Hallelujah Chorus

I woke up this morning with the birds.

They had a lot to say and I was thinking how they had been dreaming all night with their heads tucked under their wings,

the babies finally full and quiet,

the spouses, if they were still around hunkered down warm and downy.

At first light

the peeping, cawing, trilling, thrilling sounds of morning.

Wake up!

Wake Up!

Oh it’s a new day

Oh look, things to see and hear and eat

I dreamt I could fly

I could fly and chatter with them all.

Up Up they say

Shake that sleep out of your eyes

There is a brand new world right outside your nest

A bright new world

Wake up!

Just because…

GREEN FIELDS

By this part of the century few are left who believe
in the animals for they are not there in the carved parts
of them served on plates and the pleas from the slatted trucks
are sounds of shadows that possess no future
there is still game for the pleasure of killing
and there are pets for the children but the lives that followed
courses of their own other than ours and older
have been migrating before us some are already
far on the way and yet Peter with his gaunt cheeks
and point of white beard the face of an aged Lawrence
Peter who had lived on from another time and country
and who had seen so many things set out and vanish
still believed in heaven and said he had never once
doubted it since his childhood on the farm in the days
of the horses he had not doubted it in the worst
times of the Great War and afterward and he had come
to what he took to be a kind of earthly
model of it as he wandered south in his sixties
by that time speaking the language well enough
for them to make him out he took the smallest roads
into a world he thought was a thing of the past
with wildflowers he scarcely remembered and neighbors
working together scything the morning meadows
turning the hay before the noon meal bringing it in
by milking time husbandry and abundance
all the virtues he admired and their reward bounteous
in the eyes of a foreigner and there he remained
for the rest of his days seeing what he wanted to see
until the winter when he could no longer fork
the earth in his garden and then he gave away
his house land everything and committed himself
to a home to die in an old chateau where he lingered
for some time surrounded by those who had lost
the use of body or mind and as he lay there he told me
that the wall by his bed opened almost every day
and he saw what was really there and it was eternal life
as he recognized at once when he saw the gardens
he had made and the green fields where he had been
a child and his mother was standing there then the wall would close
and around him again were the last days of the world.

W.S. Merwin

Empty Tub

Aunt Fran just reminded me that thee only way I could of written that last post was because I’m feeling pretty good today and that the minute I have something that hurts or if I’m sick I make a big old ugly fuss about it and feel like a worthless piece of shit.

I reminded Aunt Fran that she is a figment of my imagination and as such she can fucking mind her own business or she can be replaced by some other persona.

She said fuck you back and also she said “I am the best part of you.  Throwing me away would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  What you got left, but an empty tub?

I don’t think that was nice.

Our Bodies, Ourselves

I was reminded today of “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”   We ache, we fall down, we break bones, we shit our pants, we can’t shit, we grow wens and barnacles, pimples and pustules and boils, oh my.  We develop pockets in our bowels that collect shit as if we didn’t have an organ already designed to do this.  Our knees ache, our backs ache, our elbows and ears ache.

What the hell is going on?

We are multi-celled organisms.  The more complex the organism, the more likely are things to break.

We are human.  We are imperfect.  Some say it gets worse as we get older but from what I’ve seen,  stuff happens to everyone, young or old.

Being sick or hurt or both is not a comment on our worthiness, any more than wealth is a sign of purity.  That is a Calvinist bullshit; a prosperity gospel lie.  This belief has somehow seeped into our culture like a noxious gas.

Nothing could be further than the truth.  All you folks out there who think you can outrun death by exercising, take heed.  We can’t outrun death, or bad luck or bad genes or just wear and tear. Not to be too cute, our bodies are our Achilles heel.

We cannot outrun our corporeality.  Don’t wear it like a bad suit.  Own it; wear it proudly, flaws and all.  We are grateful to be alive.  Be kind to yourself and others who hurt and are imperfect.  Sit in that stew of yourself and say thank you for all the years of service.

Here’s Jack cursing the day he met Jill.

Also, it’s okay to feel sorry for yourself for awhile, and curse.  Everyone gets to do that.  Aunt Fran say “Just ‘cuz  I’m grateful to be alive all the time, don’t mean I got to be happy about it sometimes.”

 

Pep it Up

Wow, that last entry was so sad.  I write, I guess, to digest grief.  I write to explore my head.  I write to commune with myself and a few others.  I write because it’s what I got.

Aunt Fran says “Why don’t you jazz it up some?  You so doom and gloom makes me want to go back to bed and sleep or slit my throat.  Pep it up crazypants.”

She’s not a deep thinker my Aunt Fran.

Ashes

 

 

My sister died when I was 29.  Fifty years ago.  I still have bits of paper she wrote on, cards she designed for my first child’s first birthday, an odd t-shirt or two from the 60’s, a framed poster she had hung in her house that has hung in mine ever since.

I’ve been trying to write about her.  I push it away, I bring it close.  I make myself younger, writing as if she were ten years older.  I write in first person, third person, any old fucking person and whatever guise I put myself in, I can’t seem to create what I want.

And what is it I want?  I want to tell the story of what it is to lose someone who has been so close and then estranged for so long.

I felt she was disappointed in me as she grew up.  She may have realized my limitations.  That’s probably projection.  I disappointed myself.

Young people are such revolutionaries.  They have to throw you over so they can emerge as themselves.  And then when they have kids it happens to them.

Separation, oil and water, young from old. New generations want to repair the world, to wrestle to world down to fit them.  But the world is so old and we are like a bit of spit on its’ surface.  We dry leaving barely a trace.

This can be consoling and then it can be unbearably painful.  For our moment is our eternity.  Our moment is everything to us and nothing in the scheme of things.

My writing is a way to make things last;  to put into words, to pin down the ephemeral. My brother John and his kids brought his wife’s and their mother’s ashes to the beach this past weekend.  What could be more ephemeral than ashes?

Love and connection.  These don’t make us any less ephemeral, but they ground us in the moment, they root us to each other and to our spots in time.  Tend your moment well.

My old Birch Tree

I find my voice a lot easier to find than this 10 year old girl.  My voice is just me–it pours out of me without a whole lot of work.  This character Sandra is a mystery.  On these days in April, she is coping with the loss of her big sister, the loss of her faith, bafflement about really who her sister was.  She doesn’t understand her brothers and their reaction.  Her Father and Mother are pretty much unable to help her in the way she’s always been helped as the baby in the family.  It’s as if not only did her sister die but she herself disappeared too.

She goes back to her old standby, her tree.  Up there out of the noise and confusion she begins to see her way clearer.  Never clear really, but clearer.

I knew my old birch tree would someday find it’s way into a story.

Now for my old red corduroy coat.

 

The Chart that explains Everyone…

I heard this really interesting podcast about an exercise developed by the creators of Dungeons and Dragons.  This grid helps players (and writers) develop complex fictional characters.This grid is called “the chart that explains everyone.”  Not quite, but it’s an interesting and helpful little exercise.

So I am working on a story about a little girl coping with the death of an older sister.  In thinking about this, I realize that children are often the embodiment of neutral good or lawful good.  Only in horror writing do we encounter a true evil child.

However, the other characters in the story range from chaotic evil through the whole spectrum.  It’s interesting to watch a true innocent wander among these characters, protected by her goodness but also changed as the story evolves.

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Our Leader, Comrade Napoleon, Father of All Animals, Terror of Mankind, Protector of the Sheep-fold, Ducklings’ Friend is a fictional character and the main antagonist in George Orwell’s Animal Farm

So this guy, is Lawful evil in that he creates a system and then goes after the dissenters.  He makes the law and then punishes those who aren’t good foot soldiers.  At the same time he is Father, Protector and the Ducklings’ Friend.  The system he creates is exclusive not inclusive.  He is God, for better or worse.

Chaotic evil is like The Joker character in Batman.  He is anarchy and chaos and all the many rings of Hell.

I can’t figure who the hell neutral evil would be.

I’m going to play around with this.

 

 

 

What if Sisyphus…

The many positions of Sisyphus

 

What if Sisyphus laid down his boulder?  What if, acknowledging his fate but refusing to accept it, he laid his burden down?

So this popped into my head this morning as I dozed.  I attach this thought to a presentation I went to on Tuesday where we were asked to pick up a rock that had words written on them.  I picked up “to matter”.  This really spoke to me.

To matter has always been important to me.  I need to meet needs.  I need to work, to have a project, to matter.

Without a boulder, who am I?  It started me thinking about my family.  They have been a boulder.  They are no longer a burden.  They can be a joy.

But I am not used to this weightlessness.  I feel unmoored without my burden.  I’m like fucking Mother Courage who no longer has to drag her cart around in the war zones of Europe.  I don’t have to, but then what?Without my cart who am I?

My mother collected stuff all her life.  Extra plates–dinner, salad, big bowls, small bowls-,  chests of drawers spilling with linens—napkins, bits of lace, tablecloths,  spices from 1950 through 1980, dried up and unrecognizable,beds–twin, full, extra long,  —stuff and stuff and stuff.  She squirreled things away under her bed, in her closets, in the storage in the basement.  In the eventuality that someone might need them someday.  And someone always did.

Those are my bona fides.  A long line of women carrying burdens.  This is not to say how wonderful I am.

I recognize now that the boulder I push up the mountain has been my choice.  I push it up because without the boulder I am nothing.  Without purpose, who am I?

I feel like I ought to go to a meeting of masochists anonymous and stand up and say I am a masochist, let me share my story.

Aunt Fran she say “Honey, with that crazy mind of yours you don’t need no extra burden.  Drop your load, loony pants.”

Peanut man with the boulder.

This is my resolve.  It is now okay to move aside and let the boulder go.  My children are grown.  I can move on and have fun.  I will occasionally let myself worry but only in the privacy of my own head.  I will let go.  Shit this is hard.