Wednesday, July 29, 2009
ha
Confirmation of the absolute pointlessness of the Evening News. The new electronic billboard downtown, the one that changes every 5 seconds, told me this in giant, dramatic letters as I waited at the red light: "Tonight on Channel 13: Larry Barker Investigates The Road To Nowhere."
Sunday, July 26, 2009
quote
"You will need three or four days to follow it out. The last part will be on foot. Prepare for this. Prepare for the impact of nothing. Get on a regimen of tea and biscuits and dried fruit. On the third or fourth day, when you are ready to quit, you will know you are on your way. When your throat is so thick with dust that you cannot breathe you will be almost halfway there. When the soles of your feet go numb with the burning and you cannot walk you will know that you have made no wrong turns. When you can no longer laugh at all it is only a little further. Push on.
It will not be as easy as it sounds. When you have walked miles to the head of a box canyon and find yourself with no climbing rope, no pitons, no one to belay you, you are going to have to improvise. When the dust chews a hole in your canteen and sucks it dry without a sound you will have to sit down and study the land for a place to dig for water. When you wake in the morning and find that a rattlesnake has curled up on your chest to take advantage of your warmth you will have to move quickly or wait out the sun's heat.
You will always know this: others have made it."
-- Barry Lopez, "Directions", Desert Notes
It will not be as easy as it sounds. When you have walked miles to the head of a box canyon and find yourself with no climbing rope, no pitons, no one to belay you, you are going to have to improvise. When the dust chews a hole in your canteen and sucks it dry without a sound you will have to sit down and study the land for a place to dig for water. When you wake in the morning and find that a rattlesnake has curled up on your chest to take advantage of your warmth you will have to move quickly or wait out the sun's heat.
You will always know this: others have made it."
-- Barry Lopez, "Directions", Desert Notes
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
what didn't happen
I couldn't make this up if I tried. I'm still trying to believe it all happened, even though I saw it happen. Even that is a question: I was sitting right there, I must've seen it happen. But the brain can't seem to find a visual record - the memory holds a moment of blindness, only full of sounds.
Back in Carlsbad again (another story). My sister and I are sitting on her porch. It's just about midnight. This is the best time to talk with her, as she gets ready for work on the night shift. The air is warm and humid, even now; the busy street she lives on is quiet for the moment. Suddenly there's a screech of tires - right in front of her house - and then a terrible CRASH! And CRASH! again, and AGAIN and AGAIN! I can't describe the volume - it fills the air. It sounds like a series of explosions are happening right in front of us, and then all the way down the block. They wrench the gut with the unmistakable crunch of metal twisting on metal. "Oh God," somebody yells (her? me?) "That was your jeep!" We can't see anything. There's the big tree in the yard, and all of our cars parked out front, and the noise itself overrides all the other senses. My sister's two friends burst out of the house. We're all running to the fence. Fully expecting to see flames, smoke, a whole block's worth of demolished vehicles. Please, no injured people...
But the block is mostly empty, suddenly quiet again. Although neighbors are starting to run out of their houses onto the street. "What happened?" comes from all sides. Sitting on the sidewalk at the end of the block is a Blazer with its smoking grill wrapped around a telephone pole. As we watch, a woman climbs out of the driver side, walks around the back of it, and disappears toward the alley. Everyone is too amazed, and too far away, to try and stop her.
"Your jeep..." everyone says. There's a crazy story here, and we all know it. My sister and jeeps go way back - 15 years or so. She's had almost half a dozen in her driving years. All older models, all well-loved, driven hard, kept up with sweat and grease and duct tape and baling wire. This one is unusual, and it represents her sudden return to freedom and choice, after 3 years with my grandmother. She happened onto it - just overhauled, spotless, great price - and took out a perhaps impulsive loan to bring it home. Four days ago. She's driven it twice. She just insured it yesterday. And followed an intuition, at the DMV, to lower her deductibles. And didn't follow an intuition, earlier this evening, to move it from the street into the driveway.
We creep around to its outer side, groaning. Imagining shards of glass, ripped metal. And it looks...almost normal. It has a flat tire. The bumper's disconnected, crooked. And though the drive shaft has been knocked loose by the impact, there's no body damage at all. We've called 911. Small town that this is, the police arrive in about 5 minutes. They're efficient, professional, helpful enough. We climb out of shock enough to survey the street. The other crashes, apparently, were a street sign being flattened, and the meeting with the telephone pole at the finale. And the jeep's tire blowing, as the Blazer clinked it right on one of its big, sturdy rims and then bounced off. Deflecting it from the neighbors' fence - and maybe, given the speed and trajectory, from their living room. Correcting the woman's progress on down to the end of the sidewalk where she has also, somehow, threaded between two mailboxes that are still standing.
Just inches behind the jeep sits my sister's friend's car, untouched. The normal guest parking spot is in front of the jeep (in the direction the Blazer was headed), but for some reason, she didn't park there when she arrived. She started to and changed her mind. I did the same, when I arrived here 8-10 minutes earlier from my brother's - I took the last space in the driveway. And the friend also didn't leave when she had thought about it, just a few minutes earlier. That's to say, either of us could easily have been right in that Blazer's path, with the shift of one offhand decision. Us, or our cars - and for either of us, a wreck right now would be a calamitous thing.
On closer inspection, it looks like the jeep might have suffered some frame damage. The next exciting installment, later today, will be when my sister calls her insurance company and learns whether she's just - unintentionally, unwillingly - made a double profit on her purchase. Which she will, if they deliver the kind of estimate they just might make on the damages.
What didn't happen. Just as important as everything that did. In how many other situations, just like in this one? That is my wondering drift of thought today...
Back in Carlsbad again (another story). My sister and I are sitting on her porch. It's just about midnight. This is the best time to talk with her, as she gets ready for work on the night shift. The air is warm and humid, even now; the busy street she lives on is quiet for the moment. Suddenly there's a screech of tires - right in front of her house - and then a terrible CRASH! And CRASH! again, and AGAIN and AGAIN! I can't describe the volume - it fills the air. It sounds like a series of explosions are happening right in front of us, and then all the way down the block. They wrench the gut with the unmistakable crunch of metal twisting on metal. "Oh God," somebody yells (her? me?) "That was your jeep!" We can't see anything. There's the big tree in the yard, and all of our cars parked out front, and the noise itself overrides all the other senses. My sister's two friends burst out of the house. We're all running to the fence. Fully expecting to see flames, smoke, a whole block's worth of demolished vehicles. Please, no injured people...
But the block is mostly empty, suddenly quiet again. Although neighbors are starting to run out of their houses onto the street. "What happened?" comes from all sides. Sitting on the sidewalk at the end of the block is a Blazer with its smoking grill wrapped around a telephone pole. As we watch, a woman climbs out of the driver side, walks around the back of it, and disappears toward the alley. Everyone is too amazed, and too far away, to try and stop her.
"Your jeep..." everyone says. There's a crazy story here, and we all know it. My sister and jeeps go way back - 15 years or so. She's had almost half a dozen in her driving years. All older models, all well-loved, driven hard, kept up with sweat and grease and duct tape and baling wire. This one is unusual, and it represents her sudden return to freedom and choice, after 3 years with my grandmother. She happened onto it - just overhauled, spotless, great price - and took out a perhaps impulsive loan to bring it home. Four days ago. She's driven it twice. She just insured it yesterday. And followed an intuition, at the DMV, to lower her deductibles. And didn't follow an intuition, earlier this evening, to move it from the street into the driveway.
We creep around to its outer side, groaning. Imagining shards of glass, ripped metal. And it looks...almost normal. It has a flat tire. The bumper's disconnected, crooked. And though the drive shaft has been knocked loose by the impact, there's no body damage at all. We've called 911. Small town that this is, the police arrive in about 5 minutes. They're efficient, professional, helpful enough. We climb out of shock enough to survey the street. The other crashes, apparently, were a street sign being flattened, and the meeting with the telephone pole at the finale. And the jeep's tire blowing, as the Blazer clinked it right on one of its big, sturdy rims and then bounced off. Deflecting it from the neighbors' fence - and maybe, given the speed and trajectory, from their living room. Correcting the woman's progress on down to the end of the sidewalk where she has also, somehow, threaded between two mailboxes that are still standing.
Just inches behind the jeep sits my sister's friend's car, untouched. The normal guest parking spot is in front of the jeep (in the direction the Blazer was headed), but for some reason, she didn't park there when she arrived. She started to and changed her mind. I did the same, when I arrived here 8-10 minutes earlier from my brother's - I took the last space in the driveway. And the friend also didn't leave when she had thought about it, just a few minutes earlier. That's to say, either of us could easily have been right in that Blazer's path, with the shift of one offhand decision. Us, or our cars - and for either of us, a wreck right now would be a calamitous thing.
On closer inspection, it looks like the jeep might have suffered some frame damage. The next exciting installment, later today, will be when my sister calls her insurance company and learns whether she's just - unintentionally, unwillingly - made a double profit on her purchase. Which she will, if they deliver the kind of estimate they just might make on the damages.
What didn't happen. Just as important as everything that did. In how many other situations, just like in this one? That is my wondering drift of thought today...
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
quote
Picked this book off the shelf at my sister's...
"Perhaps the universe has been outthinking us, too...My body is cooperating with the universe better than I manage to.
Healthy cells remain tied to their source no matter how many times they divide. For them, being an outcast is not an option...
The mystery of life was patient and careful in allowing its full potential to emerge. Even now, the silent agreement that holds my body together feels like a secret because, to all appearances, this agreement doesn't exist.
The mystery was changing [his father, recently passed on] from one state to another, and I realized that the same transformation is happening in myself and in everyone. We are all held together and we all dissolve according to mystery, nothing else."
-- Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets
"Perhaps the universe has been outthinking us, too...My body is cooperating with the universe better than I manage to.
Healthy cells remain tied to their source no matter how many times they divide. For them, being an outcast is not an option...
The mystery of life was patient and careful in allowing its full potential to emerge. Even now, the silent agreement that holds my body together feels like a secret because, to all appearances, this agreement doesn't exist.
The mystery was changing [his father, recently passed on] from one state to another, and I realized that the same transformation is happening in myself and in everyone. We are all held together and we all dissolve according to mystery, nothing else."
-- Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets
the memory unit
In Carlsbad this week, I went to see my grandmother at the nursing home. It was the first time. She's only been there a month. My sister's just been released - quite suddenly, after a decline in my grandmother's health - from over 3 years' service as her full-time caregiver. And when I say, "full-time", I mean that. Not "40 hours a week". Not 80. All of them. Your waking, your sleep, your relaxation, your every process is subject to the interruption of some need or some crisis. I don't know if anybody can comprehend the level of commitment that live-in caregiving requires. Maybe parents can. But kids progress in their understanding. They learn to hold their own, give their parents space now and then, make a few decisions for themselves. Adults with dementia are moving on the opposite trajectory. There is, simply and literally, no end to their needs. As long as their life continues.
It's a small home, one of the least institutional I've been in. The staff seem friendly. There are plenty of windows. The residents are interacting with each other -- surprisingly so. When I used to deliver drugs (for a pharmacy), my route took me into nursing homes full of such sad, wandering souls, lost in irretrievable isolation. It was a deep relief not to see much of that here.
We always joke about my grandmother being the one we get our psychic abilities from. She's proved her powers on more than one startling occasion. And yesterday she didn't let me down. I hadn't seen her in several months, and she wouldn't have been told I was coming. But as the attendant rolls her wheelchair in, she stretches out a hand, pointing, and her face lights up in a smile. "There she is!" she calls out, in the same voice that would say, "Didn't I tell you so?"
I spend about an hour pushing her around her small ward (it's called "The Memory Unit", sounding like a term out of sci-fi, or supercomputing). Several other residents stop to talk with us. The common theme of conversation seems to be "as soon we get out of here". Almost as if they were cheerful prison inmates. Nobody appears to be upset about the time they're doing, only mildly impatient to get back to their ordinary lives and all the daily tasks they had left undone. A woman with wild bleached-blonde hair and startling black eye makeup confides to me, "This week just isn't my week. But as soon as I get outta here and get some stuff organized, I'll be doing better."
There is only one man in the Memory Unit. I had been told that he doesn't speak. My grandmother - always the flirt, but also the kind heart - is concerned about him. She asks me to wheel her over next to his chair. He'd be strong and tall - over six feet - if he could stand. But he sits slumped, staring through thick glasses at a point invisible to everyone else. My grandmother reaches out silently, and takes his hand. He glances sidelong, looks as if he's going to pull away, then relaxes. "Do you have what you need?" she asks, softly. He doesn't reply. So we move on. A few minutes later we're back in the room. "Are you doing alright?" she asks again. Several seconds elapse. Then he looks up, almost but not quite meeting our eyes. In a cautious, monotone voice, he offers, "I don't hurt too bad..."
My grandmother has a new roommate as of this week, Mrs. Bustamante. One look at her and I am convinced that she was once a silent movie star. Either that or an opera singer. She is thin, dresses all in black, and her large, deep black eyes are uncovered by glasses. Black eyeliner, high cheekbones, deep red lipstick, and thick wavy hair dyed black complete the glamour. She casts a shadow of someone who was surely dramatic, gorgeous, in her youth. Her daughter is visiting today, and exchanges some friendly words with me, around the curtain that separates the halves of their room. I am sitting on my grandmother's bed a bit later, when Mrs. Bustamante comes walking slowly around the curtain. She comes straight up to me, leans over, puts her arms around my neck, and says, "I love you, mi'ja. You are beautiful!" She goes to my grandmother, gives her a hug, tells her she loves her too. Then she disappears quietly back around the curtain.
How do we calculate a memory unit? There must be thousands of them, floating everywhere in this contained space. One word, one gesture, one look? The single shard of a moment it takes for a beam of light, the sound of a voice, a touch of a hand, to imprint itself forever on the senses? Would it be the amount of information that gives an occurrence meaning? Or only as much as it takes to ignite mystery, sense, engagement with all that is? One thing I'm convinced of, from time around my grandmother: no memory is ever lost. I think every last unit of it stays humming and glimmering in the web of interconnection. It's only the search engine that malfunctions. The filing system that gets disordered. But it's all there. And there are moments when the mystery finds ways to bring the strangest and most lovely slivers and threads of it singing to the surface, even in the most weary or embattled or bewildered of minds.
I'm worried that leaving will be difficult. But when I tell my grandmother I'll be back tomorrow, she accepts this cheerfully enough. As I walk toward the door the old man looks up. "Take it easy!" he calls out. As if we'd been in friendly conversation all along. Or maybe we had, and I'm the one who doesn't remember.
It's a small home, one of the least institutional I've been in. The staff seem friendly. There are plenty of windows. The residents are interacting with each other -- surprisingly so. When I used to deliver drugs (for a pharmacy), my route took me into nursing homes full of such sad, wandering souls, lost in irretrievable isolation. It was a deep relief not to see much of that here.
We always joke about my grandmother being the one we get our psychic abilities from. She's proved her powers on more than one startling occasion. And yesterday she didn't let me down. I hadn't seen her in several months, and she wouldn't have been told I was coming. But as the attendant rolls her wheelchair in, she stretches out a hand, pointing, and her face lights up in a smile. "There she is!" she calls out, in the same voice that would say, "Didn't I tell you so?"
I spend about an hour pushing her around her small ward (it's called "The Memory Unit", sounding like a term out of sci-fi, or supercomputing). Several other residents stop to talk with us. The common theme of conversation seems to be "as soon we get out of here". Almost as if they were cheerful prison inmates. Nobody appears to be upset about the time they're doing, only mildly impatient to get back to their ordinary lives and all the daily tasks they had left undone. A woman with wild bleached-blonde hair and startling black eye makeup confides to me, "This week just isn't my week. But as soon as I get outta here and get some stuff organized, I'll be doing better."
There is only one man in the Memory Unit. I had been told that he doesn't speak. My grandmother - always the flirt, but also the kind heart - is concerned about him. She asks me to wheel her over next to his chair. He'd be strong and tall - over six feet - if he could stand. But he sits slumped, staring through thick glasses at a point invisible to everyone else. My grandmother reaches out silently, and takes his hand. He glances sidelong, looks as if he's going to pull away, then relaxes. "Do you have what you need?" she asks, softly. He doesn't reply. So we move on. A few minutes later we're back in the room. "Are you doing alright?" she asks again. Several seconds elapse. Then he looks up, almost but not quite meeting our eyes. In a cautious, monotone voice, he offers, "I don't hurt too bad..."
My grandmother has a new roommate as of this week, Mrs. Bustamante. One look at her and I am convinced that she was once a silent movie star. Either that or an opera singer. She is thin, dresses all in black, and her large, deep black eyes are uncovered by glasses. Black eyeliner, high cheekbones, deep red lipstick, and thick wavy hair dyed black complete the glamour. She casts a shadow of someone who was surely dramatic, gorgeous, in her youth. Her daughter is visiting today, and exchanges some friendly words with me, around the curtain that separates the halves of their room. I am sitting on my grandmother's bed a bit later, when Mrs. Bustamante comes walking slowly around the curtain. She comes straight up to me, leans over, puts her arms around my neck, and says, "I love you, mi'ja. You are beautiful!" She goes to my grandmother, gives her a hug, tells her she loves her too. Then she disappears quietly back around the curtain.
How do we calculate a memory unit? There must be thousands of them, floating everywhere in this contained space. One word, one gesture, one look? The single shard of a moment it takes for a beam of light, the sound of a voice, a touch of a hand, to imprint itself forever on the senses? Would it be the amount of information that gives an occurrence meaning? Or only as much as it takes to ignite mystery, sense, engagement with all that is? One thing I'm convinced of, from time around my grandmother: no memory is ever lost. I think every last unit of it stays humming and glimmering in the web of interconnection. It's only the search engine that malfunctions. The filing system that gets disordered. But it's all there. And there are moments when the mystery finds ways to bring the strangest and most lovely slivers and threads of it singing to the surface, even in the most weary or embattled or bewildered of minds.
I'm worried that leaving will be difficult. But when I tell my grandmother I'll be back tomorrow, she accepts this cheerfully enough. As I walk toward the door the old man looks up. "Take it easy!" he calls out. As if we'd been in friendly conversation all along. Or maybe we had, and I'm the one who doesn't remember.
Friday, July 10, 2009
thanks
I just realized last week that I've been teaching ESL (trying to teach it) for 8 months already. There was nothing in the blur of time to show this - weeks run together and become months just like that. Here, as in most every other aspect of the everyday. The three of us - two students and I - didn't have any too dramatic signs of progress to make it evident either. But time made a jump when I realized that M's youngest daughter is trying to walk now. She could only lie in her mother's arms, in the first few classes. And she's got this crazy head of wild hair out of nowhere, too. I understand that babies do that kind of thing. Grow hair and develop language overnight. (I, for one, could be a little jealous on both counts). But I hadn't been around any to see it happen, in a long time.
M was on her own again at class yesterday. L still has so many work and personal conflicts keeping her back. I hope we all figure something out. But M told me some exciting news, about negotiating two conversations in stores this week, with people who only spoke English. Which is a major step, and takes courage. If you've ever been there, you know about it. We did our usual hour through the boring workbook, which I think will cease to offer her a challenge pretty soon. Right as I was about to leave, her husband came in. He's passed through the room a couple of times before, only saying "hi", no more. Today, he pauses in the kitchen, and tells me, "Thank you for coming here!" I reply, surprised, that I'm happy to come. He continues - pretending to be stern, but with a goodnatured smile behind his voice - "I tell her, don't speak Spanish any more! Learn English now!" "Well, she's learning it!" I tell him. "I've heard the stories!" Wow, I hope everybody in that room got as much lift of spirits out of that little exchange as I did.
M was on her own again at class yesterday. L still has so many work and personal conflicts keeping her back. I hope we all figure something out. But M told me some exciting news, about negotiating two conversations in stores this week, with people who only spoke English. Which is a major step, and takes courage. If you've ever been there, you know about it. We did our usual hour through the boring workbook, which I think will cease to offer her a challenge pretty soon. Right as I was about to leave, her husband came in. He's passed through the room a couple of times before, only saying "hi", no more. Today, he pauses in the kitchen, and tells me, "Thank you for coming here!" I reply, surprised, that I'm happy to come. He continues - pretending to be stern, but with a goodnatured smile behind his voice - "I tell her, don't speak Spanish any more! Learn English now!" "Well, she's learning it!" I tell him. "I've heard the stories!" Wow, I hope everybody in that room got as much lift of spirits out of that little exchange as I did.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
quote
"If only we would listen to the voice of all the beauty that attracts us in any form, we would find that in every aspect it tells us that behind all manifestation is the perfect spirit, the spirit of wisdom.
...all that we love in color, line, form, or personality belongs to the real beauty, the Beloved of all...All these different forms are part of the spirit of beauty that is the life behind them, a continual blessing."
-- Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Music of Life
...all that we love in color, line, form, or personality belongs to the real beauty, the Beloved of all...All these different forms are part of the spirit of beauty that is the life behind them, a continual blessing."
-- Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Music of Life
story
This was in the Journal today. It almost made me cry to read it. I don't want to sentimentalize, though. I just want to add my affirmation: to the crazy, irrational, gracefull Motion that IS, in this world. I am tripped out imagining what life might look like right now, to this guy. No less to this little boy's family. Maybe I need to hear stuff like this once in a while, for the proof of what I try to hold onto, with the mind: that it all works together for something...
Silverton, Colo. -- A young man who was grieving after learning that a college friend had drowned rescued a 5-year-old New Mexico boy who was struggling in a Colorado river.
Sean Simpson said he was less than five minutes into his walk after being told the news of his friend's death when he heard children screaming Saturday along the Animas River.
The 5-year-old he saved, James Wilhelm of Aztec, NM, had been camping with his family near Silverton.
Simpson's friend, Anna Schneider, drowned in her family's pool in Chicago on Saturday.
Silverton, Colo. -- A young man who was grieving after learning that a college friend had drowned rescued a 5-year-old New Mexico boy who was struggling in a Colorado river.
Sean Simpson said he was less than five minutes into his walk after being told the news of his friend's death when he heard children screaming Saturday along the Animas River.
The 5-year-old he saved, James Wilhelm of Aztec, NM, had been camping with his family near Silverton.
Simpson's friend, Anna Schneider, drowned in her family's pool in Chicago on Saturday.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
another story
Yesterday Nambe Pueblo was having dances, up at the falls. There was just time to go up before work. It's not possible to head into the Espanola Valley from Santa Fe without running into a story or two from the past. I lived on the edge of that valley for almost 4 years, and knew it like, yeah, the back of my hand. The front of my hand, more like (why don't people say that instead?). Roads stretching out their lifelines in every direction. But I forgot how thick the stories grow in Nambe. Or how the roads out there grow as well, gnarled and twisted like tree roots. Irrational and interweaving like dreamstories. One minute you're topping a hill, with an unbroken view of the Sangres in front of you, and the next you're following what seems to be an arroyo under somebody's house. If you take more than two turns you find yourself back at the same intersection where you started. I passed a stop sign that had to go on the left side of the road, because a giant cottonwood was taking up every inch of space on the right, and part of the road too. It's a dreamlike place for sure.
Diving off the pavement into a road/arroyo that I think leads through the pueblo's center, I pass a church I visited a couple times, long ago. Back when I still visited churches to see how people in that realm were doing community. But that's an old story now, buried under years of road. Further down is the house where, back when I was a new homeowner - trailer owner, that is - a yard sale one Saturday offered all the materials I needed to start remodeling. That's one of the few stories that felt like it ended the way it wanted to. Rounding a green curve, this road looks familiar now: Michael Nesmith's summer house is right around here somewhere. I spent a summer afternoon there, sampling champagne and caviar, listening to an impressive collection of artists, writers, activists, all there at his personal invitation, speak their visions of how to improve the world. I didn't speak with Mr. Nesmith (just as well, as citing my membership at 16 in the ranks of Second Wave Monkees fans would've been something for both of us to cringe about). But I sat next to him for a highly entertaining half hour, operating recording equipment as my date for the party interviewed him. He was as original, ironic, insightful, and funny in his own fix-the-world ideas as anybody there. But that's definitely another story.
The Pueblo of Nambe has my best wishes, but I don't feel up to supporting them with the $10.00 entry fee I encounter at the gate to the falls. Backtracking, I take another side road, and suddenly, I'm at the turn to Violet Roybal's house. How not to go and take a look? It's been years since I've even been by, although I came back to this turnoff more than once after declining that particular story's invitation. It was fall of 1997. I had landed in Tesuque a few months earlier, where my sister gave me a kind welcome and a place to recover from a few years of story I'm not even gonna mention here. Now I'm looking for a place of my own to settle. A handwritten paper on a public bulletin board has led me out to the Nambe loop, where there's a place for rent. A right turn onto a county road, a left turn into an arroyo and then a narrow, climbing driveway lined with lilac bushes and ancient-looking stonework. The eroding hillside around the place is fortified with old pallets, pieces of tin, and tree branches, all held in more or less place with baling wire. It looks like the hill's bones are showing. The house is invisible from below, perched on a hilltop and surrounded by cottonwood ramparts like a green fortress. It's old, I can't tell how old, classic northern New Mexico with hand-planed wood walls, pitched tin roof, and wraparound porch. It's poised at a lovely point just this side of dilapidated. There's a sort of barn out back, with an ancient truck that hasn't run for 20 years inside. The rental sits between these: an adobe casita, sheltered by cottonwood shade, furnished in classic 1950's Granny Style: spare, sparse, practical.
Violet Roybal herself strikes me at first view as the perfect combination of my two very different grandmothers. She has the small, compact build of my mother's mother, and looks ready (like my granny) for any work the day might offer and then some. She's wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. Her silver hair is not permed, but straight and shoulder length. In her eyes, I see the spark and energy and love for life that I admire most in my father's mother. She greets me kindly, shows me the place, answers all my questions. We turn from the casita, and her eyes light up a little brighter. "Want to see the horses?" she asks, in a voice that makes me feel like we are two six-year-olds, and the world is our own gorgeous secret to explore. Her enthusiasm, it almost feels like joy, is tangible, contagious. They're not even her horses; they're only staying here awhile. We climb a short rise behind the house, and a small meadow and a manmade pond appear, in the back corner of the place. The pond is also ringed by the grand old cottonwoods. It's just a little island of paradise.
Why don't I take the place? There are definite practical considerations. The road out will be a challenge, maybe an impassable one, for my two-wheel-drive truck, come winter. The 40-minute drive to work is hard to picture, since I drive for a living already. But probably the deciding factor comes when she tells me that the place is for sale, and there's no telling how long I would get to be a renter there. With the uprootings I've already come through in the last year, I can't stand the thought of getting attached to another place and then having to leave it. Especially a place like this one.
I don't remember how we ended our conversation that day: if I declined in that moment, or asked to think about it awhile. I do remember that I felt thoroughly welcomed in the short time I spent on her little hilltop. I tried to imagine what life would be, up there. Would we keep our own silent green spaces? Would we sit on the porch at sunset and drink tea and talk about life, breathing lilac perfume and watching the mountains change colors? Where was she going, after she sold her house? What kind of difference might a few months there have made? And in one of those irrational dream-spaces in the mind, I think of Violet Roybal as a grandmother I never had. An alter-dimension grandmother.
This morning I got up to breakfast with my housemates, and was offered another story for the here and now. Instead of my taking on the entire renovation of this dilapidated old casita here - a sort of condition of my moving in with them, and one that's become kind of overwhelming, lately - what if they gathered all their friends, pooled their knowledge and their energies, and organized a couple of workdays to get the place fixed up? We could cook for people, make it fun, make it worth their while. Build community, and build the barter network they're already helping to start here in the Valley. And my part? Probably to swing a hammer or a paintbrush, where I can. But much more significant than that: my part would be to ask for the help that I need. With the things I can't possibly do myself, but keep pretending that I can. And just as essential: my part is to ask for another story, when I need one, when the current one is getting too sad and heavy to keep carrying around. Alright, then, I'm catching on. I want another story. Not an entire replacement, because a lot of the parts of this life right now are really beautiful, and I want to see how they turn out. But I want another telling of the things that are possible, and the changes that aren't too late, and the connections that don't have to be uprooted, and the ways that I am not alone. That's the story I would like to begin, if it's not too late, in this time and place.
Diving off the pavement into a road/arroyo that I think leads through the pueblo's center, I pass a church I visited a couple times, long ago. Back when I still visited churches to see how people in that realm were doing community. But that's an old story now, buried under years of road. Further down is the house where, back when I was a new homeowner - trailer owner, that is - a yard sale one Saturday offered all the materials I needed to start remodeling. That's one of the few stories that felt like it ended the way it wanted to. Rounding a green curve, this road looks familiar now: Michael Nesmith's summer house is right around here somewhere. I spent a summer afternoon there, sampling champagne and caviar, listening to an impressive collection of artists, writers, activists, all there at his personal invitation, speak their visions of how to improve the world. I didn't speak with Mr. Nesmith (just as well, as citing my membership at 16 in the ranks of Second Wave Monkees fans would've been something for both of us to cringe about). But I sat next to him for a highly entertaining half hour, operating recording equipment as my date for the party interviewed him. He was as original, ironic, insightful, and funny in his own fix-the-world ideas as anybody there. But that's definitely another story.
The Pueblo of Nambe has my best wishes, but I don't feel up to supporting them with the $10.00 entry fee I encounter at the gate to the falls. Backtracking, I take another side road, and suddenly, I'm at the turn to Violet Roybal's house. How not to go and take a look? It's been years since I've even been by, although I came back to this turnoff more than once after declining that particular story's invitation. It was fall of 1997. I had landed in Tesuque a few months earlier, where my sister gave me a kind welcome and a place to recover from a few years of story I'm not even gonna mention here. Now I'm looking for a place of my own to settle. A handwritten paper on a public bulletin board has led me out to the Nambe loop, where there's a place for rent. A right turn onto a county road, a left turn into an arroyo and then a narrow, climbing driveway lined with lilac bushes and ancient-looking stonework. The eroding hillside around the place is fortified with old pallets, pieces of tin, and tree branches, all held in more or less place with baling wire. It looks like the hill's bones are showing. The house is invisible from below, perched on a hilltop and surrounded by cottonwood ramparts like a green fortress. It's old, I can't tell how old, classic northern New Mexico with hand-planed wood walls, pitched tin roof, and wraparound porch. It's poised at a lovely point just this side of dilapidated. There's a sort of barn out back, with an ancient truck that hasn't run for 20 years inside. The rental sits between these: an adobe casita, sheltered by cottonwood shade, furnished in classic 1950's Granny Style: spare, sparse, practical.
Violet Roybal herself strikes me at first view as the perfect combination of my two very different grandmothers. She has the small, compact build of my mother's mother, and looks ready (like my granny) for any work the day might offer and then some. She's wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. Her silver hair is not permed, but straight and shoulder length. In her eyes, I see the spark and energy and love for life that I admire most in my father's mother. She greets me kindly, shows me the place, answers all my questions. We turn from the casita, and her eyes light up a little brighter. "Want to see the horses?" she asks, in a voice that makes me feel like we are two six-year-olds, and the world is our own gorgeous secret to explore. Her enthusiasm, it almost feels like joy, is tangible, contagious. They're not even her horses; they're only staying here awhile. We climb a short rise behind the house, and a small meadow and a manmade pond appear, in the back corner of the place. The pond is also ringed by the grand old cottonwoods. It's just a little island of paradise.
Why don't I take the place? There are definite practical considerations. The road out will be a challenge, maybe an impassable one, for my two-wheel-drive truck, come winter. The 40-minute drive to work is hard to picture, since I drive for a living already. But probably the deciding factor comes when she tells me that the place is for sale, and there's no telling how long I would get to be a renter there. With the uprootings I've already come through in the last year, I can't stand the thought of getting attached to another place and then having to leave it. Especially a place like this one.
I don't remember how we ended our conversation that day: if I declined in that moment, or asked to think about it awhile. I do remember that I felt thoroughly welcomed in the short time I spent on her little hilltop. I tried to imagine what life would be, up there. Would we keep our own silent green spaces? Would we sit on the porch at sunset and drink tea and talk about life, breathing lilac perfume and watching the mountains change colors? Where was she going, after she sold her house? What kind of difference might a few months there have made? And in one of those irrational dream-spaces in the mind, I think of Violet Roybal as a grandmother I never had. An alter-dimension grandmother.
This morning I got up to breakfast with my housemates, and was offered another story for the here and now. Instead of my taking on the entire renovation of this dilapidated old casita here - a sort of condition of my moving in with them, and one that's become kind of overwhelming, lately - what if they gathered all their friends, pooled their knowledge and their energies, and organized a couple of workdays to get the place fixed up? We could cook for people, make it fun, make it worth their while. Build community, and build the barter network they're already helping to start here in the Valley. And my part? Probably to swing a hammer or a paintbrush, where I can. But much more significant than that: my part would be to ask for the help that I need. With the things I can't possibly do myself, but keep pretending that I can. And just as essential: my part is to ask for another story, when I need one, when the current one is getting too sad and heavy to keep carrying around. Alright, then, I'm catching on. I want another story. Not an entire replacement, because a lot of the parts of this life right now are really beautiful, and I want to see how they turn out. But I want another telling of the things that are possible, and the changes that aren't too late, and the connections that don't have to be uprooted, and the ways that I am not alone. That's the story I would like to begin, if it's not too late, in this time and place.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
this moment
There is no other moment but now. This is no cliche or easy affirmation. This is the only reality, and the only perspective that has made the last several days possible. It doesn't mean, the only moment that matters is now. It is the chosen opinion that no other moment than this one actually exists. It is either my furthest progress yet toward detached, waking presence, or the clearest concession to soul's absolute necessity. No intention to be owned but the sheer will to survive the meantime. I'm either close to enlightenment or close to weighing nothing at all.
Sure, this moment touches other things. Or perhaps other things touch it, as it hovers in its singular completeness. They might be other people's nows, or next moments or previous moments. Even though, at times, they feel familiar enough to be mine. They might be alternate dimensions, each contained and glowing, its own perfect untouchable moment. Maybe they're my alternate moments, or maybe others' that they discarded, or didn't see in time to choose. But for whatever known or unknown reason, we embarked on the one in which we now ride. They might be what are often called "memories", of this life or of the many other lives contained within it. But these, too, drift through air and ether and find their way into moments even they didn't expect, and cannot be owned, only acknowledged. That might be my memory; it might be someone else's. It might be just a sigh and a wish of time itself, for a moment that never happened. Or never happened yet.
I tell myself that so many things in this moment cannot be explained, and these not-quite-connections must also be accepted, without the satisfaction the mind might seek about their origin. Moving past, and allowing them to move on their languid way around the timespace we all seem to cohabit. Courteously, gracefully, like negotiating a crowded room at a fancy party, wearing spike heels and carrying a crystal flute of champagne in one hand. How would I know about such moments. Courteously, gracefully, like negotiating a crowded living room at a house party, carrying seven pizzas and twenty pounds of soda pop, holding my balance between careening kids and spinning beer bottles. Yes, I do know about such things. And about the impossible series of moments that intersect, and sometimes collide, in these rooms. But none of them are mine - not the family, not the house, not the party, not the kids, not the beer. Only the balance, and the job that I have to do. And hopefully, the courtesy and the grace. And I want to say that I may not have to maintain all these things for much longer, but who knows: there is only this moment.
Sure, this moment touches other things. Or perhaps other things touch it, as it hovers in its singular completeness. They might be other people's nows, or next moments or previous moments. Even though, at times, they feel familiar enough to be mine. They might be alternate dimensions, each contained and glowing, its own perfect untouchable moment. Maybe they're my alternate moments, or maybe others' that they discarded, or didn't see in time to choose. But for whatever known or unknown reason, we embarked on the one in which we now ride. They might be what are often called "memories", of this life or of the many other lives contained within it. But these, too, drift through air and ether and find their way into moments even they didn't expect, and cannot be owned, only acknowledged. That might be my memory; it might be someone else's. It might be just a sigh and a wish of time itself, for a moment that never happened. Or never happened yet.
I tell myself that so many things in this moment cannot be explained, and these not-quite-connections must also be accepted, without the satisfaction the mind might seek about their origin. Moving past, and allowing them to move on their languid way around the timespace we all seem to cohabit. Courteously, gracefully, like negotiating a crowded room at a fancy party, wearing spike heels and carrying a crystal flute of champagne in one hand. How would I know about such moments. Courteously, gracefully, like negotiating a crowded living room at a house party, carrying seven pizzas and twenty pounds of soda pop, holding my balance between careening kids and spinning beer bottles. Yes, I do know about such things. And about the impossible series of moments that intersect, and sometimes collide, in these rooms. But none of them are mine - not the family, not the house, not the party, not the kids, not the beer. Only the balance, and the job that I have to do. And hopefully, the courtesy and the grace. And I want to say that I may not have to maintain all these things for much longer, but who knows: there is only this moment.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Sing Out for Single Payer Road Show
The encouraging word of the day. Friend Brian just posted this. One of those things I have to nudge further out into the current of thought about what can be done by people coming together.
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• Anne Feeney has put together almost four dozen acclaimed musicians to launch the Sing Out for Single Payer Road Show. Modeled after the traveling chautauquas of the 1930s, these concerts will take place nightly from San Diego, CA to Bellingham, WA. I will be in on the concerts in Eugene, Portland, and Vancouver, Snohomish and Olympia in Washington state and other confirmed performers are Adam + Kris, Austin's Green Mountain Grass, Raina Rose, Jason Luckett, Patrick Dodd and others
(annefeeney.com/specialevents.html)
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And this respectfully borrowed from Anne Feeney's website:
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We believe that single payer health insurance is the only real solution to 50 million uninsured and countless millions of underinsured people in this country. We're working closely with health care professionals and activists in all three states [CA, OR, & WA]. This tour is sponsored and endorsed by all the groups mentioned above [California Nurses Association, Jobs With Justice, Physicians for a National Health Program, and others], along with generous contributions from many doctors, nurses and concerned individuals, including Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary. We hope you'll catch one of these shows and PLEASE - tell your friends. Call your Representative in Congress today and thank him or her for sponsoring HR 676. If s/he is not one of the 80 co-sponsors, ask him/her to sponsor HR 676. Call your Senators and ask them to sponsor SB 703. Thank you! National Health Care NOW!!
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*********
• Anne Feeney has put together almost four dozen acclaimed musicians to launch the Sing Out for Single Payer Road Show. Modeled after the traveling chautauquas of the 1930s, these concerts will take place nightly from San Diego, CA to Bellingham, WA. I will be in on the concerts in Eugene, Portland, and Vancouver, Snohomish and Olympia in Washington state and other confirmed performers are Adam + Kris, Austin's Green Mountain Grass, Raina Rose, Jason Luckett, Patrick Dodd and others
(annefeeney.com/specialevents.html)
*********
And this respectfully borrowed from Anne Feeney's website:
*********
We believe that single payer health insurance is the only real solution to 50 million uninsured and countless millions of underinsured people in this country. We're working closely with health care professionals and activists in all three states [CA, OR, & WA]. This tour is sponsored and endorsed by all the groups mentioned above [California Nurses Association, Jobs With Justice, Physicians for a National Health Program, and others], along with generous contributions from many doctors, nurses and concerned individuals, including Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary. We hope you'll catch one of these shows and PLEASE - tell your friends. Call your Representative in Congress today and thank him or her for sponsoring HR 676. If s/he is not one of the 80 co-sponsors, ask him/her to sponsor HR 676. Call your Senators and ask them to sponsor SB 703. Thank you! National Health Care NOW!!
*********
pain climbing
Last night the pain began to climb. It's never done this before. It left the place where it has lived, as deep as memory reaches, for some unknown point of migration. This home has been, til now, right at the center: in the solar plexus. The pain is its own whitehot miniature sun, centering its own galaxy of invisible unresolution. Gathering ungrounded wishes, unanswered questions, unsutured wounds into its whirling orbit, by the force of its own self-inclining gravity.
But last night, it began to rise. Or maybe, flares and tongues of its fire flamed out and began to rise. It used the ribs, one by one, as a ladder and the sternum as a scaffold. It blackened all the bones that it touched, so they looked like the aftermath of a forest fire. It wiped out normal weather patterns in the heart as it passed, with its too-proximate heat and pull. It compressed the lungs with its invisible density, so that they could barely keep inflating. At one point it seemed to be going for the throat - does it want a stranglehold? Does it wants to take life? But no, not that. It seems to be reaching for the vocal cords.
What will happen if pain takes control of voice? Will it rage inarticulate, splitting silence with its useless, severing sounds? Will it collapse, implode into annihilating or portalling singularity, leading into oblivion or another dimension? Will it find a medium in which to speak this voyage of useless alienation and thwarted power, to some constructive end? Will it gain, somehow, the articulation to express this seeming impossibility of the now: objective awareness, unscarred, unsinged, mute, resides right next to the heat. So very near and yet completely apart from it, almost as if red and blue stars could share one galaxy's center. Aware, acknowledging but other. Waiting to learn what survives this convergence. What sun, if any, will finally rise...
But last night, it began to rise. Or maybe, flares and tongues of its fire flamed out and began to rise. It used the ribs, one by one, as a ladder and the sternum as a scaffold. It blackened all the bones that it touched, so they looked like the aftermath of a forest fire. It wiped out normal weather patterns in the heart as it passed, with its too-proximate heat and pull. It compressed the lungs with its invisible density, so that they could barely keep inflating. At one point it seemed to be going for the throat - does it want a stranglehold? Does it wants to take life? But no, not that. It seems to be reaching for the vocal cords.
What will happen if pain takes control of voice? Will it rage inarticulate, splitting silence with its useless, severing sounds? Will it collapse, implode into annihilating or portalling singularity, leading into oblivion or another dimension? Will it find a medium in which to speak this voyage of useless alienation and thwarted power, to some constructive end? Will it gain, somehow, the articulation to express this seeming impossibility of the now: objective awareness, unscarred, unsinged, mute, resides right next to the heat. So very near and yet completely apart from it, almost as if red and blue stars could share one galaxy's center. Aware, acknowledging but other. Waiting to learn what survives this convergence. What sun, if any, will finally rise...
Thursday, July 2, 2009
English as an afterthought
Here was English class today:
First, the whole plan depends on whether both women are there, or only one. The gap in their learning levels is constantly increasing, and it's harder all the time to make just one class that offers something to them both. So every week begins with two potential lessons. L, the one who struggles more, is able to come much less often. Her job, whose schedule seems to change without warning, prevents her half the time, and a battle with vision trouble and doctor visits takes up the other half. M, the one with more learning history and more confidence, has only her three cute children for distraction: aged 11 months to 6 years. M does great - I think she'll meet her goals eventually, with the language. I worry about L though. Right before my eyes, the story seems to happen yet again: she's trying to make a life in this country, but just the survival may keep her from gaining the language, and so the empowerment, that she needs in order to make anything more than a laborer's life...I feel partly responsible; I know I'm not, and can't be, responsible. I don't know.
I do know that, whether or not this is a failing on my part, I can't bring myself to push her to speak more English in class. We're supposed to be doing total immersion, actually. But she asks M or I to translate, and she speaks Spanish only, and my heart sinks because here, at least, I know how she feels. For all the lonely all-Spanish conversations I've sat on the outside of, hearing the intonations of jokes and the outside of laughter, waiting for the kindness of just one person, anyone, to turn and translate, and include me for just a moment. Maybe I'm supposed to be challenging her more, asking her to dive in and learn on all these levels at once. But I can't bear the thought of offering that kind of alienation to another person.
We meet in M's kitchen, surrounded by kidsounds. We don't know if L will be able to make it today, so we start where we left off last week, in the workbook. 15 minutes into this, L arrives. She hasn't been able to attend for almost a month, so I've prepared a review for the next class she's a part of. Try for a graceful transition -- finish the set of sentences we were reading, and suggest she look at this chapter for next week. There's only this one moment to try to learn something. "I'd like to do a little review", I say, and then discover I don't have copies of the pages I wanted to read together. There's a knock at the door. A neighbor arrives, with a little girl. She sits on the couch, begins conversing with M and L, and sets her daughter on the floor next to M's daughter, who soon starts to cry loudly. The two boys join us at the kitchen table. How about a game, I suggest. Luckily I can at least find the scraps of paper that I've made some games with - conversation phrases to pair up, body parts and family terms to match to their counterparts on cards. There's 15 minutes left and it goes by in a blink. Sure hope we learned something today.
First, the whole plan depends on whether both women are there, or only one. The gap in their learning levels is constantly increasing, and it's harder all the time to make just one class that offers something to them both. So every week begins with two potential lessons. L, the one who struggles more, is able to come much less often. Her job, whose schedule seems to change without warning, prevents her half the time, and a battle with vision trouble and doctor visits takes up the other half. M, the one with more learning history and more confidence, has only her three cute children for distraction: aged 11 months to 6 years. M does great - I think she'll meet her goals eventually, with the language. I worry about L though. Right before my eyes, the story seems to happen yet again: she's trying to make a life in this country, but just the survival may keep her from gaining the language, and so the empowerment, that she needs in order to make anything more than a laborer's life...I feel partly responsible; I know I'm not, and can't be, responsible. I don't know.
I do know that, whether or not this is a failing on my part, I can't bring myself to push her to speak more English in class. We're supposed to be doing total immersion, actually. But she asks M or I to translate, and she speaks Spanish only, and my heart sinks because here, at least, I know how she feels. For all the lonely all-Spanish conversations I've sat on the outside of, hearing the intonations of jokes and the outside of laughter, waiting for the kindness of just one person, anyone, to turn and translate, and include me for just a moment. Maybe I'm supposed to be challenging her more, asking her to dive in and learn on all these levels at once. But I can't bear the thought of offering that kind of alienation to another person.
We meet in M's kitchen, surrounded by kidsounds. We don't know if L will be able to make it today, so we start where we left off last week, in the workbook. 15 minutes into this, L arrives. She hasn't been able to attend for almost a month, so I've prepared a review for the next class she's a part of. Try for a graceful transition -- finish the set of sentences we were reading, and suggest she look at this chapter for next week. There's only this one moment to try to learn something. "I'd like to do a little review", I say, and then discover I don't have copies of the pages I wanted to read together. There's a knock at the door. A neighbor arrives, with a little girl. She sits on the couch, begins conversing with M and L, and sets her daughter on the floor next to M's daughter, who soon starts to cry loudly. The two boys join us at the kitchen table. How about a game, I suggest. Luckily I can at least find the scraps of paper that I've made some games with - conversation phrases to pair up, body parts and family terms to match to their counterparts on cards. There's 15 minutes left and it goes by in a blink. Sure hope we learned something today.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
a little lightbulb
finally clicks on. Shedding light on why it's so hard for me to care, lately, about all those larger realms of human action: politics, social change, shared spirituality, local economy, community. Because no forseeable change in the world as I know it is going to bring me the happiness, or the peace, that I'm lacking.
That sounds selfish, yeah. But how can you work from the heart for something that doesn't motivate the heart? And how can you be useful at all, if you can't be? Of course, this is not ideal. There's a foundational, essential piece (pieces?) missing in my outlook. And I don't know where to find it/them. I think some of these pieces have always been missing (why I resonate so with that last Inayat Khan quote). I don't even know what they are, exactly - making the search that much more of a challenge.
At the risk of getting cliche-ish, the thing I'm missing most likely has to come from within, or it's not gonna come from anywhere. Which brings me to the real question of the week. Of the lifetime, really, but with the volume cranked up seriously in the last week or so. If you look inside and don't find those answers, or even those beginning motivations, that can only come from within, then where do you go?
Surely anybody who knows me well knows that, if I've done anything in this life, I've tried not to live it unexamined. But I've never known what I'm here for. What I wanted to be when I grew up. And more than that. I'm gonna be honest here, and I don't mean to bring anybody down. But my problem, the heart of it, is that I don't know how to feel that I'm here on this earth for a reason. Even though I cherish the belief that all things, and all people, exist with purpose. I don't know how people find that feeling/belief/sense of unique, claimable purpose to begin with. Whatever it is. And yeah, plenty of kind people have said, believe me, you do serve a purpose. And that's surely appreciated. But if you've been in this place, you know: it's not the sort of thing you can just take on faith. Or on the word of others.
I'm so tired of fighting this fight. Of it feeling like a fight, to begin with. Not that I can give it up (or will, cause it's my life). But so tired. And so damn tired of feeling alone in this fight. Of not having the impression that others struggle in this way. If you don't - well, good for you. It'd be no good if everybody was dealing with life on this level. The world just wouldn't work. But if you do...does anybody out there know what this is like? To hurt like this -- soul-pain so intense it manifests as actual, continual, physical pain? To stay up sleepless with these questions, without answers? To lack the power just to give and share and offer, the things you most wish to do? To flounder around futile, while so many pass by so alive, so full with their purpose and significance? If you do...then where the hell are you??
Put off writing this for a while. But this is where I'm at. And may be for a little while. It's write this or write nothing, cause I can't write fake. It doesn't help that, due to chronic health problems, I've just given notice at my job. My one little source, if not of purpose, at least of competence. I'm grateful at least for my home-space, which is cheap enough and friendly enough not to be threatened by a space of joblessness. Guess I'll be grateful for the time to recover lost sleep. And I'm not asking for anything here. Just talking. This is something I have to work out somehow. But man, this little light's burning pretty dim lately. All of you sharing what lights you got, in words or thoughts or actions, do mean more than ever.
That sounds selfish, yeah. But how can you work from the heart for something that doesn't motivate the heart? And how can you be useful at all, if you can't be? Of course, this is not ideal. There's a foundational, essential piece (pieces?) missing in my outlook. And I don't know where to find it/them. I think some of these pieces have always been missing (why I resonate so with that last Inayat Khan quote). I don't even know what they are, exactly - making the search that much more of a challenge.
At the risk of getting cliche-ish, the thing I'm missing most likely has to come from within, or it's not gonna come from anywhere. Which brings me to the real question of the week. Of the lifetime, really, but with the volume cranked up seriously in the last week or so. If you look inside and don't find those answers, or even those beginning motivations, that can only come from within, then where do you go?
Surely anybody who knows me well knows that, if I've done anything in this life, I've tried not to live it unexamined. But I've never known what I'm here for. What I wanted to be when I grew up. And more than that. I'm gonna be honest here, and I don't mean to bring anybody down. But my problem, the heart of it, is that I don't know how to feel that I'm here on this earth for a reason. Even though I cherish the belief that all things, and all people, exist with purpose. I don't know how people find that feeling/belief/sense of unique, claimable purpose to begin with. Whatever it is. And yeah, plenty of kind people have said, believe me, you do serve a purpose. And that's surely appreciated. But if you've been in this place, you know: it's not the sort of thing you can just take on faith. Or on the word of others.
I'm so tired of fighting this fight. Of it feeling like a fight, to begin with. Not that I can give it up (or will, cause it's my life). But so tired. And so damn tired of feeling alone in this fight. Of not having the impression that others struggle in this way. If you don't - well, good for you. It'd be no good if everybody was dealing with life on this level. The world just wouldn't work. But if you do...does anybody out there know what this is like? To hurt like this -- soul-pain so intense it manifests as actual, continual, physical pain? To stay up sleepless with these questions, without answers? To lack the power just to give and share and offer, the things you most wish to do? To flounder around futile, while so many pass by so alive, so full with their purpose and significance? If you do...then where the hell are you??
Put off writing this for a while. But this is where I'm at. And may be for a little while. It's write this or write nothing, cause I can't write fake. It doesn't help that, due to chronic health problems, I've just given notice at my job. My one little source, if not of purpose, at least of competence. I'm grateful at least for my home-space, which is cheap enough and friendly enough not to be threatened by a space of joblessness. Guess I'll be grateful for the time to recover lost sleep. And I'm not asking for anything here. Just talking. This is something I have to work out somehow. But man, this little light's burning pretty dim lately. All of you sharing what lights you got, in words or thoughts or actions, do mean more than ever.
we have a name?
This from today's Journal:
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Wednesday, July 01, 2009
New Name Picked for South Valley
By Journal Staff Report
Valle de Atrisco has been picked as the name for the proposed incorporated South Valley.
The name was the most popular choice among several that residents voted on during a "Name That Town" campaign, state Rep. Miguel Garcia said.
Next up for an advisory group of community members, which has been meeting regularly for more than two years researching the process of how an area may incorporate, are a number of hoops to jump through.
The group is in the process of gathering 200 names for a petition in support of the proposal, which needs approval from the Albuquerque City Council and the Bernalillo County Commission. The group is nearing completion of a census that will be submitted to the state.
If the South Valley becomes its own city, it would be the state's fifth largest with an estimated 50,000 residents.
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Wednesday, July 01, 2009
New Name Picked for South Valley
By Journal Staff Report
Valle de Atrisco has been picked as the name for the proposed incorporated South Valley.
The name was the most popular choice among several that residents voted on during a "Name That Town" campaign, state Rep. Miguel Garcia said.
Next up for an advisory group of community members, which has been meeting regularly for more than two years researching the process of how an area may incorporate, are a number of hoops to jump through.
The group is in the process of gathering 200 names for a petition in support of the proposal, which needs approval from the Albuquerque City Council and the Bernalillo County Commission. The group is nearing completion of a census that will be submitted to the state.
If the South Valley becomes its own city, it would be the state's fifth largest with an estimated 50,000 residents.
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