(for lack of anything else to say, I’m posting here a poem a day)
I wake
tight
wound in the sheet
–night winding sheet —
wounded
in the tight lined
yellow-sheet logic
of your wound mind
winding
sheet-tight
around my night.
c elf 1970s
This is the year for me to really start paying attention.
Creativity emerges from paying attention. Problem solving requires paying attention. Connections thrive on paying attention.
Until the middle of November, my mother’s fatal dementia, by necessity, was the focus of my attention for the past decade. It feels strange, in a way, not to feel that pull any more — to have no excuse for not paying attention.
Writing well depends upon paying attention.
And so I begin here, tomorrow, participating in a month long project, A River of Stones.
A small stone is a polished moment of paying proper attention, and the challenge of the project is to write a small stone every day.
I will start tomorrow. One small stone. And, stone upon stone, I will try to set a solid path out of the stress and sorrow of the last decade and into a more focused future.
________________________
I was starting to feel guilty about not posting frequently enough on this blog. Then I read what my son wrote on Twitter about his blog:
I write for me, and then stop writing for me. Anyone who reads in the meantime? Cool.
This is my response to Mag 30 visual prompt at Magpie Tales.
will it rot or not
That’s how I’m feeling about my life right now. I took my bite. So what. I wait for my mother to let go of a life no longer worth living and my son to find a life worth living with passion. And I wonder if my life has been worth living. Will the apple rot or finished being consumed with relish. And does the larger menu matter any more. These are questions that I ask as statements. Maybe the core of this metaphor is that I just don’t know anymore. As Eve found out, sometimes one bite is all you get before being tossed out of Eden.
There is a lingering scent of bug spray throughout the house this July 4, left over from yesterday’s cook-out and trek down the street to watch the fireworks. I had the option of not hanging out in the 90 degree heat with the forty-something-aged parents and their young kids and not standing around in the mosquito and Japanese beetle invested night with the hundreds of others, necks craned to the sky. I chose to hang out in my own cool space, making periodic appearances to gather up my food and drink and interact a bit with the guests.
Such is the privilege of age — especially in my situation, where I have few responsibilities to anyone but myself. (Except, of course, my 94-year-old demented mother, whom I will visit in a few days to help with her care.)
It is Independence Day in another way for me. For the first time in some 25 years, I am off an anti-depressant. It served it’s purpose, and I was done with the lack of depth of feeling that is the both the benefit and the curse of those meds. It took three months to wean myself off, and I am seeing a counselor to help with the transition, but it’s worth it.
I’m writing more, feeling more, doing more. I’m almost done with the three-dimensional wall hanging that I’m creating for this virtual exhibit. I’m quite pleased with the result, and I have ideas for more such projects. And I’ve begun a sweater for my daughter like the one below I made for myself, but in another color.
I’m even feeling more sympathy for my poor mother, and, in a new strange way, I’m looking forward to spending some time with her, trying to ease her weary mind.
I am thinking a lot about being the age I am (70) and what I want for myself, which is seeming to be so very different from what I wanted even a dozen years ago. I am trying out some alternative ways to relieve the pains of joint and spine problems, and they seem to be working.
Today is Independence Day, and despite the turmoil and despair in so many other parts of this world, in this small space that my life takes up, it’s a good day.
Yes, it’s a good day for singing a song,
and it’s a good day for moving along
Yes, it’s a good day, how could anything go wrong,
A good day from morning’ till night
Yes, it’s a good day for shining your shoes,
and it’s a good day for losing the blues;
Everything go gain and nothing’ to lose,
`Cause it’s a good day from morning’ till night
I said to the Sun, ” Good morning sun
Rise and shine today”
You know you’ve gotta get going
If you’re gonna make a showin’
And you know you’ve got the right of way.
`Cause it’s a good day for paying your bills;
And it’s a good day for curing your ills,
So take a deep breath and throw away your pills;
`Cause it’s a good day from morning’ till night
I’m a writer. I’m a writer. That’s what I am. I’m also a cutter and sewer and looper. I want to do it all. I’ve always wanted to do it all.
So I’m writing. Mapgie Tales for one (a new one in the works). Entered an essay contest about death for another.
Pinned on my wall are pieces of what eventually will be a wall hanging for an online craft exhibit.
Maybe it’s because I started in therapy again, and that always gets my juices going.
Or maybe it’s because I’m cutting down on my anti-depressant.
Or maybe I’m getting manic in my old age.
Or maybe I’m avoiding thinking too much about the awful state my mother is in.
Or maybe all of the above.
So much to create. So little time.
I google their names, the people I knew in my past — poets, painters, psychologists who kept my psyche stirred, my shadows swirling through radiant darkness; dancers who swept me across ballrooms and turned my nights starry, my limbs light and fair. Do they ever google me and remember?
Even in dark corners, good things grow.
I read this article in the NY Times by Bob Herbert and am almost overwhelmed by the clouds of darkness with which the GOP has shrouded the minds of so many of my countrymen and countrywomen.
Herbert writes:
The G.O.P. poisons the political atmosphere and then has the gall to complain about an absence of bipartisanship.
The toxic clouds that are the inevitable result of the fear and the bitter conflicts so relentlessly stoked by the Republican Party — think blacks against whites, gays versus straights, and a whole range of folks against immigrants — tend to obscure the tremendous damage that the party’s policies have inflicted on the country. If people are arguing over immigrants or abortion or whether gays should be allowed to marry, they’re not calling the G.O.P. to account for (to take just one example) the horribly destructive policy of cutting taxes while the nation was fighting two wars.
If you’re all fired up about Republican-inspired tales of Democrats planning to send grandma to some death chamber, you’ll never get to the G.O.P.’s war against the right of ordinary workers to organize and negotiate in their own best interests — a war that has diminished living standards for working people for decades.
The are dark times. Depressed and depressing times.
But then I read this article, also in the Times, and see a brighter side — small, still. But we are due for a new season of enlightenment in our nation’s political world.
David Leonhardt reminds us that
The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.
[snip]
The bill is the most sweeping piece of federal legislation since Medicare was passed in 1965. It aims to smooth out one of the roughest edges in American society — the inability of many people to afford medical care after they lose a job or get sick. And it would do so in large measure by taxing the rich.
[snip]
Above all, the central question that both the Reagan and Obama administrations have tried to answer — what is the proper balance between the market and the government? — remains unresolved. But the bill signed on Tuesday certainly shifts our place on that spectrum.
While I am not a Christian, I can’t help but wonder how a U.S. Senator Jesus Christ would have voted on the issue of universal health care.
I’m Ronni’s guest blogger today at Time Goes By, as she spends a couple of weeks in NYC at work and play, including participating in the Age Boom Academy.
From an 04/02/09 Time magazine editorial:
For the past several years, I’ve been harboring a fantasy, a last political crusade for the baby-boom generation. We, who started on the path of righteousness, marching for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam, need to find an appropriately high-minded approach to life’s exit ramp. In this case, I mean the high-minded part literally. And so, a deal: give us drugs, after a certain age – say, 80 – all drugs, any drugs we want. In return, we will give you our driver’s licenses. (I mean, can you imagine how terrifying a nation of decrepit, solipsistic 90-year-old boomers behind the wheel would be?) We’ll let you proceed with your lives – much of which will be spent paying for our retirement, in any case – without having to hear us complain about our every ache and reflux. We’ll be too busy exploring altered states of consciousness. I even have a slogan for the campaign: “Tune in, turn on, drop dead.”
Read the whole piece here. and go over the TGB to get my take on it.
I am struck tonight by the power of other persons’ words.
Oh, I know, this web is a world of words. I spend too many hours meandering among miles of words that escape my head and ignore my heart.
Ronni Bennett’s Time Goes By is the one blog I read every day because what she has to say always has relevance for me. And so I don’t know how I managed NOT to read an incredibly moving section of her blog until tonight. And it is a section that has deep meaning for me because it’s about her time being her dying mother’s caregiver.
“A Mother’s Last Best Lesson” is presented in 12 poignantly honest pieces that hold the mind and touch the heart.
It’s not that I identify with Ronni’s experience; my attempts to take care of my mother have been very different. But she tells a powerful story, and there is something in me that is jarred by her revealing words.
There is something in me that resents not being able to do for my mother what Ronni did for hers. Oh yes, our circumstances are very different. Dementia makes it so. As does, in my case, situations of brutal familial disputes over how my mother’s care should be handled. I couldn’t win, so I abdicated because I have no legal power to make her struggle any easier, and I couldn’t bear to just stand by.
Ronni’s story made me realize that, after 8 years of caregiving being the intense focal point of my existence, I now find I don’t have a point, a purpose. I can get up in the morning, or not. I can eat, or not. Bathe or not. Go out or not.
I am finally “retired” from employment and living with a loving family and an almost-7-year old engaging grandson who is a joy. But I have forgotten how to be engaged in my own so-called life.
I am feeling like a work in progress that has had no progress for 8 years. In my past life I raised a family; held various challenging and rewarding jobs; was an vocal activist on behalf of various political and educational issues; and found power in the poetry of women’s spirituality. And I wrote. And I wrote. I was passionate about everything I did; if I didn’t feel passionate about it, I didn’t do it.
I have found myself in a “dark night of the soul” before and have labored, successfully, to find my way out, one step at a time.
Next week I am going on a week’s vacation to Maine with two of my closest friends. We will play Boggle and drink wine and laugh a lot. We will walk on the beach and read and contemplate and talk and laugh a lot.
And when I come back home, I will begin yet another journey to find the parts of myself that I have lost, to regenerate the parts of myself that have lost passion and purpose. I think I have found a new counselor who might be able to help me with that process.
Over the course of some 20 years of my previous life, I had the good fortune to have had as a friend and counselor someone who has moved on to assisting veterans and their families as they reconnect and readjust into full, productive civilian life.
He was a poet before he was a therapist, and his work and his words, now, still hold a great deal of healing power.
The word psychotherapist comes directly from the Asclepiad tradition. It means “soul attendant.” Psychology literally means “the order and meaning of the soul.” It didn’t become a science until Freud and his followers arrived out of the medical tradition. Modern psychology left the soul far behind and has not yet reconnected with its spiritual roots, though it needs to, because psychological healing occurs at a spiritual level.
The above is from an interview in The Sun magazine on helping veterans with PTSD, entitled Like Wandering Ghosts: Edward Tick On How The U.S. Fails Its Returning Soldiers. It’s worth a read.
Entropy is a term used to define (among other things), a process of deterioration of a system.
In terms of technology, my life seems to be one big process of entropy. My old desktop died a slow death over the past several months. Last week, I totally fried the new laptop that I inherited from my once husband. (That frakkin’ Vista!) Now I’m on a old little laptop that does not hold the wifi settings that I need to get online. It’s only a matter of time with this machine as well. How do you end entropy?
I think the first thing for me to do is cut my losses. and not spend any more time and money trying to fix messes of machinery that have aready joined the slide into infinite entropy.
I have to start over, with an inexpensive CPU with XP that can keep me online. If I ever have enough money to get a new laptop, it will be a Mac. That’s a big IF.
And then there’s my mother, whom I somehow have to rescue from the entropy of her care by my brother. I’m leaving tomorrow, driving into what I know will be a battleground for what’s left of my 93 year old mother’s demented life. She deserves better than she’s getting.
She fell yesterday, and the doctor wanted her to go to the emergency room, but that didn’t happen. I want to take her there when I arrive tomorrow. It could wind up a fierce and legal battle if things do not change to her benefit.
Took a sleeping pill to calm me dowm.
TOMORROW’S ANOTHER BATTLE FOR FREEDOM AND INTEGRITY AND SELFLESSNESS.