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Road Journal I — XX
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BEING THE ADVENTURES OF A SEMI-NOMADIC POLYMATH ARTIST, MUSICIAN & WRITER
Essays, poems, and collected ruminations are being collated and compiled in a parallel journal at Dragoncave. I never know what I'm going to write about next, so if you desire to keep up with what I'm writing and thinking about, you really need to read both journals. Some overlap may occur without prior warning; sorry about that.
804. 3 May 2008, Beloit, WI I’ve been sleeping almost exactly eight hours this past week, not setting an alarm, just getting up when I wake up. This morning I knew I’d slept the full time, and for once I didn’t jerk awake with my mind already racing. I’m still sore this morning, but it’s that kind of sore that lets you know you’ve had a good workout. I recorded two new piano improvs last night. It took awhile to get set up, but I did what I wanted to do. One of the new pieces is self-confident, and already on the podcast: midnight wing. The other piece was a bit tentative, but there’s something really good about it; I might try to record that one again. I have finally set up the mics and mixer by the piano, where I will leave them set up at least for a day or two, while I record as much as I can before Pam arrives. It is quieter late at night, but I don’t mind the right kind of ambient noise, if it’s birds or rain instead of traffic sounds. It does look like it’s going to rain today. I think I’ll give myself a workout and haul boxes of books. Appropriate supportive footwear required. • I’m discovering a kind of pattern: One day working at full capacity, alternating with days working at around half-capacity. Yesterday I did get a lot done, and I do feel good about it. Today, not as much, and I’m getting a later start, and doing less. Still, humping those heavy boxes of books around has been giving me an aerobic workout that sets the heart going in healthy ways. I’m also realizing that I do need caffeine to get me through, in some form or another. That’s all fine, it’s what it is, for now, and maybe not forever. • I went over and built a couple more bookshelves, then I took over and unloaded a dozen books of books. Feels like barely a dent, but it’s a lot. I also did some grocery shopping, then came home and loaded up the car again with more boxes while I cooked myself a steak for dinner. Steak and chips, that was dinner. I didn’t feel like cooking, but I really needed to eat something. Sore and tired describes my day, again, but also again, I feel pretty good, like I actually got something done, and also like I survived the day. It’s one day at a time, that’s all we can do. 803. 2 May 2008, Beloit, WI It’s night, I’m sore as hell after working all day, but I’m feeling really good emotionally, and I intend to bliss out with some chocolate ice cream now. The past two days, R. has helped me box up and pack and load the car to move Stuff over to the new house. Then I usually drive over and unload it all myself, and put it away. I’ve moved some storage units into the basement, and I’ve stocked them with a lot of the nice glass and kitchen stuff from Mom that I’m keeping. I’ve decided to keep the main floor of the house minimalist and uncluttered, and store the rest of the clutter in the basement, out of sight. That means I’ll be putting books down there on shelves, making that back area into a rec room, and adding shelving units along the walls. I have fantasized about making the rec room area into a secondary library, but also putting the spare TV down there, and maybe getting a dart board to put on the wall. There’s time to plan for that, once I’ve moved. Unloading the carloads of Stuff is not nearly as hard for me as loading up, so I’m mostly able to do that myself. Over at the new house I feel energized; at the old house, I feel depleted and drained and paralyzed and overwhelmed. Every time we take down a painting, or move something, or pack something up, there’s an emotional load on top of everything else; couple that with the ongoing depression and tiredness brought on by grief, and it can be really hard some days. It can get completely overwhelming, and exhausting. It helps me a lot to have someone here to help me: one other person around keeps me on track, keeps me focused. I guess you can say, though, that if I’m this sore and tired, it must have been a good day. I guess it was. I started out angry today, feeling really angry at the pressure on me to get this all done; but I turned it to work. I feel awake and strong enough to do more, but I do ache. I’ll see what I can manage, while the focus and the energy last. I feel strong; when was the last time I felt this way? Seems like forever. The leaves on the trees are beginning to fill out. I bought on a whim today a couple of new rosebushes to plant, very cheap. There was rain this morning, but then the sun came out and it was a dramatic sky all afternoon and evening, but no more rain. We loaded books into boxes today. I cleared off several shelves, and moved them over to the new house. I’ll move as many of the boxes of books tomorrow as I can, and probably another shelf or two. I also bought and built new bookshelves. I spent time moving Stuff around in the new house, too. It’s easy when I’m there; it’s just harder at the old house, because of all that’s left to do, and the emotional drag. I took my shirt off and got fairly sweaty doing the work. I think I might take another shower before bed tonight. When I was building the shelves, I was thinking about a haiku I wrote probably ten years ago, doing some similar tasks on a hot, sweaty day in summer: sweating profusely in midsummer record heat— I make new bookshelves! I’m surprised that feel very good tonight, like I’ve actually accomplished something. The benefit of sore muscles is that it’s evidence of accomplishment. Feeling like this is so unusual, these days, it’s a little surprising. Am I maybe over the emotional crest of that hill, and coasting down the other side? It’s too soon to tell. I have no expectations that I’ll still feel good tomorrow; so for tonight I intend to enjoy it, and not worry about it. I’m in a mood to listen to or make music, or write. While my energy lasts, I’ll try to do something creative with the rest of the evening.  802. 30 April 2008, Beloit, WI If you don’t want to hear this, don’t read it. Tired of this rollercoaster. Tired of feeling like every time I open up to the possibility of actually enjoying life, I get slammed down again. It does feel very personal, and I don’t care if that makes me paranoid. I feel abandoned again and again by people who say they’re going to help me, then, often for very understandable reasons, don’t. Who do you trust? I’m feeling very much like this is all on me, and that I can’t deal with it, because I’m losing my ability to trust. I’ve tried to believe that the world is trying t support me and help me out—and it feels like every time I open up my heart to that possibility, I get a spear through it. That happened again last night: a lesser version of the spear through the heart that was the basement flooding again, but nonetheless I feel like shit anyway. I’m really tired of feeling this way. I just want to crawl into a hole and not come out again till it’s all over. Of course, that’s impossible, because the lesson here is that, once again, you can’t rely on anybody but yourself, you can’t depend on people, people let you down, and there’s never anyone to help when it really matters. Sorry, can’t sit around waiting for people to decide they’ve available again; got to get it done now. Once again, I feel scraped raw, and paralyzed, and unable to do anything about it. Because it’s more than I can handle on my own, and I reach for help; but then the proffered help evaporates, and I’m left on my own again. I’m really tired of this Catch-22, and this recurring cycle of asking and not receiving. It makes one not want to bother to ask anymore. I need help now, dammit, not at everyone else’s convenience. I’m sick to death of waiting on other people, I’m sick to death of trusting people who turn out to be faithless. I’ve had enough of that. It makes me not want to bother, not want to ask for help, ever again. Which cycles around the whole problem, again. The only way out of this that I can see right now is just to burn it all down and disappear. 801. 29 April 2008, Beloit, WI I slept deeply and well, despite the as yet strange environs. I jerked awake suddenly, though, as I have been doing lately, unable to get back to sleep. I lay in the warm blankets and thought about things, though. I haven’t turned up the heat very high as yet, and I haven’t brought over a lot of bedding yet, either; so the cool mornings we’ve been having this past week or so make it a little chilly here this morning. But I don’t mind. It feels good to be here, this morning. It does feel like camping out, because of the cool, and also because of the need to get going sooner rather than later. I’ll have my first shower here, and some orange juice, then I need to go over to the other house before driving to Milwaukee, to see if there are any messages. 800. 28 April 2008, Beloit, WI I haven’t spent a night at the new place yet, so yesterday I decided that tonight I would camp out, as it were, in my new home, for a night. Camping out because there isn’t really much infrastructure here yet. I brought several full loads over today, though, so it was a good day. And I also went shopping and got some more supplies for here, including groceries, mostly breakfast and snacks. In the morning, I’ll try a new routine, and see what happens. I am camping out on the floor, sleeping on my actual camping bedding that usually lives in the truck. I moved over the smaller TV with the built-in DVD player, and watched a couple of episodes of a favorite TV series that I just got complete on DVD: Space: Above and Beyond. This was a really underrated series that was very well done, some years ago. The new house has new sounds. The rush of air as the heating kicks in, the flame sounds of the pilot light in the gas fireplace. I ran the fireplace for awhile this evening, as I sat and watched TV, and snacked. I feel comfortable enough here, now, and tired enough, to go to bed soon. I have a another long day planned tomorrow, but it’s a breakaway day, a vacation day: I’m going over to the art museum in Milwaukee for a show with some friends. I’ve been having a hard time feeling anything but stress lately. Today, because I got a lot more done, and felt stronger and more physically capable than I have in a long time, I feel okay. It’s as I’ve said before: with everything I’ve been through, and with what’s going on, I’m doing well if I can just stay at neutral buoyancy. Joy seems a long way off, anymore, but I did spend the day at or slightly above neutral buoyancy. There’s still a lot to get done, and a long and growing list of things to do; at the moment, that doesn’t weigh on my mind, at least. It’s there, but not looming. For once. So, overall, it was a good day, as recent days go. • I’m reading back over my thoughts of the past week or so. An amazing amount intense living packed into a very small number of days. Have I recovered form the blow of the basement flooding? It’s been ten days, and the days have been full. That really knocked me down, and hurt me, and it’s taken time to get past it. I don’t know if it’s something you can forget about and move on from: in some ways it was a reminder of how ephemeral everything is, of how unpredictable and chaotic life always is. “Chaos never died.” A reminder not to trust things too quickly, too easily. I don’t know if it’s something I can just get other. I keep asking myself: I had a big opening, and then I got slapped down hard. Can I ever fully trust again? I don’t know. I can’t answer that right now. I might never be able to give a definitive answer. I’d like to be able to be open and trusting, and it’s really hard for me to achieve that; I feel like I’ve made that several times, but then I’ve been slapped down afterwards. Maybe I’m too sensitive; maybe I’m just not meant to ever be that open, that trusting. The way I live my life, spiritually, it does kind of make me a target. I have a connection to the Powers That Be, as a shaman and healer, that’s up close and personal; and it leaves me vulnerable to attack by less friendly powers. Maybe the reminder was to always be the Warrior. I feel toughened by this experience; not entirely in a nice way, but more certain of my own strength to survive anything thrown my way, and more certain of my determination to defend what and who I can, and my determination to never back down. It’s not that I’m not terrified; I am. It’s just that I won’t give the bastards the satisfaction of quitting. 799. 27 April 2008, Beloit, WI Yesterday sunny cold, but Jo. and I transplanted some plants from here to the new house, so I would have them when I finish moving. Then I did some other things. My dreams last night bound up in urgency; having to get somewhere to do something, before the world comes to an end, and everybody dies in come kind of unnatural disaster; so I am racing across a cityscape, then later in a car racing up north to get to a place that I need to be; always with a sense of urgency and speed. • Later: A rage attack in the afternoon, moving things to the new place, and re-discovering how much of my own stuff had been destroyed in the basement flooding here. A whole three boxes of old prints of my artwork, gone. Several mailer-bags of freelance records. A couple of original pieces. All in the recycling now: they were in toxic water, they can’t be cleaned or otherwise restored. But my anger was triggered by technology misbehaving. Of course, it’s just emotional spillover. Part of the ongoing process. I had a good long talk yesterday morning with my sister about all of this, and we’re on the same page. It really is overwhelming. When she gets here in a week or so, I can really dig in, and it will all be easier. Right now, I have permission to not pus myself as hard as I have. My dreams of urgency last night mean that I really am stressed out, if this is all spilling over into the dreamtime. 798. 25 April 2008, Beloit, WI Heavy rains this morning, and strong thunder. I spent some time before bed last night in gathering together things to take over. I have a pile big enough for two carloads. I’m in a better mood, although my sleep cycle is still unpredictable. They say in the grief support group that sleep patterns can be disrupted for a long time; and I have found this to be true. Part of my stress has been a loss of routines, a lack of predictable cycles. The positive aspect of that is more lessons to learn to live in the moment, and be present. Rain so thick it’s a fog making the woods fade to gray, so heavy on the roof it’s a thunderous weight. The river has looked normal for the past few days; now we’re under a warning of floods again. Will this summer be as violent and beautiful as the winter has been? 797. 24 April 2008, Beloit, WI I’m constantly feeling rushed, like I can’t get it all done, like I’m stuck and paralyzed. I spent most of the day in emotional and mental paralysis today, after getting a lot moved over yesterday. Of course, it’s also rained all day long, which doesn’t help; nor did I sleep well last night, again. People keep asking me if I’m enjoying my new house yet. They expect me to be overjoyed. To be honest, I’m too stressed out to have felt more than even the most minimal pleasure as yet. I feel the same kind of insane stress I’ve been feeling for weeks, months, years, and it just won’t let up. I can never get enough done, I can never get it all done, something is going to slip through the cracks and get all fucked up and take me a long expensive time to recover from. I just can’t get that out of my head. I’m frustrated and stressed and not at all happy, so quit asking! • Later: I ended up vegging out the rest of the evening, before taking out the trash and recycling around midnight. I guess I needed a day off. Or maybe a day of gathering after a day of hauling. I admit that my body hurts, and I’ve got a few new bruises that showed up today. I shouted and yelled a few times, too, mostly at those inner voices that are pushing me to do more. I need to convert that energy into something useful (not the shouting, the pushing), because what it does is get me all tied up in knots and unable to actually do anything. It’s late, but I’m not so tired yet that I can’t gather more things together to carry them over tomorrow. It continues to go in waves. This is really hard, really stressful. I’m starting to wonder if it’s ever going to be fun, or not stressful, or if this is the way it’s always going to be. It is not fun, at least not yet. • Later: I’m struggling hard with the temptation to beat myself up for not getting more done today. Never mind that I’m exhausted, sore, got a lot done yesterday, or can only do as much as I can. I feel like I’ve already lost a lot of time; I feel huge time pressure. If I yelled earlier tonight, it was yelling back at those forces I feel are pushing me too hard, both inner and outer. I know that by vegging out earlier tonight I was taking necessary downtime, but I was also distracting myself from the ongoing hamster-wheel mind-drama that I can get into, when everything is quiet and I can’t sleep. I jerked awake very early this morning, too, and couldn’t get back to sleep; so, more than once during the day I had to stop and nap, and take a break. My first nap over at the new house was also today: another first. I don’t feel ready to move over the kitchen or bedroom just yet, but at some point I will; sometimes you just wake up in the morning, decision made, and get busy. Some of what I’ve been doing today, it feels like, is waiting for ripeness. The timing was wrong today; I wasn’t up to it, or the timing was wrong, somehow. I’m not sure I can state that any more clearly.  796. 23 April 2008, Beloit, WI Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. —Carl Jung My dreams last night ended in complex tangled relationships between myself and friends I am traveling with, but who are antagonists in the dream. (No one I actually know, by the way.) Some task we’re supposed to do, and are arguing about; or some satchel of supplies we can’t find, and are arguing about. I mostly stand aside from the arguments, annoyed but not getting into it. At some point I wander off by myself, feeling anger but not acting out. Why do we write down our dreams? why do I write out these thoughts, these feelings I am having? why am I observing this grief process here? Because Jung was right: until you know what’s going on inside you, in those parts of your self normally ignored or hidden, you’ll never figure out why you respond to events the way you do. I am not a fan of C.S. Lewis; I think it’s telling that his books are more popular in the USA than in his native UK. His ideas about theology are often priggish and simplistic. But he does have moments of good thinking, and his writing is best when it’s personal and specific, rather than grandiose and theoretical. When he is grounded in human experience, he’s much more believable than when he’s telling his audience what to think. So, his book A Grief Observed has had some relevance for me lately; the title alone reflects how I’m trying to observe and write about my own process. It’s not just journaling: it’s everything. Not one facet of my life has been untouched by grief, by this big changes happening, by everything that has happened in the past few years, that will echo down the corridors of my life for a long time to come. In this book Lewis asks timeless questions, and doesn’t always give answers; which is a better form of theology than any collection of platitudes and certainties. A key question Lewis asks is: Of course it's easy enough to say that God seems absent at our greatest need because He is absent—non-existent. But then why does He seem so present when, to put it frankly, we don't ask for Him? Later on, Lewis writes: Sooner or later I must face the question in plain language. What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, “good”? Doesn't all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite? What have we to set against it? During bereavement, you get into the darker shadow of God. You get into the issue of theodicy—actually an issue I got into when I was in the desert much more than I do now; was that preparation for this? or was it mostly that my own process of encountering theodicy was properly timed, and I’ve moved on to deeper layers? Regardless, in observing myself and the others in this grief support group, I am not having a problem with theodicy; I haven’t even been thinking about it much before this. Reconciling the dark side of God is not a problem for me. Jung addressed the question directly in some famous letters he wrote. Near the end of his life he wrote: To this day "God" is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions, and change the course of my life for better or for worse. God is that which breaks us open, that shakes us loose. God is not a fantasy of a loving parental figure who nurtures and never subjugates—the classic image that most people carry in their minds when they chant again and again, against all evidence, that “God is Good.” Jung writes later in that same letter: I remember Him, I invoke Him [when I am] overcome by anger or by fear [and] I involuntarily say: "Oh God." And that happens when I meet somebody or something stronger than myself. . . . [God] is an apt name given to all overpowering emotions in my own psychic system, [which] subdue my conscious will and usurp control over myself. We experience trauma as though it were a divine act. Perhaps it is. The mystery lies in our trying to frame those acts as either bad or good. Yes, it’s bad for me that my parents died and I have a chronic illness. But what good has come of it? I found myself writing, during a workshop exercise, several good things that have come out of all this. The two most notable things are: 1. my time is now my own again, and I am free to set my own hours again; 2. for the first time in my adult life, I feel more or less financially secure, thanks to my inheritance from my parents’ estate; I am not wealthy, but I was able to buy a home, and I am able to go grocery shopping without worrying about making the budget at the end of the month. Jung gets more deeply into these questions in his book Answer to Job—which I first read when I was in my early 20s, and had lost all faith in the Lutheran religion in which I had been raised. A faith that couldn’t contain my questions, my experience, my sexuality, or my intellectual capacity for theological thinking; Lutheran theology is very rich but it’s also usually very intellectual, and occasionally heartless. It contains a great amount of justification, rather than fellow-feeling. It lacks, in my opinion, a deep reading of the dark side of God. (Except maybe in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison, of course.) Jung summarizes the problem in Answer to Job as follows: The Book of Job. . . provides a picture of a God who knew no moderation in his emotions and suffered precisely from this lack of moderation. He himself admitted that he was eaten with rage and jealousy and that this knowledge was painful to him. Insight existed along with obtuseness, loving-kindness along with cruelty, creative power along with destructiveness Such a condition is only conceivable either when no reflecting consciousness is present at all, or. . . is very feeble. . . . A condition of this sort can only be described as amoral. Later on in the same book Jung writes: It is the task of the conscious mind to understand these hints [from the unconscious]. If this does not happen, the process of individuation will nevertheless continue. The only difference is that we become its victims and are dragged along by fate toward that inescapable goal which we might have reached walking upright, if only we had taken the trouble and been patient enough to understand in time the meaning of the numina that cross our path. This is the key: pay attention, pay attention, pay attention. Pay attention to the numinous moments when we feel most alive, most sure of God’s presence—and those moments of ten are indeed our most traumatic. They shake us up, they break us open. My own experience of the Sacred Heart in my own body was an opening, a waking; I now believe it was also a tool I needed to have in order to be a caregiver for my father and mother’s last experiences of bodily life on this planet. (This time around.) The purpose of life is to learn to live life consciously, rather than unconsciously, to live life with intention and create meaning and purpose for oneself, rather than to have those intentions and meanings given to us by others. God is what breaks apart conventional meanings, platitudes, and received wisdom from our elders. Every time we ossify our faith into dogmatic belief, God will come along, like a stonemason, and break our bricks back into sand. Our choice is to go along with the process, and be conscious of the process, or to be dragged kicking and screaming into it, against our will, protesting all the way: but it will happen, so we might as well go along with it. The one thing the Lutheran theologians I read in my early adulthood never seemed to understand—I could not articulate this objection at that time, all I had was a vague feeling of dissatisfaction—is that God is not rational. God is irrational. God is amoral, as Jung says. God’s understanding and morality are not like our own. There is plenty of information we lack, that is buried not only in the Unknown but in our own, inner unknowns; which can be come known, but only by the hard process of individuation, of which the grief process is one kind. What this means is that our conventional, rational, moralistic images of God are too small, too limited, and do not contain God’s shadow. God is, in fact, Mystery. God is the routine-breaker, the change-maker, the attitude-disrupter, the destroyer of all convention, and the remover of dead emotional trash. God is Shiva, the Destroyer, who removes dead things from the world in order to make room for the new creation: and the Dance circles on. We become mid-life orphans when our parents die; and that is when we must be come individuals, if not before, because we no longer have that wall to push against, to throw ourselves against in some act of self-definition by negation. Adolescent rebellion sustained into adulthood—which is all too common in our culture, which likes to keep people infantile—becomes doubly absurd when those one has been rebelling against are gone. One of my favorite Jungian writers, Dr. Janet O. Dallett, has devoted an entire book to these questions, The Not-Yet-Transformed God: Depth psychology and the individual religious experience. (Dr. Dallett is the author of one of my favorite books, When the Spirits Come Back, which I have discussed here before.) In her book, she writes lucidly about our predicament. For example: Today, many people feel themselves having to deal with violent affects, forces of superhuman proportions that have traditionally been assigned to Satan or the devil. As fewer and fewer people’s spiritual needs are met by the established religions, the power of gods and demons flows into the human psyche and often runs amok, expressing itself in experiences of murderous rage and suicidal self-abnegation, in psychosis and addiction, in the compulsions that force us to act against our best intentions, over and over again. But it’s not up to God to solve these problems, it’s up to us. Dallett’s entire book is inspired by and is in response to a famous letter Jung wrote in the 1950s to a woman who was asking him the fundamental question of theodicy: If God is indeed good, how can there be evil in the world? If God is good, why do we have to die, and suffer bereavement, and be unable to find answers to these disruptive Mysteries that beset us? It’s one of the oldest human questions. It’s a question everyone must confront, sooner or later, even those who we do not think of as conventionally religious. For example, Charles Darwin once wrote to a friend: There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the [parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that the cat should play with mice. No one escapes the question. It is a human question. Lewis writes elsewhere in A Grief Observed: Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself. For me, Jung’s letter contains hints towards an attitude towards the Mystery, if not actually an answer. Here’s a lengthy quote from the letter (which is reproduced in its entirety in Dr. Dallett’s book, as an appendix): Although the divine incarnation is a cosmic and absolute event, it only manifests empirically in those relatively few individuals capable of enough consciousness to make ethical decisions, i.e., to decide for the Good. Therefore God can be called good only inasmuch as He is able to manifest His goodness in individuals. His moral quality depends upon individuals. That is why He incarnates. Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of God the Creator. We ought to remember that the Fathers of the Church have insisted upon the fact that God has given Himself to man's death on the Cross so that we may become gods. The Deity has taken its above in man with the obvious intention of realizing Its Good in man. The significance of man is enhanced by the incarnation. We have become participants of the divine life and we have to assume new responsibility, viz. the continuation of the divine self-realization, which expresses itself in the task of our individuation. Individuation does not only mean that man has become truly human as distinct from animal, but that he is to become partially divine as well. This means practically that he becomes adult, responsible for his existence, knowing that he does not only depend on God but that God also depends on man. Man's relation to God probably has to undergo a certain important change: Instead of the propitiating praise to an unpredictable king or the child's prayer to a loving father, the responsible living and fulfilling of the divine will in us will be our form of worship of and commerce with God. His goodness means grace and light and His dark side the terrible temptation of power. Man has already received so much knowledge that he can destroy his own planet. Let us hope that God's good spirit will guide him in his decisions, because it will depend upon man's decision whether God's creation will continue. Nothing shows more drastically than this possibility how much of divine power has come within the reach of man. We are not separate from God—although we have often created images of God that are separate from us. We partake of Creation, and we are co-creators in Creation. We are not separate from it. And Death is part of Creation. (What is the symbolism of the Buddha dying after eating a poisonous mushroom? The function of fungi is to break down and decay dead things, otherwise they would litter the landscape. The Buddha died a natural death!) I do not feel that death is the end of everything; I do feel it’s the end of a natural cycle. But I have always felt that we go on, and come around again; the Universe is made of circles and spirals and fractal boundaries. (The Hindu-Buddhist concept of time is cyclical, rather than linear.) It is up to us to finish up the Creation, and to bring God into final transformation. Jung writes in a lecture on another occasion: The ego participates in God's suffering. We have become participants in the divine nature. We are the vessel. . . of the Deity suffering in the body of the ”servant” . . . . Buddha's insight and the incarnation in Christ break the chain through the intervention of the enlightened human consciousness, which thereby acquires a cosmic significance. Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of God. Human consciousness is the only seeing eye of the Deity. The great Medieval Christian mystic and preacher, Meister Eckhart knew this same truth when he said: The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. Jung’s conclusion, from that same letter in response to the question of theodicy, is profound and meaningful to me. I find it directly relevant to my own grief process, which is not only about losing my parents but about losing a complete way of life, and having to start all over again. (And not for the first time, in this lifetime.) Jung concludes his discussion by connecting us back to the world and the personal experience: The problem of crucifixion is the beginning of individuation: there is the secret meaning of the Christian symbolism, a path of blood and suffering, like any other step forward on the road of the evolution of human consciousness. Can man stand a further increase in consciousness? Is it really worthwhile that man should progress morally and intellectually? Is that gain worth the candle? That is the question. I don't want to force my views on anyone else. But I confess that I submitted to the divine power of this apparently insurmountable problem and I consciously and intentionally made my life miserable because I wanted God to be alive and free from the suffering man had put on him by living his own reason more than God's secret intentions. There is a mystical fool in me that proved to be stronger than all my science. . . . Thus I suffered and was miserable, but it seems that life was never wanting and in the blackest night even, and just there, by the grace of God, I could see a great Light. Somewhere there seems to be a great kindness in the abysmal darkness of the deity. I come back to the God who is not yet fully formed, in which we are humans participate. This is not a God of separation, but a God of participation. Everything we do participates in the Divine. (If only more people would realize that, we might not have an ecological crisis on our hands.) How can I begin with my own grief, not so great a set of griefs in this complex and demanding world as so many others’, and end up with God? Because we are part of the Incarnation as well as the Creation; if God is incarnate, and immanent, then God is in us, because we too are incarnate. We are not separate from anyone who has lived or died; and they live on, in us, not just as disconsolate memories, or ghosts or phantoms, but as actual beings, as those who are us, the voices of the elders in us, but also the voices of what is alive all around us. Listen: you can hear them. They’re not really gone.  795. 22 April 2008, Beloit, WI Coming out of the Beloit Hospice grief support group just before sunset, the sun an orange ball hiding behind bare tree branches and dramatic clouds, my senses were preternaturally sharp—or maybe it’s just that I haven’t been paying attention lately, so much inner turmoil has been getting in the way. But I felt clear. There was a robin yelling his mating call from the top of a tree, so loud I stopped for awhile to watch and listen to him. Is it only artists anymore who stop and pay attention to these life details? It seems like most of the time people just go on their ways, and get back to their familiar safe zones as fast as possible. Maybe it’s too hard to break out, for most people; I don’t know. During a guided visualization today I went to that high mountain grass land with the blue mountains looming over the grassy tableland, a single strip of road, and a single huge tree by the crossroads on the plain, and in the shade of the huge tree, my guide to talk to, and to give and receive gifts. I’ve been there before, so it was easy to go there again. This morning I realized that there has been a voice in the back of my mind screaming about everything lately, about how there isn’t enough time, and and and. Just screaming. I spent significant time this morning clearing and releasing. And I also made a new metaprogram for myself and set it running: to take the energy of stress and redirect it into being physical strength to sustain my body’s health and ongoing healing. Not to discard that power, but to put it to better use. The birds are so loud this time of year: mating calls, territorial establishment calls. In the past few days, all the trees have budded, the grass is green and thick, the hyacinth and daffodils are blooming, all the other bulbs are coming up, and so on. It’s this warm weather, which has been in the 70s for a few days—sudden summer, and no spring—although it did rain hard this morning for a short time. A sudden burst of rain like the sudden arrival of the threshold of the greening. I feel stirred up emotionally today. It’s been a challenging day. I knew early on that it would be a day I’d have to be extra-vigilant about my edges, after the third time I banged into something, which I normally don’t do. It’s like I couldn’t tell where my edges are. The thing I find most difficult in all this grief, stress, moving, etc., is the cognitive difficulties I’ve been having for months—they distress me more than almost anything else—forgetfulness, lack of attention, inability to focus and stay on task, having to do some things multiple times because I couldn’t focus on them at first. Today I really moved slowly, when I was carrying storage units over to the new house to set them in place preparatory to moving a lot of other stuff; I had to really pay extra attention, it wasn’t at all as easy as usual. It’s not even like it gets when I know I’m tired, and approaching being done, when I start to bang into things and have to be careful to not to damage things or bruise myself by bumping into things; when you start out the day from that place, rather than ending up there, and knowing you’re done, you have to be extra-cautious. It doesn’t matter, I know that this is all part of the matrix right now; but it’s still not easy to cope with, and I have to keep reminding myself to take it easy on myself, and be patient. I still got things done, just not as much as I would otherwise like to have gotten done. 794. 21 April 2008, Beloit, WI Another very warm day. I spent most of the day cleaning, then moving. I think I got enough done, but I feel this pressure behind me to do more, to push myself harder. But I can’t. I have to take care of myself first, and that means not pushing myself harder than I can safely go. I can’t afford to lose the time I would lose if I seriously hurt myself, or damaged something in the house. I hope I have enough time to do the sane and organized move that I have wanted and planned to do. I have already decided that some things are just not my problem, like tending to the lawn and garden here at my parents’ house. I intend to transplant some of Dad’s flowers over to the new condo, and keep them going. Some of them will be beautiful there. But cleaning out the garage here is now very low priority, and so are several other maintenance asks. I simply don’t have the time or energy to maintain two households, and it’s not up to me to take both houses on anymore; mine comes first. I will pick out the things I want to keep and save, from the garage as from the rest of the house. A cleaning crew will come through after we’re all done, and take care of the rest.  793. 20 April 2008, Madison, WI A gloriously warm day. All the plants in the garden are coming up. In the past three or four days, the daffodils have exploded, and the crocus have finished blossoming. The bleeding-heart bush is coming up, and may-apples are everywhere in the woods. There were about twenty canoes and kayaks going down the river today; they bottlenecked at the island before the bridge, and paused to let each other go in order; for a short while, the brown river was full of bright-colored boats and clothes.  It hit 80 degrees day. My dinner plans here in Madison fell through, so before rehearsal I took a long walk down State St., looking at things that have changed, and things that are the same. Photos of shirtless joggers; of buildings in the bright afternoon light; photos of people sitting at the sidewalk cafés. Then I sat in the sun for awhile, just relaxing and soaking up the heat. The first really warm day of the year.  792. 19 April 2008, Beloit, WI Today I felt somewhat recovered from the sharp blow to the system. I slept a full night’s sleep, if somewhat fitfully, and when I finally got the day started, I went over to my new place and continued cleaning. I also took over three loads of Stuff. The day had several firsts: the first time you do something, the first thing you do, etc. The first piece of music I played in my new home was my own piece horse at breath, I also played a few more of my own Stick pieces, like 20 Minutes Short of a Year. I took over my old stereo that I had originally bought in the 1980s in Madison; at the time it was a very high-end boombox, made by JVC, that still sounds great. I plugged my iPod into the CD connectors; one of the reasons I bought this stereo originally was that I could plug my CD player into it like this. So, the first music at the new place was my own music. The first items I put on display, on that shelf above the living room—a small shelf where the ceiling meets the walls, inset about four inches, making a perfect display space—were items from India. Things we had brought home when we moved back home from living in India during my childhood. I think I’ll make that into an India shelf, and rotate the objects periodically, but keep the Asian theme. At some point, I want to do more of a completely Asian theme in my decorating; maybe bring in some bamboo screens, Japanese rice-paper screens, that sort of thing. I love bamboo in all its uses and forms. I also took over a couple of the filing cabinets, and started assembling the office and studio room, which is what the second bedroom is going to be. My room for all kinds of creative work, and my de facto office. I am thinking about placing my grandfather’s old oak desk there, as my computer table and workspace; I haven’t decided yet, though, as I am not sure what will work best when I assemble the space. I intend next to move over a lot of the bookshelves and other kinds of storage units, so that I can bring things over, put them away, empty out the plastic bins, and take them home to fill up with more things to bring over. Doing it in stages. I have to keep marshalling my strength, and resist doing too much on any given day; I need my strength to make it all the way through this stressful process. I still have a lot more cleaning to do. And I will be tracking dirt in as I continue to haul more Stuff over, so I will no doubt have to clean again and again, over the next few weeks. But it’s worth it. Tomorrow I plan to get into some of the really intensive cleaning on the main floor, and get that all spotless. At least I am starting as spotless as I can. After that, it’s just maintenance. 791. 19 April 2008, Beloit, WI Last night was a night off; it had to be. It’s taken me time to recover from that blow, which I still have to integrate in terms of meaning, if there is any. But I slept long and hard last night, afterwards, if not deep. I feel wiped out this morning, starting out, but at least I slept a full night through, mostly. It rained all night long, too. What comes forward is about trust. I opened up my heart, and I had a loving day of release and healing, and my heart was wide open. And then I felt like I’d been stabbed through the heart, when I got home. It took only seconds to flip my emotional and spiritual states completely over into Victim from feeling healed and clean and released. The pain and numbness in my breast are only part of that, and haven’t gone away yet. Will they ever again? Can I ever trust fully? Ever? Because it still feels like I got attacked not only when I was most open to the world, but because I was so open to the world. It’s hard not to see this from Victim as some kind of cause and effect, some kind of slapdown of a variety all too familiar. I am thinking about Jung’s comment that if you don’t make the unconscious conscious, it will appear to act in your life as fate. I’m trying to understand how that applies here. How can I ever trust again? If I ever did. How can I live without shields? Maybe, in a place like this, you can’t. I don’t know. I can’t figure it out right now; maybe given enough time. 790. 18 April 2008, Beloit, WI I’ve barely slept all night. I feel assaulted, as if I had just opened up my heart to life and love again, with that emotional forgiveness piece yesterday, about Dad, only to feel like I had a spear stabbed through it. I feel numb and blocked. I feel paralyzed just like I did before. This is the worst feeling I’ve had in a long time. It’s like I’m being to never trust again, to turn back towards death and stasis, and crawl into a hole and die. And it’s hard to not do that right now. It’s very hard. It’s not even about impermanence and the lack of control: it’s like it was a direct attack, targeted very much at me, designed to do me the most damage possible at my most vulnerable moment. I am supposed to continue on from this? I am supposed to somehow move into my new house and deal with all this at the same time? You don’t think the timing isn’t significant? Well, I do. I feel attacked. I’m not able to not take this personally, at the moment. I guess you can tell how short of sleep I feel right now. 789. 17 April 2008, Beloit, WI It’s been an amazing and exhausting day. Today I closed on my new home, the condo that is really a small house, 1500 square feet, in a small group of stand-alone condos that’s unique in this area. I had Jo. and V. there to help me through it, and it was a powerful experience. Jo. and I had lunch beforehand, and she told me some things that were really important. When Dad was in the hospital, that last illness before coming home to die, when my sister and I were both away from the hospital room, he said to her, “I need to ask you a favor.” She said, “I’ll do anything I can.” He said, “I want you to make sure that Arthur has a good life.” I just broke down and cried when I heard that, at lunch. All my life, Dad and I had a difficult relationship about money, and related things. He never really taught me how to handle money; then when I got in trouble and needed help, he did help me, but he always got mad about it. It was very difficult between us. Jo. told me that he had said all that to her, and wished he had done a better job teaching me those things. Well, I’ve learned some of them on my own, through failing and learning better, and I’ve made real progress. But hearing what he asked her to do, which she is doing for me now, just broke me open. It was a real piece of healing of past wounds, and it came just before my closing on my first home. It felt like a blessing, and a release. The timing couldn’t have been better. I took possession of the keys, and went over and looked the place over again. It felt really good, for those few moments. I know there’s a lot left to do, but it felt good to be there. The place, and the street it’s on, have felt good to me, since I first came to look at the place. After that, I went out to dinner with some other friends: a celebration, and a release. I came back to my parents’ home, where I’ve been living for a couple years now, very tired, and ready to go right to bed. And then when I got home after dinner, I discovered that the basement was flooded. Again. yes, property damage this time. To my property. I’m so exhausted I can’t even deal with it. But thank you so very fucking much. 788. 17 April 2008, Beloit, WI The sun is warm this morning. My dreams were cold and dramatic, the details already lost. Yesterday I took two naps, and went to bed early, after dozing off in front of the TV. This is a change from my recent insomnia; I’ve been jerking awake suddenly, either in the middle of the night, or the morning earlier than I usually get up, and unable to get back to sleep. Yesterday, I was so tired I slept a lot more than usual. This warm sunlight feels good on my body. I’m feeling tired already, knowing how much there is to do in the next few weeks, and how hard I’m going to have to push myself. As I sit here in the sunlight, I feel too tired to move; eventually, though, I’ll get this day started. This morning, the first daffodils. The purple and white crocus have been bursting forth already for a week. This morning, the buds on some of the trees are visible enough to be green against the brown. This morning, the lawns seem awake and green, and there is wash of green against the brown layers of the woods, as some shrubs and bushes burst forth against the trees. The river is still brown and fast and wide, after all the excessive spring rains. I got some video footage of the swollen river a few days ago, and also of the early flowers opening. A few days ago, when there were dramatic clouds everywhere, I also go some long shots of a single patch of blue moving slowly across the sky behind the branches of the still-bare trees.  787. 16 April 2008, Beloit, WI Tomorrow afternoon is the closing for my condo, which I am buying outright, so there’s no mortgage, no financing, just a cheque from the bank. I’ve been feeling alternately completely nervous and completely excited. Today it was the first day of spring-like weather, the temperature in the 70s, the grass greening. The Fearless Agamemnon, the Wonder Woodchuck, has been browsing in the yard, sunning himself on the deck, and once even walked up to the porch door to peer in. I chased him off for that, don’t want to encourage such free license. Starting tomorrow, I am actually moving. I feel like there’s so much to do, I’m just afraid I’ll overlook some detail. I probably will, but probably nothing major. I have good support on all this. Still, after dinner I think I’ll go back to packing boxes preparatory to moving. The nice thing is, I’m moving less than a mile, albeit to my own home now; so, I can make several trips a week by myself, loading and unloading by myself, before I need to bring in actual movers at the end of the project. Some things are just too heavy for me to move. It feels like too much, but it’s probably not; it’s just all so overwhelming, that I am on a rollercoaster. A few more weeks of utter stress, though, and then it’s all over. It will be over, and done. I am going to concentrate on moving those things that I know that I can move without hurting myself. The first pass is some of the storage units I’m taking to put in the basement, which will be the central storage area, so I can avoid too much clutter in the main living areas. I am tempted to go very spartan in my living area, but that’s not realistic. Still, I can keep the clutter below stairs, then move things up and down as I desire. I have enough artwork to change out the gallery display areas a few times a year, should I so choose. I am thinking about eventually making this home ever more Asian, more Japanese, more bamboo, as I go forward. I have to think about all that, though. The first task is to get settled in; then proceed from there. All the planets are aligned to support me, with no retrogrades right now except Pluto. It has been hard to stay focused. I get overwhelmed, then I need to stop and do something for awhile. I’ve been writing a lot, although not poetry. I need to distract myself periodically to stay on task. At times I feel like I’ve been on fire with ideas, at other times I just can’t seem to focus. Focus is difficult right now. But then, there’s a lot of reasons for that, moving is just one more layer, honestly. 786. 8 April 2008, Beloit, WI Yesterday I had the piano tuned, by a very friendly and capable tuner who I enjoyed talking to before and after, and the piano sounds amazing. It sounds like it’s supposed to, plus it has that gloss of a fresh tuning. Even the voicing and tonality of the registers bring back memories of hearing Mom and her piano students playing in the living room, while I listened from the kitchen, back in Ann Arbor. When I was alone again in the house, I immediately sat down and played some old pieces still in my fingers, and later in the afternoon, I recorded two improvs. That’s what I want to do: I want to spend a lot of time with this piano. I’m going to take lots of photographs, and I’m going to record a lot of new pieces on this piano. I’m going to take advantage of it, do a lot with it, secure a lot of new music out of it. And then, when I have had time with it, I can let go of the actual physical object. But having a freshly-tuned piano makes we want to have a piano around again. It brings back the joy. I may have to buy another piano, in the not too distant future. We’ll see. 785. 3 April 2008, Beloit, WI All day it’s been cloudy and overcast, on the edge of a storm but doing nothing. The crocus have arisen, purple blooms amongst the dead brown oak leaves. I went out and took some photos. Because of what’s happened in my internal weather, I’ve been quiet and “on holiday” all day today. I can write about all this because I’m already past it. I just want to record it. I went to a grief support group run by Beloit Hospice, a first session, earlier this week. I have resisted these sorts of things, because it’s often been my experience that I don’t move at the same pace—Caroline Myss reminds me, listening to CDs in the car today, that when you start live more consciously, the pace of change accelerates; and it is this faster rate of change that people are most afraid of, and why they resist becoming conscious—as the rest of the group, and I often don’t get anything out of it because I find myself in the role of caregiving for others, rather than having my own process met. So, I’m always a little hesitant about these sorts of groups. The other thing, too, is that one can do this process too early, too soon. I am not sure if it’s too soon, or too late, for me. There is so much going on, with the buying of a house for myself, and the moving process, and this is in some ways just bad timing. I question if I have the spare time for this kind of process right now, that brings up all the emotions to the surface—granted, the best place to deal with them—at a time when I need all my energy just to get through what needs to be done. Bottom line, the grief support group stirred things up again that I may not actually have time to deal with right now. So I am debating about continuing. We’ll see. I can’t avoid the possibly elitist and self-serving insight, however, that, once again, I’m moving at a different pace than the rest of the world. And as I have recently discovered about all this, I really do not like being pushed. I woke up in the early morning, though, with a huge load of grief and anger that kept me from going back to sleep. Classic crying into the pillow in the middle of the night. It chose to crystallize around Mom’s piano: Why shouldn’t I keep Mom’s piano, instead of sending it to Europe, because after all I was closer to her, and I’ve played it more than anyone else, over the years? What was fair about any of that? That whole load of grief-based clinging to objects. Not that I was going to demand that any changes be made to the existing plans about shipping the piano to Holland, but that I wanted to talk it all over one more time. Over an hour or so, I played through every scenario and idea in my mind, lying in bed, before I finally moved towards clearing and releasing the whole constellation of emotions and thoughts. Surprisingly, they cleared up almost instantly. I was able to go back to sleep, and I slept in late, then got up for awhile, then went back to bed for a few more hours. I feel caught up on sleep, and well-rested, and actually very clear and emotionally in a good place. I spent the day in a good place; sometimes a quiet place, and sometimes physically tired, but with a clear and vibrant mind and feeling clear about everything. Well, maybe that was the point of the grief group, after all. Still, I have to think about if I have the time to lost an entire evening every time I go to the grief support group. Is it worth losing that much time, right now, with so much else on my plate? Can it wait till later? I had planned to give it one or two more visits, before deciding. We’ll see. 784. 1 April 2008, Beloit, WI A whole century of war now, continuous war or preparation for war. Do we even know what peace feels like? Whole generations who never knew peace, who wouldn’t be able to explain it or recognize it. Yet we continue this insanity, because it is the only thing we know. The frog is boiling in the pot. 783. 30 March 2008, Beloit, WI There was lightning and thunder today, making me shut down and unplug the computers. I recorded some rainfall on the deck: the first rainstorm of the season. Heavy rains and heavy snow elsewhere continue to surpass records, and more rain is expected late tonight, prompting continued flood warnings. I saw the deer on the opposite bank a few times today, brown coats against brown land and brown tree branches not yet budded out, pacing along and looking for a safe place to cross. They were unable to do so, as the river is too wide, too deep, and moving too quickly this evening for them to safely cross. Deer may be dumber than posts, but they have very good survival instincts. I worked hard in the basement storerooms all day today, mostly cleaning up, vacuuming, and organizing the detritus of recent weeks. The mess had piled up, and I needed to reorganize the space in order to keep working in it. I discovered that I am close to done with all my boxes of old, old papers and trinkets. I have recycled 90 percent of what was there, and if there’s time I’ll recycle even more. I have saved some older papers out of interest towards my own early years. It’s like going through a midden-heap of memories, salvaging bits and pieces. I have memories associated with most every object or paper I saved; although in the case of having multiple copies of some things, I kept only one or two and discarded the rest. I found some old papers I wrote that would be fun to re-read before discarding. I found old school photos of myself and my family. I found programs for plays and shows I was in, or that my sister was in. I found my old report cards and class notes. I was pleased to toss out the notes from that painful chemistry class in college. But I was pleased to keep the poems and stories I wrote in a creative writing class at around that same time. It’s interesting to go back through old writings, and see what has changed, and what remains the same. It’s the excavation of a life, a personal form of archaeology that can lead to memoir or autobiography. I’ve been thinking a lot about memoir lately, and so it’s hard to let go of some paper that you might need. I found the announcement of the national writing awards that I had won while still in high school. It’s interesting to me now that I won two or three national awards for writing, but then I didn’t write again for a long time. I know that I dislike repeating myself; but I also know that I like to do a lot of different things, creatively, so maybe what I felt was accomplishment that didn’t need to be repeated or reinforced. I’ve written more maturely and better in the past few years than ever before, I think; looking back at this juvenilia brings back memories, strong memories, but it also shows me both where I’ve improved as a writer, and also that some topics are life-long, and one keeps returning to them many times, at different points in life. Now I’ve just cooked and eaten a meal. For the first time in days, or weeks, I felt I had the strength and interest to cook. I had been cooking all along when P. was here, but we also ate out a lot, and did a lot of cooking for the freezer, so that when I didn’t have time or energy now, I could just thaw something and prepare it easily. Today I wanted to make a full meal. I made my staple fried thin-sliced potatoes and curried stir-fried chicken, with yogurt on top. It was delicious, and nicely spicy. For a few hours now, in the wake of today’s storms, there is a freak warming spell. It is almost 60 degrees outside, and I had the windows open while I cooked, to air the place out. The wild turkeys are gobbling as they fly up into the trees for the night, now that it is dusk. There are insects flying, and on the windows; the first bugs I’ve seen in months. The killing cold this year was so severe, you thought that life would never return. But here it is, again, finding a way, as always. Life always finds a way to go on. 782. 30 March 2008, Beloit, WI Heavy rains all night long, and a dreary, dark, wet morning. Thunder and lightning in the sky before noon. The river is moving fast and has crested the banks on the opposite side, the floodplain. Flood warnings have been posted for the Rock River watershed. It’s cold and damp, and all I want to do is curl up on the couch with a mug of tea. The past few days, my mind was on fire with ideas, and I wrote a great deal, essays and postings and other materials. But no poems. I’m sorting through a lot in my mind about life, and am trying to integrate a great deal, and poems just haven’t been coming forward. And that’s okay. The online poetry community that I was a part of for several years has fragmented, splintered, and died. It is no more. It’s too bad, but I had already gotten to the point where I just wasn’t getting any decent critique anyway. Leaving me on my own to write and revise without feedback. Which is okay for now. Things may reform in the future, or not. But there are too many hard feelings over there for it to ever be the same as it was, I feel. I do feel cut off and on my own. At the same time, that opens up a whole new world, the possibility of meeting new people elsewhere, making new friends and contacts, and a lot more. The end of something is always the beginning of something else. That parallels what’s going on in my own life, of course, obviously. Ending one household, one set of relationships, and starting all over again, with my own life, now freed of old patterns and baggage. Nothing but what you yourself carry forward. And I am doing my best to divest, purge, let go, and carry nothing forward that I do not need, or which no longer serves me. 781. 28 March 2008, Beloit, WI I wake early to light streaming horizontally into the big windows of the house. The land and trees are covered with frosting, a thick candy-coating of white that hasn’t begun to melt yet. My dreams were of wandering in a version of Ann Arbor, the library part of town, with various fantasy adventures; nothing really vivid, but with a familiar emotional tone of things getting back to normal. Whatever normal means anymore. My waking and sleeping schedule seem off lately, but I don’t feel really sleep-deprived; I’m just not sleeping my normal hours, but I am catching up with naps, etc. • the day after a late winter snow flurry wind shakes snowballs off the tall trees onto the back of the drumming woodpecker • I’m also catching up with projects that have been on hold for weeks, because of our focus on the house, the estate sale, and everything else. I am in the process of buying my own first home, complete with all the exhilaration and panic that implies: a stand-alone condo near here, with nature views out back and a quiet street. The wind is knocking the remaining snow off the tree branches. I went out to bring in the garbage and recycling bins, and it was like it was snowing on the driveway again, beneath a clear blue sky. 780. 27 March 2008, Beloit, WI Last night as I was going to bed, my sixth and seventh charkas were wide open and pulsing; some kind of download, or upgrade. It was still going on when I woke this morning. Have no idea what about, though. We had another several inches of snow about a week ago, which then quickly melted in the warm weather. This morning, it’s lightly snowing, flurries mostly, as P. prepares to fly back home to Holland. After which, I will have the house to myself again for awhile. And then I’ll be closing on my own condo, and then moving. It’s going to be busy and complicated and stressful the next few weeks, for a couple more months, and then it’s going to be over. I could feel Dad and Mom this morning, in that in-between state between waking and sleeping, Still asking me if I wanted to join them; still saying no, thank you. • Later: I just got back from taking P. to the bus. I’m pretty exhausted, after weeks of productive work around shipping, moving, estate sales, etc., I’m going to take the rest of the day off, as much as I can, watch movies, sit around nude, make dinner, go to bed. Sounds absolutely hedonistic and wonderful. I’ll get right on it. Right after I take a nap. • Later: One two-hour nap later, feeling much revived, thank you very much. It’s been lightly snowing all day, very beautiful, very fresh-looking. 779. 21 March 2008, Beloit, WI My dreams last night were like spy movies, not much action but a lot of suspicion: who do you trust?, evasion and escape, narrow escapes from enemies, that sort of thing. Yesterday it was a sunny and warm day. The auction people were here to take away things for the estate sale. They were here packing boxes and loading them for five hours, and they took away about half a moving van’s worth of material. It was stressful for P. and I to see it all go—a lot of memories going—but also exciting. The house actually looks emptier for the first time since this process of sorting and moving and organizing began. Now P. is going to focus on what she wants to ship to Holland, and I need a day of creative work. I feel completely wring out. We went out to dinner last night, though, which was good. This morning, as predicted, and fortunately a day after the auction people came, there is whiteout blizzard going on outside: one last big winter storm. We could get several inches, and set further snowfall records for a winter that ahs already set several records. The wind is high, and the snow dances back and forth in all directions as it falls. Soon I will get up, get dressed, and get the cameras out for some last winter photography from here. This will be the last winter in this house, after all. I want to record this beauty as much as possible. • Later: I’ve been out making video and photos of this latest storm. The wind is higher than in some other storms, making the tree branches sway, and the snow constantly change direction. It’s very dramatic. It’s going to snow all day long, so I will break away from other duties periodically to make more images, whenever something catches my eye. 778. 14 March 2008, Beloit, WI A violent dream that lingers in mind, leaving me shaken when I wake up: I am in a bank or store, visiting a friend who works there, when a robbery happens; there is shouting and yelling off to the side; I am hiding my wallet under the counter when I hear a gunshot and then feel a huge kick in my left shoulder, like being kicked by a mule; no pain at first, just shock; lots more yelling, off in the distance; before I black out I see a button that must be the silent alarm, and trigger it. The rest of the night that violence was in my mind, even as other dreams played out: pain, suffering, being crippled in the arm; a hole in my chest between the clavicle and shoulder, just above the heart. I wake up feeling bruised, a little shaky. I remember having dreams this violent in my teens. I turned some of them into story ideas, back then, which I still remember. This one was not as good a plot as those old ones, as it were, but these emotions feel familiar. A shot to the heart? A time of radical change and beginnings, again? It’s not clear. 777. 12 March 2008, Beloit, WI I’ve been on the phone or doing meetings and paperwork for days. Buying a house is a major life-changing commitment. When I’m not freaked out, I’m excited; and people are telling me that that’s normal. I’m also really, really busy. I don’t have time right now for anyone’s drama but my own. Managing my own rollercoaster is a full-time occupation. People need to just keep understanding that this is a period of my life when I need to focus hard on things important to my own future—like sorting and moving, like finding health insurance, etc., and that everything else is secondary. To be fair, lots of folks do understand, and are cutting me the slack I need right now. When it’s all done, I can get back on the horse, and go on. But it’s a little surprising, sometimes, when people who I thought would understand, don’t. 776. 9 March 2008, Beloit, WI I feel well-nigh vaporized. In the past couple of days, I made an offer on a condo, and it’s been verbally accepted although they’re late in getting the paperwork back. Part of me is in the freak out, what the hell have I done, stage. Part of my mind is racing to figure out everything that needs to be done in the weeks and months to come. It’s going to be a stressful time, on the tail end of a very long and stressful period. It’s going to be pretty intense, and I worry about having enough financial resources to make it happen. I can’t do this alone; it would be too much, too insane. I don’t know if I can do it at all. But it’s the right thing to be doing. It’s just so amazing, and overwhelming, and frightening and exciting, all at the same time. I went to bed last night feeling completely vaporized, and had a restless night’s sleep. I woke up too early this morning, mind racing. Last night was also a concert in Madison, and tonight is a repeat concert, with attending stress and necessary plans, and all. It’s tempting to say that the timing of all this happening at once is bad, but that’s not true; it’s just that it’s stress piled on top of stress. That’s something I might be used to by now, though, after the events of the last year or so. In some ways, what this is, is all movement forward into full freedom for me, and the removal of obstacles to be replaced with a streamlined ability to get what I want, when it’s what I need. Thanks be to Ganesha, Remove of Obstacles, and Hermes, god of speed and the crossroads and change and communication. • Later: I went back to sleep for an hour or two, later. The most vivid dream was of living in an apartment on the top floor of a rickety house, that was swaying in the wind and rain, and always about to topple, making me hang to something; although it never actually fell over, it threatened to continuously; I remember thinking, Thank God I won’t be living here much longer. 775. 7 March 2008, Beloit, WI I’ve had a very long day, and I’m very tired, and it’s late at night, and I’m still too wired for sleep. I’ve been on the phone for hours, counseling friends, tonight, on top of everything else. Which is effort, but not hard work, just energy expenditure. It’s not about me, it’s very impersonal at times. Today I made a step into a world that’s very new to me—that’s completely new, who am I kidding—and a major life-changing step: with my financial planner at my side, I made an offer on buying a house. It’s really a condo, part of a condo association, but it’s a stand-alone building, doesn’t share a wall, it’s large enough to be roomy for me, but small enough to be easy to take care of, and it has most everything that I want in a place to live, including a fireplace and screened-in porch, which is also glassed-in so it can be a sunroom in winter. It has a full basement with storage racks built in. I still have a lot of Stuff, and moving it will be a chore, but not an impossible one. I can make it work, and I have the support and guidance that I need. (I have good people helping me, and I know I could never do this on my own.) But there it is: something I had given up believing would ever happen to me: A place of my own to live in. My home base from which to travel, to do my work. It makes me think about something that I only came to realize as I was talking on the phone tonight with a good friend: Now that Mom and Dad are gone (I feel no disloyalty in saying this, it’s no judgment, it’s just information), I may be free of the obstacles that I feel have held me back my whole life. Or maybe I’ve finally reached the threshold of learning to be really detached from worry about outcomes. I do feel freed, even as I grieve and continue deal with the aftermath of everything that has happened this past year. I wonder if, now that that phase of this life is done, and those sacred contracts have been completed, if I can now be free to live my own life, unshadowed, and unburdened. I feel like what I say now has more and more ease of coming into manifestation, and what I wish for has more power behind it to become true. I wanted this house, it was instantaneous desire, and it feels right. There are many things about it that are perfectly suited to me, and to the life I want to live. The new life, with my new career with LCG and the DVDs and music and photography. I am also remembering how John Cage once commented that he was fifty before he was well-to-do. I feel like that’s coming true for me, too. It might be another year or two, and I have no doubts: it will be true. Rob Breszny’s Sacred Advertisement for Capricorn this week, which he attaches to his weekly horoscopes, was: Say this: "Novel intuitions are now erupting from my smart heart, awakening me from any trance I've been ensnared in. I am hereby breaking and escaping obstructions that have hindered my ability to express my soul's code. All of my unique capacities are being unleashed, all of my potentials activated. I recognize that I'm a miraculous work of art, a masterpiece unlike any other ever created in the history of the world." Seems perfect.  774. 4 March 2008, Beloit, WI My dreams full of amber and gold colored insects; scarabs in a landscape; exploring an alley in rolling hills between tall trees, I stop to take photos and discover I am in a yellowjacket hive, they swarm everywhere and begin to sting me; an afternoon sky the color and clarity of clear pale amber. I’ve spent a couple of days recovering. I’m still sore and achy, but better rested. I slept in late yesterday, just needing to spend more time resting. This morning I woke up a little early, and I’m taking my time starting the day. I have been finding this morning time to be a good time for me to do some sorting and organizing in the basement, before I go up to make breakfast. I get more done before bed, as well, most days. There’s still a lot to do, but I can see gaps now amidst the piles of books and boxes and other objects. Some of my own bookshelves now only have one layer of books on them, instead of two or three, and I can see the wall behind the books through the shelf. I keep discovering more boxes of books hidden away in my old bedroom, and also in the storeroom, I bring them out to the library room, add them to the collection, and gradually sort through them. Since the end of January, I’ve driven up to Madison several times to sell off over a thousand books, and of course brought home about a dozen new books plus some CDs. One never escapes completely unscathed from a good used bookstore. So, some progress is ongoing, it just takes time to do it. I am learning to not push myself too hard, and to also not be pushed too hard by outside forces. It’s a work in progress.  773. 2 March 2008, Beloit, WI After almost three days of being away from the online world, you come back home to over a hundred new emails, a lot of posts on the various message boards that do nothing but keep the wheel of samsara turning, and not much news of note. At the moment, all I can raise is a shrug, because I’m tired and sore, and needing to go to bed soon. Part of you wonders if anyone notices when you go away and come back. Nothing happens, and nothing you say has been responded to, so you feel that, if no one is going to bother to notice all the work you’re doing, then it’s okay to stop bothering to do the work. I can write book reviews and other essays, and if no one cares, then why bother? That’s not sour grapes, that’s the realization that effort expended that doesn’t lead to dialogue is not always worth spending. There are points where you just have to let it go, and put your effort into the arenas that do create dialogue. That all goes in cycles, too, of course. And I’m the last to advocate doing things for the simple sake of provoking a response. I’m much more interested in making the art that I am moved to make, regardless of the payoff, or lack thereof. I won’t change what I do to please others; that’s a dangerous precedent. At the same time, not all the art I make is just for myself; that’s not the point, either. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, there is always a context. But the context cannot dictate the art. They must coexist. In the past two or three days, I’ve practiced learning new techniques in Photoshop, I’ve made a few new drawings—sketches, really, still drawing practice rather than finished pieces. Various themes, as I still learn what I’m doing.  This morning the dawn was spectacular. The sun was a ball of light through the morning mist before it burned off. The white land of the snow-filled yard before the lake, and the white lake itself, were backlit by the sun. The shadows of the trees were charcoal blue in color, and all angled away from the sun’s glow, like an aisle pointing towards dawn. It’s something I want to draw, this vision. I might have to use one of my own photos as reference, which is fine.  I stopped at Devil’s Lake on the way home, and trudged around in the deep snow for an hour, taking photos, till I was tired and sore.  When I got home, I threw all my clothes into the laundry and took a long hot shower, feeling much better afterwards. My arms and hands are still very sore, and also stiff. So, I wanted to draw today, but I was too sore. No more bowling, I think. These are all lessons learned the hard way, this weekend. But the social aspect of bowling was good, and I had some nice long conversations with men I hadn’t really gotten to know till now. Now, to bed early, as I’m really hitting that wall tonight. It’s been a long exhausting weekend, and I’m needing at least a day of nothing much to do. I hope it works out that way.  772. 2 March 2008, Green Lake, WI Up at dawn, photos of the long shadows of the trees on the snow, with the sun rising over the frozen and snow-covered lake. After bowling last night, I’m sore and even more tired. A long hot shower felt good. I sprained my right hand bowling early on, last night, so I bowled left-handed the rest of the night. It’s useful being ambidextrous. I’m still a terrible bowler, with either hand, doing mostly gutter balls—which I discovered I cared about too much—but also with the occasional strike and several spares: all left-handed. Beat that! Actually it was strange: I either did gutter balls or strikes, not much in between. I don’t like competition. It brings out the worst things in me, performance anxiety, competitiveness, and the tendency to beat myself up when I don’t live up to my own desires and expectations. I avoid competition most of the time. Even though bowling last night was mostly social, and I enjoyed all the conversations I had, still, I beat myself up for being the worst bowler in the room. A place I don’t like to go. Interestingly, the times I got strikes I knew it was going to happen. I made several spares that were gutters followed by strikes. Each time, I knew it was going to happen. The rest of the time, I couldn’t control the ball, and it almost always was a bad throw. When I knew it was going to happen (sometimes it was connected to being pissed off), it was perfect; the rest of the time, I had no control at all. So, my performance was all at extremes, no middle ground. We played three games, and I was worst in the last one; but I was also tired and sore at that point, exhausted and playing through the pain; I should have stopped after two, which was my best game. In all a learning experience. This morning, I have pain everywhere, and I’m even more tired. But the morning is a beautiful one. On the way home, I plan to stop for photography at Devil’s Lake. An opportunity, since I’m already north of Madison, up here at the Lake. This is a lovely region, rural and resort combined. People are out on the lake this morning, and a family was building snowmen on the lake. 771. 1 March 2008, Green Lake, WI Strike while the muse is hot: I’ve made three drawings while doing other things, here on retreat in Green Lake for the weekend. It’s a concert prep music rehearsal retreat. But during dinner, or meetings, or rehearsals when I have nothing to do, I’ve been drawing.  Drawing from memory. Images from places I’ve been or seen in the past few years. I started from circles again, in most cases. Using the straight-edge technique to outline shapes; overlapping and shading, or hard edges meeting other hard edges but with line-directions going in different ways. A dead brown saguaro cactus in front of a red sun. A multi-color, carefully-shaded depiction of the lunar eclipse from last week. A sunset over the ocean, with the green flash; that one done in watercolor pencils. I haven’t smeared the pencils with water yet, but I draw it all out, and I’ll see how the pigment looks when wetted later.  I’ve also been making a lot of photographs here, mostly of elements rather than finished images. There are some amazing icicles hanging from the eaves, sparkling in the sun, or backlit, or silver in the blue of evening light.  770. 25 February 2008, Beloit, WI The past two weeks I have been fighting off severe depression. It hurts to do anything. My old knee injury has been a real problem. It hurts to think, and to get out of bed. It hurts to go back to bed, because I can’t always sleep. So I get back out of bed, and I putter around doing things, till I’m too tired to stay awake. I’ve managed to sell off over a thousand books so far, in the past month, and I keep sorting more out and getting them ready to sell. I’ve been driving up to Madison to do that; there’s this used book store that is a terrific place, and they give good credit for my used books. Of course I never escape unscathed, always finding one or two books and CDs or DVDs to replace those I’ve gotten rid of. But a one or two percent return is fair enough, I think, and not a burden. At least I never bring home anything I took away to be gotten rid of; what I bring home is new and interesting to me. I’m digging into my old bedroom, and clearing things out in there, too. It’s all significant progress. Yet it feels hollow, like it’s nothing, even though it isn’t. Progress is being made. I just feel numb about it all. My mental clarity is affected. I can’t think clearly these past few days, and if I don’t write something down, I forget it. I want to sleep all the time, but I’m not tired. I guess it’s classic depression, but it feels like apathy, like numbness, like hollowness, like a bleak detachment. Nothing seems to matter very much. In the past two weeks, there’s been a numbness about everything, like a glass plate has been placed between me and the world. I can see it, but it doesn’t touch me, or move me. It’s an unpleasant detachment. I can reach out and feel the world, but it requires a huge effort, and I feel like I have no strength. Some days I don’t even have the will to cook, or the desire, or the energy. Fortunately, Ethnic Gourmet makes this line of Indian frozen dinners that are all-natural, no preservatives, and delicious. It’s unbeatably good food for when I simply don’t have the strength or desire to cook.
768. 16 February 2008, Beloit, WI A significant dream that wakes me at dawn: I am riding on a bus, going home to Madison; there was some confusion about the bus’ destinations when I first got on; it’s a minibus, not a big one; the driver and several passengers all know each other, they are local Wisconsin Indians; I sit behind an old grandfatherly man; even though I am a quiet white man, mostly looking out the window, for some reason they offer me a strip of their elk jerky to chew on, and include me in their jokes and conversation; the old man seems to want to take me under his wing. Even though I am feeling alone, I am adopted by the people of the earth, as one of them. It’s an open welcoming and acceptance that is rare among “my own” people, my birth tribe. I feel shy. I am again the insider-outsider, more welcome where I am an outsider, an exotic, than I ever am “at home.” Later dreams, in the morning, after I go back to sleep, have similar themes. 767. 15 February 2008, Chicago, IL A nightmare, for me: I am arriving late at a wedding, and a reception, in the wrong suit and tie; I don’t know what’s going on; am I the bridegroom, the best man, the reception organizer?; everyone is upset and mad at me; at one point, I am annoyed enough to just leave, since no one will tell me what is going on, yet they all expect me to know; since they’re already mad at me, who cares if I leave? it makes no difference; but my bag spills its contents all over the floor, the last straw on my temper, and as I am gathering it all back together, a woman who is in charge comes over and asks me to stay; she is calm an collected; I end up working security, invisibly at the sidelines, and I am much more pleased to not be in the center of things, and not being blamed for what I don’t know about. It’s a sunny morning, as I sit here and write, and I find myself still hung over from the emotional storms of recent days. Emotional hangovers feel like lingering tiredness, a little numbness that isn’t completely cured by engagement even with things one wants to pursue, and subdued energetically. • Later, back in Beloit: I find myself irritable and tired today, after some shopping and the drive home. Not a lot of sleep, and those kinds of dreams can rock you for the whole day. No matter what meaning you decide to pull out of them—and I think that was just an emotional process dream—they can still tire you out, make you feel a little wraith-driven throughout the day. I would love to go out and do something to distract myself, but I’m feeling too tired, and a little soured by life. Nothing really appeals, not even a movie. What good is entertainment? especially, what good is it versus art? Often, not much good at all. Entertainment has its uses, for me, when I do need distraction, or some down time. But I don’t use it nearly as much as many others seem to; maybe it was the time in the desert, or those other times in my life when I’ve been without TV or the other usual entertainment delivery systems, but I find that most of the time, the “usual thing” is boring at best, actively toxic at worst, to me. I’d rather watch a documentary or movie on DVD than what’s on TV, almost all the time. I’d rather the house be filled with open silence than patched over with space-filling babble. I’d rather choose what to listen to, on the stereo, when I want to listen, than listen to the radio. I even like and support radio, and have been a volunteer programmer on more than one community radio station; but I don’t listen to the radio that much, even my own stations. I feel like the flurry of activity and emotional storms of the past week have wiped me out, left me empty and exhausted. I feel like I have no energy to engage with anything, nor any desire. I can plod ahead with rote tasks, but my appetite and interest are not their. I also continue to negotiate, not always successfully, the minefield of friends who mean well, but are breathtakingly ignorant about how to “support” me, in these days of recovery and rebirth. The insensitivity, the lack of actual listening, has been staggering at times, to the point where right now I trust fewer than ever. I look out the window, and see tracks of the red fox on the snow and ice covering the river; or I see the trees making lines of shadows on the snow; or I see the pale blue winter sky, with the powerless sun over to the west—these things support me better than any words have lately, than any sentiments or feedback, or badgering and hectoring that some friends seem to think is supportive. Well, it’s not. It’s just clueless. Other friends are just absent. They’re off doing their own thing, with their own lives. Even when I need them, they’re not there. So what. It doesn’t matter. I’m not the center of this or any other universe—not even my own. After the time in the desert, I’m the first to say that it’s not about me, and it’s not centered on me, none of it matters, and it’s all an illusion. 766. 12 February 2008, Beloit, WI I’ve had some blows and some meltdowns in the past few days. I’ve discovered just how much losing my future business and homesteading plans would mean to me. Everything’s probably okay, but I find myself on edge, unable to completely believe or trust. There are still things to work out, still uncertainties, still desperate fears of the nothingness. It’s ironic that I, who have spent so much time there, should now be afraid of uncertainty and the nothingness. It’s a commentary on where I’ve invested my hopes, perhaps; and reminder of how toxic hope itself can be, for me. There are truths I want to believe in, that I don’t dare believe in, that I don’t even dare collapsing into some belief about unbelief or about taking them for granted. This is still a fragile scaffolding on to build a new life. I quake with every gust of wind that sets the scaffold moving. It’s probably sturdier than it feels, but I don’t trust that, yet. 765. 9 February 2008, Beloit, WI A major meltdown today: the props of my future life pulled away like the last leg of a teetering table, and it all falls down. I pretty much vaporized myself over it, and now I feel exhausted and tired, beyond anything. I dreamed of tigers and giant cats; there were friendly to me, but still dangerous and fierce; like a giant kitten, one of them wanted to butt heads with me, and cuddle for a nap, but the sheer mass of him was frightening despite all good intentions. In the past few days, I have been working hard sorting through my belongings in the basement, going through them in waves. But I also lost several days this week to the bad weather—the storm so bad one night that the interstate was shut down, as the trucks couldn’t get up the hills near Stoughton; so trucks were parked overnight all over the streets around here, waiting for morning—and also I just went to white mind a few times. Catching up on sleep, one day I napped three times. Another day I basically puttered around the house, and never went out. I did some sorting but nothing much. I went online for awhile, but nothing much. 764. 8 February 2008, Beloit, WI Up in Madison all day, selling books before going to see a concert by the Academy of Ancient Music, a venerable early-music ensemble now directed by a friend of mine, Richard Egarr. Richard introduced himself during a moment when stage hands were moving the harpsichord around; then he introducted the harpsichord like this: "Do you remember in that Monty Python movie when they're in the operating room and one of the doctors refers to the machine that goes Ping? Well, this is the machine that goes Ping!" I laughed a long time on that one. After the concert, Richard and I were able to chat for a long time, as he was greeting the public and autographing CDs. It was a very pleasant visit. The concert was terrific, and we had a nice time to hang out afterwards. A very very cold day. We just had a record snowfall here, 21 inches total, and there’s more on the way, after a bitter cold spell. This is a real winter here, this year, no question. All day long I felt poems hovering at the edge of my mind, and I even bought a little notebook because for once I had forgotten to bring one with me. But when I came to write, it was already late in the day, I was already tired—my limits are still there, albeit not as severe as before—and what came out seems not very profound. I can still feel something hovering at the edge of consciousness, wanting to be written; but I don’t know what it is. It may be music, too, rather than words. • real face behind false— under snowbanks waters meet in rivers and lakes • urge to write haiku overcomes social graces— broken conversation • shrinking bookpiles as we sell off memories— when’s moving day? • on a dark afternoon the unfulfilling rapture the timorous moth-touch the bending under the marvelous weight of cloud and time and circumstance sing of branch and line limpid elemental signature turn the page to music firelight, stick, bark, paper again blackened walls again another inspiral demolition music of crackle and bow warm cast firelit stone • These are just etudes, then. Nothing much to say. The urge to say something, but nothing to say. An interesting day’s nothingness. Some silence mixed in behind the faces of the words. I few abstract thoughts, but a lot of white mind, no-mind, too. the urge to write hovers on the horizon a storm that doesn’t break all afternoon till you have to find another notebook because for once the usual journals left scattered on desks having nothing to say were tossed behind and when you want to write you have nothing to say 763. 4 February 2008, Beloit, WI Slept deeply last night, some interesting dreams, but nothing worth recording. I wake to the sound of winter rain on the windows: rain ticking over the snow, on the edge of freezing. I went to the doctor last Friday, to follow up on the bloodwork and other tests from last month. Everything is normal, and good. Except for the obvious, I’m in good health. Today I’m going to go see my other doctor, and hopefully hear something similar. If I could afford to hope, this would all be encouraging about applying for medical insurance; I filled out applications last week, and there will be a waiting period now; if I get rejected, I have to go through it all three times before some kind of state-sponsored coverage would kick in. So it could be weeks or months before I know what the results are, and what my options could be. At the moment, I feel like it’s being managed, and that I’m slowly changing my status. I have no interest in going to any kind of illness support group at this time. They might call it denial. I call it refusal to accept an illness as my chief identity. I refuse to let it dominate and arrange the rest of my life. They call IBD an autoimmune disorder because all that means is that they don’t really know the cause—beyond the stress and irritability components, which can be tied to triggers but not first causes. Lots of things are classified as autoimmune simply because the body reacts as if being attacked; but we don’t know what it’s reacting to, what causes it, or how to cure it. In some ways it’s a catch-all classification that really means nothing. So the reason there’s no cure because they don’t really know the first cause. But I do know from people who are the canaries in the coal mines, from sensitive people who have been down these roads, that if you minimize the irritants—hence the diet changes I’m going through—you minimize the impact the dis-ease has on the rest of your life. It’s a dis-ease, not a disease. It’s a condition that I hold out can be cured—or call it permanent remission if you prefer—rather than succumbed to. So, I don’t need a “support group” to help me “live with it,” and I don’t need someone lecturing to me about the stages of acceptance, denial, anger, and all that. I’ve read the literature, and I’ll do it my own damned, stubborn way for as long as it serves me to do so. • Later: I find myself, the past two days, after everything that’s happened, able to feel positive about anything, anything at all, for the first time in a long time. When I think about moving to my own home, when I think about the business, when I think about my own life in the future, and what I want to do next, I feel positive. Then I think about how much I miss Mom, and I can get weepy again. But I don’t feel pulled, today, back into that black well of abject depression. I don’t feel brought to my knees. At least not today. I am enjoying a day without drama, when I feel more or less at neutral buoyancy. I saw my UC doctor earlier today, and he’s encouraged by my current progress. We’re going to continue for now with our current course of meds, and practice. I don’t have to see him again fro two months, and we’ll re-evaluate then, again. For now, though, I’m otherwise healthy medically, and gradually returning to an even keel. it may still take a long time to get my strength back, and to the live without an irritations in my bowels. But today, if only for today, I’m enjoying the moment, for as long as I don’t feel like crap. I make no promises for tomorrow. This is all very moment-by-moment. • Later: It’s turned into a nothing day, a day I did nothing but rest. I went to the doctor, but then I napped twice, and I feel a little pre-flu tonight, despite a warm fireplace and a mug of hot sweet tea. Maybe I’m coming down with a cold; that would be ironic timing, as usual. I went out back to make some photos in the afternoon, today, and maybe got chilled. There is water on top of the ice in the river, as it’s been raining all day, the temperature hovering just above freezing. There were all kinds of tracks in the wet, heavy snow in the backyard: deer, rabbits. Maybe even fox tracks. After dark, I saw a raccoon patrol circles in the yard three times, following an established trail, for an unknown reason. Do raccoons have purpose? One doesn’t know. I wrote a draft of an Ode to Walt Whitman, tonight, as well. Something loose and talky, not at all finished yet. It takes me back to when I was writing the Sutras between 6 and 10 years ago: longer poems in various styles, all on specific topics, poems that tended to expand rather than contract on rewrite, most of the time. Probably not great poems; but necessary writing, nonetheless. One does tire of the tyranny of literary quality, of critics and other poets knocking you down unless you’re top of your game 100 percent of the time, or of dismissing bodies of work that were written to SAY something, rather than to just be perfect little gems of perfect writing. I get tired of the tyranny of craft, more than anything else. 762. 2 February 2008, Beloit, WI It’s been a rough week. I wanted nothing more than a day or two to myself, when I could just focus on the future rather than have to keep circling around the events of the past few months; but that didn’t happen. I hit the wall a couple of times. I have a lot anger, right now, I know it. The problem is, so many well-meaning people just want to talk it all out with me, even when I don’t want to, on more than one occasion, I have said, let’s talk about something else, and they can’t let go of their own needs to talk about it, so on top of everything else, I ended up feeling ignored and disrespected. What, you didn’t hear me when I said, I don’t want to talk about it right now, all five times? I guess not. I am looking at places to live, as I begin a new phase of my own life: the next phase of my life. I don’t want to rent anymore, I want to buy a condo and live in it for awhile. It can be my base of operations for several years. All that time, I build up my own equity, rather than paying rent. Either way you pay your own utilities, so why not put it towards your own good. And I’m going to do it here in Beloit. Maybe in a dozen years or so, I’ll be able to move somewhere else in the country, or want to; in the meantime, this is a good place, and it’s a cheaper place than many others to get started. If and when it starts snowing again this afternoon, I plan to go out and make some photos. • Later: This afternoon, as I was standing looking out the window, I saw a beautiful red fox with a long bushy black-tipped tail walk along the frozen river and onto the bank opposite. It lingered, eventually disappearing into the woods, where it no doubt has a den. This is the second fox sighting here in month. (Eat the mice, please!) What a beautiful thing to see, against the white land and under the white sky. 761. 30 January 2008, Beloit, WI, late night Barry Lopez wrote in Arctic Dreams: Winter darkness brings on the extreme winter depression the Polar Eskimos call perlororneq. According to the anthropologist Jean Malaurie, the means to feel "the weight of life." To look ahead to all that must be accomplished and to retreat to the present feeling defeated, weary before starting, a core of anger, a miserable sadness. It is to be "sick of life: a man named Imina told Malaurie. The victim tears fitfully at his clothing. A woman begins aimlessly slashing at things in the igloo with her knife. A person runs half naked into the bitter freezing night, screaming out at the village, eating the shit of the dogs. Eventually, the person is clamed by others in the family, with great compassion, and helped to sleep. Perlororneq. Winter. I just had what feels like a big relationship-ending fight with a friend. Former friend? We’ll see. Time alone knows. I repeatedly said that I didn’t want to talk about recent events—I’ve been trying to take a day off, and all anyone wants to talk about is recent events, Mom’s death, what’s going to happen next—but they just couldn’t not talk about it. I had been having a decent day—I figure that achieving neutral buoyancy, rather than drowning, is a major achievement, this week—and this friend basically would not let go of poking and pushing me. They said I wish you’d get angry, so I did, and then I got told I needed to apologize for getting angry—talk about mixed messages—so then I got really angry and hung up on them. Called back later, left a message. That’s it. I’m done. It’s all about everyone’s expectations of me, again. Starting tonight, I’m on vacation, and I WILL enforce it. Not one thing more about any of this for tomorrow, and no new things. I’m not going to answer the phone, or the door, or read the mail. No more email, and no more blogs or poetry websites. Not for some time. I’m not going to get that vacation I wanted, when I could drive down to Texas then over to California. I’m having wintermind on top of everything else. This winter is colder and more snowy than any in the past ten years; so, cabin fever, and feeling trapped indoors by the extreme cold. You don’t even WANT to go outside, even though you’re going apeshit crazy. Feeling trapped on many levels. 760. 28 January 2008, Beloit, WI, late night I’ve felt pulled away from myself, my own timing lost under everyone else’s, my own inner voices drowned under the general rush. I’ve lost my center, and haven’t had a chance to find it again. My patience is therefore at a low ebb, especially with those I know who are full of fixed opinions and pedantic advice—on whatever topic. I just don’t want to hear anymore. Call me thin-skinned for the nonce, I do not care; the usual arguments and contretemps seem like such a waste of time and breath, to me, right now, in the face of all that has happened. You really sort out your priorities—and my impatience right now is based mostly on the question, Why are we wasting time on this right now, when so many more important things are looming, and must be handled? Some people really do need to get lives. I dreamed last night of looking at a condo or house that I was thinking about moving into. It had a small gas fireplace in the corner. But when I turned the corner into that room from another room, to my right was a huge wood fireplace, like one might see in a Medieval castle, one large enough to walk into, with a tall archway instead of a standard mantle. Fires were burning in both fireplaces in my dream, one gas, one wood. I think it’s pretty clear that wherever I end up living next, there needs to be a fireplace. • Family Histories Boxes of photos. Scrapbooks full of memorabilia, some of it incomprehensible to the living, the importance of a piece known only to the dead. My mother's mother liked to collect into scrapbooks clippings that interested. In the old India trunks in the basement, I've found a scrapbook or two about Abraham Lincoln, one of her passions. Elsewhere in the house, I have her bronze Lincoln bookends, which I currently use on top of one of my shelves. Another recent find is a scrapbook of famous opera performers. Were these images and portraits clipped from magazines such as <i>Opera News,</i> the enthusiast's magazine that my father subscribed to until he died, and which still arrives on the doorstep? or were they clipped from newspapers of the time. many of the faces and names in the opera scrapbook are iconic, but unknown to anyone alive today who is not also an opera history buff. My father enjoyed reading history and biography. He listened to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast from New York City almost every Saturday of his life, after we returned from India. I have many memories of opera filling the house all Saturday afternoon, winter or summer. Was this scrapbook made by my grandmother for him, when we were away across the ocean? or does it predate out mission travels? It is in nearly mint condition. What causes us to make scrapbooks? I have another book of photos from Muskegon that was given to us by a cousin. There are a few photos of my mother and her sister on the beach at Muskegon, the summer waters of Lake Michigan in the background. There are many more people in this book that I do not know, nor did my father when we looked at it together. This scrapbook is disintegrating before my eyes. Turning the pages, fragments of black backing paper come loose, and fall away. I will photograph anew the pages of this scrapbook, even those pages that speak to me out of the mystery of unknown faces, unknown places, and relationships that are only imaginable, not reportable. I will continue to dig into our trunks in the basement, now that my parents have both passed away, and continue to uncover family histories, only some of which are labeled or described or named. There are always aspects of history that are lost with the stories and memories that made them, which we never had a chance to recover before they were gone. I tried to capture some. I recorded my father's voice, talking about the past. I have written down stories I remember being told around the dinner table. I will continue to record what I know. I am working out my own, new identity, as the past leaves us, and the future beckons me towards a new life, my own life, my life separate from my parents' lives, now that I have become a midlife orphan, now that the trunks are mine to sort through, now that nothing can be done but settle affairs and start over again. 759. 27 January 2008, Beloit, WI, late night I am getting absolutely nothing out of poetry critique anymore. I might as well not bother. It’s a waste of time. Everything I bring to any group is either ignored, dismissed out of hand by the purists, or seems to cause just plain bafflement. None of this is helpful to me as a writer. None of it helps me grow as a writer. None of it is useful to me, to suggest ways to improve my writing. I am back to writing in isolation. I might as well be writing in a vacuum, since nothing I am writing anymore is anything like what I used to write, and nothing like what any of the purist poets recognize or accept as poetry. I don’t mind that; this is not sour grapes. It is a recognition that I’m outside the box, for now, maybe for ever, and there’s no point stuffing myself back into it. It must be partly that I’m in a very different place, right now. So much has happened. I don’t feel like I have anything in common with other poets anymore. So much has happened, has changed in my life, in a very short time. Blow after blow after blow. |
