Clearing the Slate

I've been coming to the pool with a head teetering on melancholy, a jumbled myriad of worries. I sink into the turquoise-tinted water, stretching, doing flip-turns, feeling like a graceful moon dancer. Swimming makes me feel beautiful and elongated and calm inside my body. I glide home and sink into my work. Swimming clears the slate. It's my hydro-psycho-therapy.

Jung and Rilke

First, Jung:

We must still be exceedingly careful in order not to project our own shadows too shamelessly; we are still swamped with projected illusions. If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, all and sundry, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in the "house of self-collection." Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.

     - Carl Gustav Jung, from the lecture Psychology
       and Religion (Yale, 1938)
       (I also read this passage in May Sarton's book
       Journal of a Solitude.)

Then Rilke:

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day to the answer.

Resolve to be always beginning - to be a beginner!

     - Rainer Maria Rilke, from the book
       Rilke On Love and Other Difficulties
       by John J L Mood

Chemistry, Weather, and Habit

It's cool and gray and breezy today. I'm wearing long sleeves under my fleece pullover. The leaves rustling at the window sound like Autumn. This morning it was actually cold enough to close the windows. I am having to remind myself it's the middle of June because the weather today is making my brain think it's late September. I'd be fine with cool weather all summer. I tend to panic in the heat and humidity. I'm relieved to be feeling calm, content, and introspective after a bunch of agitated days. Once again I am reminded I am a walking chemistry set. This morning we had no milk in the house, so instead of my morning hot tea I drank cold lemonade tea, my usual summer afternoon beverage, and my brain thought it was afternoon! Are we so easily swayed by chemistry, weather, and habit? Yes, and I think it's fascinating.

Parade

The parade was amazing. Even in the drizzle people came out and filled both sides of the street. People lit up when they saw us playing music and dancing and waving. I spotted Shriners wearing clear plastic over their wool hats and decorative suits; shrink-wrapped Shriners! The sky held out until the parade was over. Then it poured.

Toes

Yesterday when I arrived at the YMCA I noticed the pearly toenails of Sheila, the lady at the front desk, who was wearing sandals. She said she paints them on the weekends and laughed. I said I tend to hide my toes because each toe looks like it was born from a different marriage! As a kid I was fascinated by the resemblance of my sister's toes to mine; hers are similar but more elongated and elegant. My half-brother's toes definitely resemble mine, and they would make me laugh because they were even goofier. Our toes were about the only place where I recognized the shared DNA between us. Mother had the original version, but her toes always looked angry.

Water Music

We're getting ready for our first parade of the season. Rehearsing the happy marching tunes last night cheered me up. Last week I played in three jams and they were all fulfilling. I am astounded at the healing power of playing music. Even when I feel wretched, it makes a home.

I'm enjoying swimming laps again, too. It's enhancing my strength for my horn playing, not to mention making a calm room in my brain. Lately I seem to especially need the thinking, underwater time. My hypo-allergenic stress-busting visceral place is in the turquoise waters. My body remembers how good this is, how swimming permeates all aspects of my water-soluble life. My muscles smile, my skin laughs, my head clears, and I calm down. I'm a water jock/junkie. There are so many of us at the pool; all ages, shapes, sizes, and colors.

Metaphoric Vision

I've often thought of those old-fashioned stereoscopic 3D viewers with the two matched sepia images as a metaphor for my divided psyche, the receive and transmit halves. These two parts combine together to create 3D, to make up the whole of my vision; life in one eye, death in the other, or receiving with one eye, transmitting with the other. If you cover one eye you eliminate visual depth. Both eyes are needed for the full vision.

Quote of the Day

Artists don't get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.

     - Stephen DeStaebler

Writing Memorial

I caught Maxine Hong Kingston being interviewed by Bill Moyers on public television the other night. She has been involved with getting war veterans and widows to write their stories, and the healing has been astounding. She talked about the magic and power of writing. Everything she said rang true for me and I was moved and inspired. I find that truth cuts through everything, and I thirst for it.

I'm a Two-Headed Beast

I am in the difficult head place and I must examine this again. I don't want to shy away from the healing powers of writing especially when I need it the most. It is painful switching over and adjusting to my receive head. I told myself if you are in receive mode then receive! Read, listen, watch; nourish your other house. I'm beginning to suspect it's been a family secret that a few of us have the two heads and we hate it and try to make the other head go away. For me the attempt to eliminate one of the heads caused a lot of damage and seemed wrong, so I am determined to take up the challenge and explore both.

For one thing, I do all of my painting in the often-painful noisy receive head. It's as if a door opens at those times and I descend into the dungeon, to the dark dank room with the prowling tigers, and I walk in and paint with my brush-sword. I adjust over the weeks and then it seems less painful and more normal and I get my most difficult work done. I can't seem to find that door in the transmit head because at those times I am gushing physical energy, and the sensory stimuli are loud and joyous and distracting. The obvious choice is to love the transmit energy and hate the receive, but God didn't ask me which I like better, inviting me to choose so we could kill off the other head. He created me with two heads, and I am determined to explore and know the nuances well, to appreciate the gifts of both. No war; my inner Hatfields and McCoys must share.

My husband says I am still me. It's as if I'm an island. The weather may change but I am still the island. But weeks of hurricanes and then weeks of sunshine is still a profound contrast and challenge to this little island. The island is strong, though, and built for contrasting weather.

I'm going to illuminate as much as I can, like an archaeologist digging in a cave with a hand-held lantern, prowling in my own psyche. There are cave paintings and treasures and scary dark corners but I'm not turning back.

Facing the Day

There are times when I'd like to hide under my bed rather than face the day. It's when the inner amplification of my haunted thoughts is blaring loud, and fear and suffering take a front row seat. I call it the mental flu. It happens when moving from transmit energy to receive energy. At these times I am faced with a barrage of overwhelm and worry. I am trying to remind myself that I can deal and the days will brighten. They already have, and today I swam in the clear turquoise-tinted waters of the pool. While I was there I chatted with swimmers Don and Mary. Both are elderly, vibrant, devoted swimmers.

Mary, a former nurse, stepped out of the ladies room cautiously, assisted by her walker, and lowered herself into the pool at the ladder. She walked in the water, repeating a short path while lifting blue foam triangular barbell weights. Today the young lifeguard gave her goggles and she put them on. I teased her, saying that she looked like an aviator or a raccoon. She laughed and explained how amazing her vision is now that she's had her cataracts removed. She said colors had become more vivid, and she was now able to distinguish between violet and blue. She said she must have been wearing clashing colors before the eye surgery! Her reading and distance vision had improved too. I said now you can read lips from down the block! I told her I had read about a man who regained his sight after being blind most of his life, and how he now struggles with organizing the barrage of visual information. Maybe it's not unlike my overwhelming transition into receive energy, struggling to make sense of the incoming noise.

I asked Don about a mutual friend, and then he talked to me about how all his friends living in the nearby elderly apartments have slightly different living arrangements, appealing variously to each. By the time I left the pool I was filled up with the cheer of others and feeling pretty buoyant!

Quote of the Day

There are two ways to live your life - one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle.

     - Albert Einstein

The Mistress's Daughter

The library called Friday to say the copy of The Mistress's Daughter, a memoir by A.M. Homes, had come in. I read it in one sitting. It's amazing, courageous and powerful. The author took me on a journey and I am not the same for having gone there. Her voyage illuminated and healed some parts of mine. This to me is the epitome of a great book. Thank you A.M. Homes.

Cold Swim, Hot Tea

I am day-dreaming about long distance swimming. There's nothing like a long cold swim followed by a cup of hot tea.

It is gray today. It is comforting to have a blanket of clouds over me after so many days of bright sunshine. It is cozy.

I saw the newborn baby cows when I got milk for my tea. One calf was so delicate she looked like a young deer. Her fur was all shiny and clean from the rain.

Happy Mother's Day

Two days ago I was in a dark mood. I took a long walk with Honey and found a book at a yard sale for a dollar, it was by the Dalai Lama! Dalai for a dolla! I read it on the couch when I got home. Eventually I fell into a deep sleep, and woke up to the sound of a woman cross-country skiing on an exercise machine on the third-floor porch across the street.

Yesterday I was reading more of the Dalai Lama book I found for "a dolla" at the yard sale. Maybe I should realize I was not unlucky to have had such a difficult childhood. I was granted the opportunity to push back with the fires of compassion, love, and joy.

The lilacs are bursting in our yard. We planted the bushes twelve years ago when Bill's sister gave us pieces of her plants. The neighborhood kids had been plucking bouquets of them for Mother's Day! I don't mind, there's plenty of blossoms for everyone.

Our neighbor Armand gave us a dozen raspberry suckers to plant. He dug them up from his pristine garden, and then fleshed out our collection with sprouts of dill, Greek oregano, and cilantro. Bill cleared the leaves and twigs and planted the herbs. We discovered our asparagus has come up again! We harvested a bunch and ate them like carrots sticks and also enjoyed them in cheddar cheese sandwiches.

Today's Food Cravings!

A Peanut Noodle Dish

I boiled a pound of whole-wheat angel hair pasta in four quarts of salted water until al dente. At the same time I steamed three heads of fresh broccoli, until tender. I let it all cool, then combined the broccoli and noodles and poured on homemade peanut sauce.

Homemade Garlic Lime Peanut Sauce

I put in a blender 3/4 cup natural peanut butter, a sprinkle of red chili flakes, a few peeled cloves of fresh garlic, freshly squeezed lime juice (3 limes), a chunk of fresh ginger (the equivalent of a tablespoon), a teaspoon each of salt and sugar. I buzzed it all in the blender, adding water until the consistency was right.

You can eat this hot or cold, with a garnish of fresh cilantro or fresh parsley sprigs.

Little Hollywood

This morning my neighborhood is a hoppin' Hollywood movie set. It's so trippy and fun. There's a camera crew, actresses dressed up as prostitutes standing around getting their makeup touched up, trucks with equipment trailers with dressing rooms, the whole deal right here on our street. We watched with binoculars from the roof over the 2nd-floor front porch.

They're here to film an episode for a cable television drama called The Brotherhood. The former Lauzon funeral parlor has been turned into a fictitious Asian massage parlor, and the new Asian video store, next door to Joe's Moldy Oldies, now has a worn neon Motel sign over the window. As the film crew has discovered, our neighborhood is already a time warp on most days.

I'm out of touch with popular culture so I don't know about the show but I do appreciate the hard work that it takes to make this stuff happen, especially the cooperation between people. It's like observing the workings of an ant colony!

Grrr . . .

I am struggling to deal with the wild beasts that have made a home in my painting studio over the past four weeks. Now there's four full-sized hungry growling tigers pacing angrily in there, ready to devour me. They make me grouchy and snarly until I start feeding them oil paintings, then we do okay.

If it does not feed the fire
of your creativity, then leave it.
If people and things do not
inspire your heart to dream,
then leave them.

-  -  -

if what you do and how you live does not feed the fire
in your heart and blossom into poems,
leave, quit, do not turn back,
move fast away from that which would mold your gift,
break it, disrespect it, kill it.

     - Jimmy Santiago Baca, from the poem Ten,
       in Healing Earthquakes, Book V

Faith

My life is one big prayer; that I can keep on pouring out and ingesting art, words, and music. I am trusting this, even in the face of fear and danger.

Leaping Cows

I've been invited to a cow-leaping party in Randolph Vermont on Mother's Day. It's when the cows come out of the barn to dance for the first time in Spring! I might have to go and dance with them, serenade them on the baritone sax.