somewhere above the knees. Yes you read that right. And we had to wear them under our dresses, so our panties would not show when we lined up in the yard and touched our toes on Tuesdays. Gym Day.

     I'll give you a moment to let that sink in.

     There were also days when we were encouraged to run laps around the school yard. This would not have been all bad but we were in South Phili. Not exactly bucolic paradise. Basically it was the equivalent of being told to go play in traffic. In any case, this is when I began to find my legs and earned the nickname "the blue streak", for the short of time that I participated in this urban prehistoric version of gym.

    Seventh grade ended, and I took up smoking having been introduced to Tarrytons by Diana Gable during sometime earlier during our visit to her family home in Virginia. We stole cigs from her mom's pack and puffed away in the dark by the near by lake, feeling oh so sophisticated. Thus began a lifelong addiction: the seeds of chronic lung problems landing in the fertile soil of my young respiratory system. 

    I have long since given up smoking and over the years practiced running occasionally, usually with an inhaler involved, and as a way to try to stay in shape as I aged. (Round is a shape.) I still like to visit the tread mill when the bones allow.  Sometimes, as I walk or run on the treadmill, the noise of the gym fades into the background a and there is a faint sound of footsteps on pavement and I remember the girl who donned her blue bloomers on Tuesdays and ran for a while, at the front of the pack, trying to find her way home.