Regrets: a Haiku

Not a good idea

Tried to move the couch myself

And now it is stuck

WHY did I have to start this alone at 9pm?!

I’m participating in the Slice of Life Challenge
hosted by Two Writing Teachers

To-Done List

It’s the opposite of a to-do list

Salmon
Rock climbing
Errands
Writing
Dancing
Eggs Benedict
Basement cleaning
Cultural presentation
Podcasts
Book shifting
Moving furniture
Tea and cornbread

Rest is the best

A few days ago, my friend Ona over at On A Thought wrote about Spending Time. I can’t stop thinking about it. Right when I read it, I went in to comment, thinking something like “Amen!” or “Preach!” But as so often happens to me, once I started writing, I started having things to say. Lots of things to say, some of which I said in my a way-too-long comment.

(My comments do sometimes get long. I know it’s not great. My texts are long too. And sometimes punctuated, which my teenager always finds quaint and sometimes finds offensive. But I have interrupted myself! Another thing I do often.)

Ona writes: “Why is it so hard to spend time now? Why does slowing down feel wrong? Why do I feel guilty? Why don’t I sit around and listen to music just to listen to music anymore?”

My ~~response~~ manifesto:

THIS. This is how we feel in a culture that says we are worth only what we accomplish or produce for someone else (usually for someone else to profit). It says our right to exist is predicated on doing things, and not all these good thing that you listed but instead “useful” things that earn money or serve patriarchy or preserve inequity or all of the above. If you’re me, your soul knows it’s not right, and so does your body, and many times even your mind knows it’s not right. But the whole things churns on, and you keep going. And if you’re me, this eventually leads to mental and physical illness, to the point that your self FORCES you to stop.

And this is what happened to the whole world; we all forgot that our worth is inherent in our existence and not determined by these thin and harmful measures, and we all were operating brokenly and in pain, and even when worldwide disease and uprisings and beatdowns and 21st century lynchings and lies brought everything to an actual, concrete HALT, we have failed to turn away from it.

Every nanosecond you spend lying on the sofa looking at shadows is a VICTORY. When you float in a pool thinking, or memorize every word to a song, or noodle or doodle: you are a fxxxing CHAMPION and I commend you. It’s proof that you are a human being and that you still know how to human.

Let all the time be spent! May it all be wasted, squandered, released, embraced, enjoyed! Splash that shit around like it’s cheap perfume!!

Talking About the Weather

I suspect that spending time with me, these days, is a bit like walking through a land with that kind of weather that changes in a heartbeat. I don’t mean that it just changes the way it does everywhere, like how everywhere I have lived, people say “Don’t like the weather in ____? Wait five minutes!”

[Spoiler alert: they say that EVERYWHERE. The nature of weather IS change.]

This weather changes in ways that show. They are changes that force you to notice. This weather pounds on the roof so hard you forget your work; you get up from your desk and go out to the front porch to watch the lightning. Or it floods the sky with colors that scream “Filter!” and remind you most of the huge eyeshadow palette you had in high school, all blues and purples and magentas and glitter. It’s weather that makes you get your camera out, or run for your coat, or rip off your layers.

My weather changes in ways that don’t necessarily seem to follow reasonably from one another. Reasonable changes would be from cloudy, to light rain, to pouring. Or from cold wind and rain to sleet. My weather isn’t that orderly. It defies cause and effect. Maybe it’s cold and windy, and you’re walking along bracing against it as the fuzz around the hood of your parka gets wet and crusty. And then without warning you are sweating, red-faced and panting, and the sun is bald and burning. I change like that.

I feel all my feelings, and also a lot of other people’s feelings, and also I have feelings about all those feelings. And I have BIG feelings. I always have. Even my elementary school report cards said things like “very sensitive,” and way too many partners and family members and even acquaintances have said “too intense.” It feels like I’ve spent most of my life trying to dial that intensity down for fear of not being liked. But really, how does one dial down the weather? You can’t. All you can really do is make sure you have the right clothing and equipment. Or, roll with it and just let the snowflakes melt your tongue. Let the sunlight warm your face. Feel the wind in your hair, and squish your toes in the mud.

Also, I have spent way too much time in my life terrified, and absolutely convinced, that bad emotional weather will stay bad. Every down day is transformed in my mind into a doomsday: “Oh no. What if I’m depressed? It was like this at the beginning the other times. I’m never going to just be happy, am I. What the hell is wrong with me? Why can’t I just be happy? Fuck. I’m going to get so behind at work. And on and on.

But weather changes, doesn’t it? The nature of weather IS change. Even horrible long gray cooped-up interminable sloggy winters in central Pennsylvania eventually do come to an end. Maybe instead of hating the showy, unreasonable changing of my soulweather, I can love it. No weather is forever, and neither is any emotion, and for that I am grateful. Showily, unreasonably grateful.

Homeplace

Things my house and I have in common:

mismatched
colorful
cozy
welcoming
needs some work
some projects are perpetually unfinished
leaks here and there
filled with memories
shared with my best people
blends old and new
lots of blue
full of found items: ground scores, curb scores, thrifts, and gifts
outer doors don’t always close or open right
difficult to heat
filled with books and crafts and drafts
stuffed with too many things

Equinox!

On an equinox, day and night are of equal length; the dark time and light time balance each other. This Sunday was the Vernal Equinox, but it also was a sort of personal equinox for me. It is a time of turning over to a new season, on levels literal, emotional, metaphorical.

There really have been no appropriate bins of seasonal clothing, no decorative seasonal garden flags, no holiday decor to pretty up this last couple of years. Since a good writer friend told me she loves my lists, I’ll list some of the events and characteristics this looooooong last season has featured:

Burnout
Panic attacks
Pandemic
Divorce
Money problems (see: divorce)
Professional rejections and disappointments
Missed opportunities
Failures
Cancellations
Health problems: mental, kidney, brain, uterine, teeth, jaws, joints, Covid
Treatments: surgeries (5), braces (1 set), medications (so many)
Overwhelm
Self-judgment
Dissociation
Near-total societal badness

Lots of dark in that season, and all the flashlights out of batteries at times.

BUT. I arrived home at 4 am Sunday, on the vernal equinox, from a trip. Climbing into my bed, I thought vaguely, “I made it.” And on Monday, I woke up to these sights:

What you are seeing is living stuff revealing that not only is it still alive, it is growing new stuff! And even though spring/new “leaf” (get it?)/new life metaphors are cliches, they are also true.

New light this spring:

Headspace
Embodiment
New love that feeds, not starves
Teeth, jaws and face that cooperate
Writing ideas
Energy
Medicines (different and better ones)!
Fun plans
Self-compassion
No part of my body is cold right now!

There may be a pandemic, still. Education is still full of disappointments and frustrations, both personal and systemic. So is society. And life. There may still be lots of societal badness, complete with wars and oppression and tons of harm. I even still wake up every day with joints that hurt and more ideas than I can ever finish, and I want more money.

But still! Leaves are growing! I made it.

Vacation Math

Seven crossword puzzles in bed

Four airplanes

Two car rides

Five helpings of guacamole

Three kinds of ceviche

Two sea turtles munching grass

Two surprise rainstorms

Five fruit smoothies

Four omelets

One Mayan city

One underground lake

Seven books

One million percent better

Mornings working from home

Some mornings I need a little more quiet time than most mornings have. Time for coffee, for sitting in my bathrobe looking at nothing, just sitting. Time for the dreams to fade and the body to loosen. Time for prayer or notebook writing or a shower or to just take a minute, or to dress or take pills or make a plan or find something I have misplaced and just NOBODY TALK TO ME PLEASE! I just need a minute! I’ll snap, or ignore, or on a good day push my own need away, not so far away that it leaves altogether, but off to the side where I can pick it up once the kids are out for the day. Sometimes I need that time and take it back during my own “work day,” sitting on the couch with a second cup of coffee when I’d normally be settling in at the computer. Sometimes I need that time, and I take it like that, but that time spreads from a few minutes into the whole morning, spent staring into space or reading “just this one article” or researching hotel rooms for a hypothetical trip. Or the very best socks, or a thermos nobody will use. Which leads to other times when, of course, I need to make up the lost work, which in turn takes away from other time that I need to… and so I… and then I… and so I… and then I… need a little more quiet time than most mornings have.

Anthropologists from Space

What will the anthropologists that visit us from space make of it all?

What will they make of our face masks… protection from a virus, or just adornments for our mouths, like an heirloom brooch or cheap flashy earrings?

What will they make of all these words on our t-shirts: Coke, Obama/Biden ‘08, Penn State, IZOD, 6th Annual 5k Race, It’s 5 o’clock somewhere!? Will they see advertisements, souvenirs? Or perhaps holy creeds, or clan-identifying garb? Or will they think they’re our names, like the name on a dog’s collar?

What will they make of the braces on my teeth? Will they know they were good for my teeth, badly needed and the best our age has? Or will they see a weird fashion, like big plumes on hats, or some kind of punishment for a gossip or a liar?

What would they make of the stack of books on my table? A true crime story, a feminist memoir, a history of the Maya, a novel about moms, a book of crossword puzzles, an empty journal. Will they look like instruction manuals? Orders from above? History or philosophy, of my culture or someplace else?

And what of me? Will they see me as a writer, teacher, mother and friend? As smart and strong and beautiful, blossoming? Or as a crone, or a symbol, as very young or very old? Oh, a priestess!

Maybe they’ll find our museums, but with all their labels worn away. Maybe they’ll have watched TV en route, like Mork. Or was it Alf?

I’ve looked at artifacts of Ancient Rome, a museum of modern art, and Mayan ruins in the same week, and I have questions!!

What will they think of Groot mixed in at this non-ancient Mayan tourist stop?

From the crayon box

I know I’m not the only person who loves the brand new box of crayons, the bigger pack the better. All those tips not yet worn down, all those colors laid out in their tidy rows. And that brand-new-crayon smell!

I had a favorite crayon color: blue-green. It was in the 64-pack with sharpener, of course, and in the satisfyingly square 48-back too. Its color was more like turquoise than aqua. More azure than teal. Closer to cornflower than to royal blue. It was blue like a blue sky, but not like the ones in Pennsylvania. It was the blue of a summer mountain sky, late in the day over a body of water. It was blue-green and not at all green-blue, which was a crayon color of its own.

It’s one of the blues just at the horizon of a Caribbean ocean view on a sunny day. It’s not the foamy greens up close or the baby blues just below the clouds. It’s just past the second line of breakers, yet lighter somehow.

Blue-green almost like dreamy old eyes remembering. Almost like the egg of a robin, which is bluer. Almost like the muddy turquoise of my kitchen walls, left behind by the people who had my house for fifty whole years before me— but that’s greener. Blue-green like the scales of an imaginary dragon. Like a soft shirt I loved but outgrew so soon.