life with flowers

I have always been someone who would spend their last dollar on flowers, so it’s not all that surprising that they are the tools, in essence, of my trade.  Right now the camellia is starting to bloom and the roses are all ready to perfume the garden air.  There’ll be toothache plant, chinese roses, jasmine, rosemary and gardenias, not to mention all the vegetable and citrus flowers, all the flowers on the herbs, and the passion flower.

Sometimes it looks as though we don’t see what we’ve made of our lives.  But I saw it pretty clearly the other night.  Walking back from feeding our landlady’s horses, I saw inky dark rain clouds in the east, and in front of them an incredible huge rainbow.  It arced over the garden and the budding plants and I thought, perhaps tritely, that if I hadn’t had to come outside I wouldn’t have seen any of that splendor.  And it was a splendor both innate and created and powerful, and that splendor? is really where the Partner and I live now, even and perhaps especially when things are challenging.   So perhaps I haven’t made such a hash of things as it might seem.  Hope springs eternal, Gentle Reader, and that’s a good thing.  None of it would have happened without flowers and an ever growing reliance on all the things in life that we cannot necessarily see with our eyes, but with our hearts.

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No cure for love

At least not for our neighboring horses, Gentle Reader.  There’s a sweet, unicorn/acts like a blonde horse and a handsome, intelligent, burnished gelding living in the corrals next to us.  AS happens every year, Ms. Blonde has gone into her annual hormonal frenzy.  This has led to the separation of her and Mr. Gelding into separate but adjacent corrals.

So.  We now have a 24 hour a day stereophonic, not to say eardrum piercing, score of hoarse neighs, bellows, desperate whinnies, and pounding hooves.  It’s awful, really, but at the same time interesting because once again we see that really? we are all the same. I think it would be hard to find anyone who hasn’t experienced this specialness for themselves.   Fortunately for all of us, Ms. Unicorn’s season is not forever ongoing so it is to be hoped that some sort of normal will be restored.  Soon.  No more long, neck twisted around backwards burning gazes through the trees and no more desolate cries at 3 am.  No more furious looks at ME when there isn’t anything I, or anyone on the scene, can do.

Other than that? We continue with the quotidian practice of not freaking out over things.  Notice I said PRACTICE.  Talk about begin again, over and over.  Still, though.  It is clear that what you put your mind to strengthens in you.  At this point I may be the Obi Wan Kenobi of the daily snafu, but there it is.  Life, in all its majesty.

Only Three Percent is Visible

At this rate, it could be a long rest of the year…..

One thing about living in a yurt is that you are always in the company of the sky.  We see clouds and constellations, flocks of birds and rainbows.  The moon is getting full now and passes over the dome in the ceiling at night, shining moonlight down on us in bed.  It is quite an astonishing feeling, even if it keeps one awake.   So, last night, of course it kept me awake and the hamster in my head was running running running on its’ wheel, pondering a Difficult Big Question.  Something that it would have been nice to have resolved a long time ago, but there it is.  For once, maybe it was the moon, I went into the unpleasant feeling, walking with it as though a part of me were a calm, developed being.  (HA) It became gradually clearer, which allowed me to not hold on to the resentment and pain of it, but still didn’t get me to any decision making ability.  But it did make me understand how sometimes you just have to walk completely away from things, even big things- really big things,  and that is all right.  We fear others’ judgements, want to be a “nice” person (what ever the hell THAT is), all the rest of it, but on some level miss the whole point.  We get stuck on the particulars, the events, our injuries and forget that the important thing is to be true to yourself and what you are here for.  Which is not to say that the selfishness of the vertical society is being true to oneself, either.  Pushing for something to happen outside of oneself and counting that as success and not paying attention to what needs to be done in life truthfully is not being true to oneself.

Being true to oneself means being able to decide what you are actually here for, and not allowing others’ opinions and attitudes and needs to swamp your ability to actually live.  It involves forgiveness to the extent that you come to understand that everything does in fact go around in whatever gyre it does, people do what they do, and your job is to not keep reproducing the suffering that happens when you abdicate responsibility for yourself and allow a situation to control your behavior.  Inasmuch as is reasonably possible in the situation.  Any thing that has happened, the wounds and pains and setbacks, along with the successes and joys, are all part of the big palimpsest of existence and are also all sort of the same:  They’re something you see from way underneath the water, perhaps, and from way up in the sky.  How to translate this into action may be revisited in tonight’s probably predictable moon induced insomnia.  I certainly hope so because seriously? I am sick of this particular gorilla.

Meanwhile this morning we heard an interview with the astrophysicist who just won the Nobel Prize for his work showing the following amazing thing:  There’s about three percent of what we see around us that’s actually “stuff”.  The rest of it is largely invisible.  Dark energy and dark matter.  So what we see is kind of the spangly covering on some huge moving thing that we cannot see, that’s expanding and contracting and moving and pulling us in all sorts of directions.  So the metaphor of our consciousness being a small pin prick of light is a good one.  I thought of the Hindu concept of Vishnu, sleeping essentially on a flower in water,  and opening and closing his eyes in vast time, creating and destroying, creating and destroying again, over and over.  Innumerable beings, immeasurable “time”.  I thought about how when we meet someone, how much do we perceive about them at the time, and over time?  Often it seems it’s about three percent.  Coincidence?  I THINK NOT.  Then I thought about how the matter and energy in this theory (we’ll call it that for simplicity’s sake)  are referred to as “dark”, and it brought me to the other thing I’ve been thrashing about with in my little mind, which is that the Spaniard’s galleons (black) were often not “seen” by the Caribs and the natives upon whom they descended.  They were, for the Native peoples,  essentially dark matter and dark energy.  It was beyond the ken of the inhabitants here, and thus invisible to them.  THEN I thought about how maybe sometimes we gradually learn to see into that darkness.  But at what price?  Is it better to stay residing among the spangled surfaces?  Looking at that three percent which seems so enormous and fantastic?  (Should we call it the three percent or the three dimensions?) Or are we meant to dip into the darkness and see what lies hurtling underneath our conscious thought?

In any event, that’s another story, and now we have to go to town, always an endeavor.  It’s an amusing shopping list, too:  Batteries, Bullets, and Milk. We’ll see how we do.

In Haste

Disturbing things in the news.  To wit:

“Supreme” Court rules that corporate entities are the same as individuals in terms of contributing funds to political campaigns.  Anybody notice anything about this?  Anything ROTTEN?  Anything completely out of whack?

I see there is a move on to completely legalize marijuana.  What I wonder about that is: Will they let all the people out of jail who got busted for marijuana offenses if it becomes legal?  Or will the corporate rush to inhale all the potential profits to be made from this crop obliterate all else?

*SIGH*.  I have to pack now.

I Should Be…..

Washing the dishes.  Watering the garden. Any number of things.  Instead, I’m thinking about how Pedro Martinez reminded me of Yojimbo last night. ( One of my all time favorite movies, that and Sanjuro, of course.)  But:  That merest flick of a backward glance while walking off the mound.  And since Matsui was the only one who, initially at  least, seemed to figure out what was going on, the–er–motif got firmly fixed in my pliable little brain.  Oh, baseball.  As long as I can watch it, just watch the game, watch the people moving, and not think about all the money and owner weirdnesses and all, I am happy.  There is a kind of discipline to the game that is like a martial art, in the way one has to devote oneself to the skills and techniques until they become second nature.  And nature always has the last word: Luck, chance, weather, so many things enter into what happens in a baseball game.  It is really like life.  In that, you never know, sort of way.

And indeed, one never DOES know.  I went to see my client in the nursing home today and everyone was dressed for Halloween.  I didn’t recognize anybody, they’d costumed and switched up wheelchairs and all sorts of things.  Werewolves! Goddesses! Border Patrol Agents! And everyone was having a fantastic time of it as a result.  Slipping off their identities and entering into the spirit of the holiday- which, being about the bridge between the worlds of “life” and “death”, is actually appropriate for such a locale- with great humor and joy.  The ability to be anonymous lent everyone an energy and …an abandon.  A freedom.  Which is precisely the point of it all, really.  Entering into life with one’s heart.  No guarantee of a win or a good ERA or success OR failure.  It just IS and you might as well jump.  So it was pretty amazing to see all these people, who live lives many  would consider totally impossible, being collectively happy and, actually,  powerful, in a funny way.  The werewolf scared the hell out of me, to be honest.  It turned out he’s one of the people who don’t speak, but I finally recognized him from his particular laugh.  Oh, he thought it was hilarious sneaking up on me in that infernal wheelchair!  I of course, being the mature person I am, laughed so hard I got the hiccups, which made everyone else giggle even more.  Dude.  Always a source of entertainment, we are.  At least I didn’t fall down.

There is a kind of piercing, yet suspended, sense to things today.  Maybe it’s the weather- warm, actually, blindingly clear.  The intensity of the colors of things against the sky.  We’re on the Pacific Flyway so there is always something amazing flying around–I saw a flock of small birds wheeling through the air earlier, watched them in a clustered group, then a circle, then a long line, constantly forming and reforming.  Sometimes you could see them and sometimes the sun hit their wings and turned them so white they disappeared.  Finally they expanded from the clump to the long sinuous line and all of a sudden: They were gone.   It’s really all quite something, isn’t it.

Mauled in Cyberspace and Elsewhere

Firstly.  To our alert apparently Moscow-adjacent reader.  No, I do not sell envelopes.  Indeed, since these dismal economic times have been upon us, I make my own, for personal use only.   If envelope has another meaning then perhaps…?  Thank you for reading, anyway.

Today started with The Partner announcing, first thing, that we are “dinosaurs”.  Neither one of us has a Blackberry.  Uh oh, I thought.  I brightened temporarily, wondering if, if I were a dinosaur, would I get to be one of the ones with the spiked tails?  Prudence prevailed and I did not actually ask that question.  So, I went back to  pondering where all this stuff comes from, these envelope sales queries, along with where the money went, and a few other things provoked by random social encounters.  Take today.   The checker at the grocery store looked at me, looked at the several things in glass jars I’d purchased, and said, well you won’t be wanting a bag will you? I sighed deeply and said, YES IWANTAFREAKINGBAG. Thankyouverymuch.  Anyway,  I’ve decided it’s all emanating from, and hidden in,  the Kuyper Belt.  Really.  The Kuyper Belt of ****, if you will.  That’s where it all is.  Circling Neptune.   Chilly willy.  I’ve heard from reliable sources there are no envelopes there, either.

Eclipses

Personally, I believe there is cosmic (as in solar system, cosmos, galaxies and beyond) energy affecting us all, Gentle Reader.  However one wishes to describe it, what words are used, it is still there.  There was a total lunar eclipse yesterday and it seemed to have some  mighty powerful energy.

In short, lots of blog fodder, really.  Take Michael Jackson’s memorial service.  To me it seemed like an incredible example of something that could be interpreted in a wide range of ways.  Physics has demonstrated that the observer does influence what they are observing.  So everyone’s reality contributes to what we all see, in a way.  Apparently Bill O’Reilly missed the point as he so often seems to, but my feeling is that his viewpoint didn’t skew the entire vision.  Leastways I hope so.  Michael Jackson was an exceptionally talented individual who was eaten alive by the demands of his life.  We all experience huge challenges and difficulties and want to get away from the pain of it, don’t we?  It struck me, watching the service, that good is something that appears with an array of attributes, while evil is quite uniform.  Hannah Arendt wrote that evil is ultimately quite banal, and I agree.  Michael Jackson really was deeply good, although it is easy enough to pick apart his life choices without applying any compassion or real understanding and pretend to be able to judge.  So the good here was presented in a very large, pretty mixed bag.  But think about the uniformity of the evil we see every day.  The bland even tones of corporate power holders we see chatting away from Sun Valley.  The smooth way lies are told that cost the earth in lives and integrity.  The financial news is a good example of banality in action, and thus evil,  to my mind.  Anyway perhaps I digress.

Then we have baseball.  I got a postcard advertisement yesterday from a place in Georgia, because I have an alternative medicine practice I suppose.  But.  Call an 800 number, and in the mail you can get all the stuff, and more,  that got Manny Ramirez suspended for 50 games.  I showed this to the Partner and he slapped his forehead and said, how can this be??? It’s not illegal, said I.  So what gives, really?  If the people who on some level really do need the support of  these hormonal aids can’t use them….who are they for?  And if all you have to do is call an 800 number and get the stuff in a nasal spray….I am confused.  Once again.  Either this stuff is OK or it isn’t.    I find it interesting, to say the least, that the FDA can wade in on all kinds of things and freak out about them, like tryptophan for example, yet stuff like this is so easy to get a child could do it.  Or a caveman.  Yet it is supposed to be Very Bad Stuff.  I think this is all spelled m-o-n-e-y.  Maybe.

Then there’s just daily life.  I visited my client in the skilled nursing facility yesterday.  I usually say hi to everyone, just because.  Usually there are several people to say hi to,  sitting in the hallway in their wheelchairs, among whom is a lady, Madame, we’ll call her.  For nine months I’ve been going in there almost every day to visit my client, and saying hi.  Yesterday the hallway smelled just foully murderous.  Someone had apparently had a bathroom related accident and the smell was, temporarily,  enough to knock you down and keep you pinned.  I was focussing on not throwing up when I saw a hand reach toward me.  It was Madame.  She reached for me, held my hand, and told me I was a beautiful and good person.  And she is not like Senorita, who reaches for you and then makes you sing along with her just because.  Madame actually pays a level of attention.  This was the first time she had ever acknowledged my existence.   It was quite an astonishing experience.

So today, post eclipse, there are rumblings and shortouts and digestions of it all, crabbiness and woolgathering, but also exciting duckling sightings.  And that cosmic, shall we say,  energy surrounds us, rains down on us, all the time.  Maybe we should pay more attention, so that when it does all hit at once, like yesterday, we don’t find ourselves dissolving in tears.  Like yesterday.  On the positive side, apart from the revelations? Nothing exploded when I made dinner.  I call that progress.

Back on the Street Again

Hello, Gentle Readers. Indeed, I was gone for few days, and here I am back again. Overjoyed? I thought so.

We went a few hours north of here to a summer art festival on a river. I must say it was wonderful, wonderful to see old friends, wonderful to NOT HAVE MY CEL PHONE WORK and NOT HAVE MY LAPTOP and NOT BE NEAR A TELEVISION. I almost forgot what bliss that is. Wonderful to be on a river, wonderful to see redwoods and a nest of ospreys. Of course, this wouldn’t be my life if the whole thing went without incident.

We decided to camp this year, to save money and just be outside. So, after packing up all the booth stuff and all the product, and all the camping gear and food, we set off. We arrived at the campground and it seemed OK. The Partner and I both prefer camping in the middle of nowhere, but this was a working trip after all. So, there we were, relaxing after a long day, looking up at the redwoods through the tent. I confess to having had a nagging sense of foreboding because the Partner had said, more than once, how much he was looking forward to peace and quiet. Uh oh. What to our wondering ears should appear but…..A Large Asshat. With a surround sound system to blare out his almost beyond belief terrible taste in music, two stand up barbeques to provide chemical fumes, AND!!! two, count ’em, small pony sized dogs with basso profundo barks. This was nothing but enhanced by the arrival of four more humans, bringing the festive group to a total of six. Six loudmouths and two Hounds of the Baskervilles. Lots of liquid refreshment. So, there we were. “Quiet time” supposedly commenced at 10 p.m., so I called the ranger station after having endured two and a half hours of top volume Kenny Chesney interspersed with 80’s techno and intense barking. Rangers were at an emergency, apparently. I went to the “camp host” trailer, and found they were cowering in it refusing to answer the door. Yes, this meant that I, clutching my newly rebatteried MagLite, had to stump over to Happy Acres and ask them to tone it down. This did not go particularly well. What noise, Large A. enquired with a flat stare and stiff shoulders. The dogs? Ha ha, the dogs. They were by now foaming at the mouth and lunging at me, and his comment was, “they’re friendly”. This, Gentle Reader, is right up there with “I’ll only park in your driveway for a minute”. A passive aggressive owner with two out of control dogs telling me the dogs are friendly. So, I said, I can handle the dogs, pal. I watch the Dog Whisperer, after all. And, indeed, they started wagging their tails, sat down, and barked conversationally. They just need to be quiet, and the music and yelling needs to stop, I said. If you could just be mindful that you aren’t the only person here. I leave you to imagine the special hours that ensued after Large A. snarled at me, have a wonderful night. It was long, is what it was.

Anyway, we got out of THERE, giving Large A. & Entourage a hearty 21 horn salute on the way out, and everything was totally groovy from then on except for not having had any sleep at all that one night. (And not much the night before because our neighbors at home were up all night partying. Sleep people, sleep. It’s more important than you know.) My inventory got a bit gnarly but what the heck. I found myself laughing at irritating non-customers instead of worrying. Good. It took all this week for the fatigue to wear off and the anxiety to kick in again, so that once again I can send off my crisply worded memos to whitehouse.gov about how non-stimulating the stimulus is for small business. And blog, of course. It’s more fun than ever because Boo is now imitating my every key stroke with her beak against her food bowl and cage side. Ah, home again. I missed you guys!

woolgathering

Or maybe woo-woo gathering, as it was originally typed.  The knitting, speaking of wool, is eyeing me reproachfully from the corner; I’m working on a sweater (Multi-Year Project.  Note to self: No more men’s sweaters on size 6 needles, ok?) and I’ve had to rip out my mistakes so often I now only knit when I’m in peak mental condition. Ha, ha.

The weather is yucky today, overcast, chilly.  I’m watching baseball and my Dear Team is Not Doing Well.    Hope springs eternal, however.  That’s the great thing about baseball, really anything can happen. One likes to take that sunny expectation into one’s daily life, right?

In other excitement, I finally vacuumed.  I wonder where all the energy I used to have went at times, but I like to think it’s just that my priorities have shifted, and the dawning understanding that control is pretty illusory overall has allowed me to stop trying to maintain it by constant polishing of the glassware.

OK.  I’m back.  I had to switch browsers because being on a Mac and all, Safari just doesn’t….quite….do anything.  And I wanted to close with a link, and now my non-premium mental state is precluding that as well. Anyway I was rather cheered to find that even Crazy Aunt Purl (at http://www.crazyauntpurl.com, coincidentally) was asking for a life decoder ring this week. It made me feel like I wasn’t alone, after all.