It's This Kid's 21st Birthday

A lot of you have been around, reading the old blog for over a decade, so this may come as a surprise that my Henry is 21 years old today! He tells me that he went out to lunch with his gorgeous Annika and had his first legal drink. He also brought home a bottle of gin so that we could make Negronis before we go out to dinner tonight to celebrate. Lest you think alcohol is all we're doing today, he also announced that he'll be heading to the nearest cannabis dispensary.

Just kidding.

WHO DO YOU THINK I AM?

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I've said it each year, and I'll say it again: Henry has been the light of my life since the moment the doctor pulled all ten pounds of him out of me. He is sweet and smart and beautiful, inside and out, and I love him.

Happy Birthday, Henry!

All My Chicks Are Home

Surround me, confound me
with your boundless love --

for your eyes only

I need to get back to writing a little bit here every day. It was a good exercise and occasionally I'd type out some really good stuff. Thoughts and musings or what passes for thoughts in my beleaguered mind these days. And nights. I went to see Dr. Jin today. I have mornings when I'm taking care of Sophie and feel tears in the back of my throat that I swallow. A sea. So I went to Dr. Jin and she tried, again, to stick a needle in that fleshy space between the thumb and forefinger, but I knew and then she knew that I knew what was going to happen and that is pain, and it's a weird pain that I just don't can't take. So she didn't stick the needle there. After she finished with the needles she turned on the Chinese music and shut the door behind her, and I swear it's the same music that they played in the Chinese restaurant where I worked for a brief time in Carrboro, North Carolina. I was the host and seated the few customers we got in dark booths and I've written this before, but there was a Chinese waiter named Jackson who was in love with my young college self and he was always somehow behind me whispering in low tones under that Chinese music. One day he came in with a perm and I noted the perm and he said for your eyes only which I believe was a Bond film of the era. I still remember Jackson and the bags of food that the cook in the back dumped in woks and stirred around and I wonder what happened to all of it. I think about Jackson every time I lie on Dr. Jin's table with needles between my eyes my breasts and down somewhere on my feet and that Chinese restaurant music plays. I'm the hostess, still, and he's at my back, whispering in my ear and there's something so relaxing about letting it all go or come, these memories of darkness and men and food and the way light falls in a late-afternoon booth. It's not nostalgia but a meditation and after a while the Chinese music tape clicks off, Dr. Jin comes in and takes out all the needles and tells me to take these pills for my sadness and she does this for me, she says, and I love her.

Awake People Be Awake

Woolsey Fire Lit, early afternoon
11/10/18

A Ritual to Read To Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am

and I don't know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood

storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,

but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider—

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

William Stafford

Woolsey Fire Lit, early afternoon
11/10/18
photographer: Carl Jackson

Cosmic

My best friend is keeping vigil as her mother lies dying from a terrible cancer. "Why is life so difficult?" I ask Sophie as I heave her into the car. I might have said hard. Sometimes I feel like a monster. Sometimes I am a monster. Heavy. This morning I slept with and woke to the stars. That's what it feels like. The space he brings me. "Are you flying?" he asks, and I say, "No, it's not like that." I want to say soar. The word weightless. 

Mercy Now

Mark Bradford's "150 Portrait Tone"
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

I do not pray except for mercy. I may sit on the side of Sophie's bed in the early hours of the morning, pulled there by a groan and thrashing legs and arms, and I'll curse in my mind even as I stroke her tiny face my grimace an extension of hers and I will ask for mercy. Mercy. I do not pray except for mercy. There is such a thing, isn't there? Not the prayer but the mercy. Today another ten children were gunned down by another child. Mercy. My own son rages at the world says hopeless but his strong body intelligence the way he moves belies the cynicism. Be merciful, I think. This morning two small yellow-breasted birds splashed in the fountain just outside my bedroom door. Yet, the earth is betrayed, buckling, relentless. I sip coffee. Sophie slept. Even so, I have a past, you know, where or is it when I did terrible things. I have a past, you know, when I was terribly hurt. I am sorry. Yes. I am, too. What, I think, might have happened if I hadn't done that? Yet still, mercy. I have held Sophie in my arms, a pieta without prayer.  The line of those who have hurt her, even indirectly. We must show mercy. What might have happened had Sophie been given cannabis medicine in those early days? Would I have crouched in the shower and wept, lay my forehead on the tile in thanksgiving for mercy? I have not prayed except for mercy. Those children dead, this earth, that person, that love betrayed and having been betrayed, my son, my son, my daughter. Mercy. There is such a thing, isn't there? Not the prayer but the mercy.

Love Poem

To C


are you only one hour ahead?

yes

weird,

this whole time I thought it was 3

no

Time's an illusion

you've been gone forever

only a minute

will be back in a

flash

will wait

forever

Riff

Winter in NYC, 1996

This morning I held Sophie in my arms, her long legs dangling over my lap, her head resting heavily on my shoulder. I had a sort of vision a deep body-felt of her inside me, how I carried her. I closed my eyes and spoke to her in my mind and she spoke back. Language is amorphous even as the body is concrete. I might have never known that if Sophie hadn't embodied it. I can be ugly and persistent in despair. Note the placement of words. Unlike thought, words are specific. Despair is not ugly or persistent, but I am ugly and persistent in despair. There's a tenacity to strength that wears me out. It's impossible to describe. My mind drifted to the winter of 1996, a huge snow storm in NYC, Sophie's pink snowsuit, that damn backpack I needed to climb up eight flights of stairs to our tiny apartment. Sophie not yet  a year old and I just 32. There's not only love. Yet, there's love.

Riding Ferris Wheels With Men

Sunset with Ferris Wheel in Distance

I rode a ferris wheel with the man I loved in the parking lot of a strip mall somewhere in Nashville, Tennessee.  It was the last century. It was the last millennium. The air was still dense with humidity even after the sun sank,  a pale disc that had hung baleful in a colorless sky for months. The Chinese restaurant where we ate beforehand was dark and cold. We ordered hot and sour soup and shredded garlic pork that came with rice. We read our fortunes. Men trip not on mountains, they trip on molehills. I know I threw my head back later and laughed into the sky, my hair damp on my neck, drops of sweat in the small of my back, our fingers entwined, legs dangling over the parking lot far below. I couldn't bear to look down. The bench creaked when we shifted. He always made me laugh. Did we marry later that summer? Did I betray him less than two years later?

That dizzy dancing way you feel.


Men watch football and they watch baseball. They watch basketball. When they aren't in the kitchen, men watch cars going round hairpin bends in foreign countries. The sisters of men watch football, too, and they watch basketball and crack nuts in their new teeth, crunch like the bodies on the screens. The girlfriends of men watch football in their team's jerseys, screaming at home on the couch or in sports bars, lunging toward screens, so many screams. I'm a girlfriend of a man who watches football and who watches basketball, but I don't watch. I can't bear to watch.


I was delighted to find myself swept upwards and downwards at such speed. But the wheel turned round so rapidly that a Greek who was sitting near me couldn’t bear it any longer, and shouted out “Soni! Soni!” (enough! enough!)

Pietro Della Valle, a Roman traveller visiting Constantinople during a Ramadan festival in 1615, riding what was known as a "pleasure wheel"

The Grace of Caregiving

I'm typing this from Sophie's hospital room in Santa Monica where we arrived yesterday early afternoon after a visit to the pediatrician turned into a ride in an ambulance with Sophie struggling to breathe and a possible diagnosis of pneumonia.

Here's the good news: She doesn't have pneumonia.

Here's more good news: The care she received from the pediatrician, from the paramedics and all the ER docs and nurses as well as those attending her in the hospital has been impeccable. I just finished speaking with her attending doctor who stopped the oxygen and is refraining from giving her any more antibiotics as she is absolutely certain that there is no sign of infection. We might even get to go home later today or this evening.

Here's the bad news: This is the second time that Sophie has gotten into trouble with the increased secretions that are a side effect of the benzodiazepine that she's been taking for the last decade -- let's face it -- her entire life, more or less. Coupled with her reduced motor ability, she doesn't have the same capacity to clear the secretions and is probably aspirating more often than not. SO, I've been in touch with her neurologist and her regular doctor to tackle the problem. We are talking mechanized vests, oxygen for home and perhaps a palliative doctor. For those of you who might gasp at the word palliative, it's not the end-of-life kind of care but rather the kind of care that improves life quality as much as possible when you're dealing with a chronic condition. The fabulous attending physician is going to give me a referral to one, so we'll see how it all plays out.

It's been a hard few days. Ok. It's been a hard few weeks. Ok. It's been a hard few months. Ok. It's been a hard few years. Ok. It's been a hard couple of decades. Sophie is as resilient as hell, and that gives me strength. You know that I don't believe in an instrumental god that is directing the show, that is making things happen for good and for bad. My supplications are not directed toward that sort of help, and while I appreciate the prayers of others as good intentions, they do not comfort me nor do I believe they change the course of events. I am hard-pressed to even describe the incredible lifting of weight and sorrow and darkness from my mind and heart. When it happens it seems miraculous. I imagine it to be a kind of collective unconscious -- the love directed our way from family, from friends and those who come into and out of our lives -- a love that is in turn reflected outward.

I don't know why I am able to hold incredible sorrow and even despair along with joy and optimism, but I think it has something to do with what I call grace.

I feel much gratitude for what I believe is the imposition of grace, bestowed on me by Sophie and the years of caregiving, the relinquishing of false notions of control and illusion. Does that make sense?

As I've typed, Sophie's had several large seizures. It's not easy. Grace has nothing to do with being cured or even being "normal." I know next to nothing in the end, nor do the doctors, nor do the prayers or supplicants. Bad things happen all the time to very, very good people. Death is a certainty for all of us, and suffering, at some point in our lives, if not all, is as well. Grace has everything to do with healing, though, and when it collides with love -- well -- we're good. We're healed.

The Eradication of Hogs

This is a post about my son, Henry, with whom I am well pleased.

Actually, this is a post about my son, Henry, for whom I am bursting with pride.

Henry is a peacemaker. He is not one to get involved in conflict, nor to agitate. He is preternaturally good-natured and easy-going. He might be slightly averse to conflict. When I send him things of a political nature or ask him to take a stand, he either blows me off, says that he isn't an activist or mocks me (good-naturedly). He is absolutely right that I am annoying when I am most agitated about the issues that are important to me. Because I'm female and he's male, I consider that a win on my part. I strive to agitate and be annoying to men, to tell you the truth. I'm interested in smashing the patriarchy.

This afternoon, Henry sent me a series of texts documenting an argument he had on Facebook with one of his high school classmates. I'm no stranger to arguing with high school classmates. The ones with whom I've argued are mostly men and a few random females,  but I've long since quit engaging with them (the last time I did so and stayed respectful but asked uncomfortable questions, I was blocked, and the questions were never answered which to me is typically conservative Republican). I have other friends from high school, though, who occasionally screen shot their conversations with these folks and show me what they're talking about and oh dear Lord and bless their hearts.

Well, this post isn't about me and I don't want to spew contempt and vitriol, as is my tendency when it comes to some of the high school classmates. I was a sweet and gentle soul in high school, I swear, and I don't think those people (and it's not everyone in my high school) had any idea that a patriarchy-smasher was in their midst. How would they? Well, for one thing, none of them took honors classes.

Ouch.

This is about Henry and his initial foray into taking a stand about something and doing it so well that I could just cry.

It can't be easy coming of age during these particularly shitty times. Yesterday. My god, yesterday.

I obviously am not going to reveal what this high school classmate of Henry said, but suffice it to say that she supports the POSPOTUS and is an avid Second Amendmenter.

The following is Henry's response to her tirade about the usual blah, blah, blah that the pro-assault weapons folks always trundle out after a massacre. Henry began with: THIS IS ABSOLUTELY 100% a

Those last three sentences broke my heart.

She responded with some more blah, blah, blah that included the necessity of making hotel windows bullet-proof and the necessity of using assault weapons for hunting. Then Henry continued:

Then there's this:

Hence, the title of this piece.

Oh, dear Reader, how we laughed.



Henry, are you reading this?

You make me proud.

You are respectful, strong in your convictions and persuasive in your delivery. You wrote passionately and beautifully.  Thanks for kicking ass without being rude or disrespectful. People will say, why bother? and there will be days when you wonder why you do. You might even lose your temper and your mind, feel hopeless and useless and guilty of stirring the pot. You'll certainly wonder whether there's any use to any of it at all. You will never be sorry, though, to do the right thing, to stand by your convictions and for those who are vulnerable. You're woke as they say and on your way.

We old folks need you and your friends to step up and help us. We are grateful for your energy.

You are beautiful inside and out, and I love you more than you'll ever know.

Tuesday Afternoon

I had my toenails painted this afternoon despite the hurricanes whipping up over the Atlantic again, despite the persons displaced by the last hurricanes still digging themselves out of the muck, despite the huge earthquake that hit Mexico City this morning and killed hundreds of people, despite the Rocket Man speech that the Sexual Predator in Chief of the Disunited States gave to the United Nations, despite the threat of nuclear annihilation, despite the displaced millions in Syria, despite the melting ice-caps, despite the half million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar spilling into Bangladesh -- well -- you get it. I have nothing to bemoan or to complain of, other than 22 years of watching my child seize and suffer and the burdens of caregiving, and even those are nothing, nothing in comparison.  Are we connected to one another in suffering? I sat in the raised chair while a woman I don't know knelt at my feet and painted my toes a brilliant purplish pink. I go to Sophie's room every single morning expecting her to have perhaps died, and I realize that sounds dramatic and perhaps neurotic, except it's not. The thing is, we do that. We put our children to bed at night like newborns except we do it for years and years and years, sometimes decades, and we hope they don't die before us and dread that we might die before them. What's it all about? my seven year old son cried one afternoon, watching his sister seize and his mother weep. This isn't a post about privilege, however aware I am of it. I'm just musing on what it means to know suffering, how the demands of caregiving as mother, the detail of it, the tedium of it, the relentless ongoingness of it,  has honed me, made me aware of the more giant undertone that is the suffering of the world. How I can't do anything about it and do everything about it, every single day.

Aiyana

Photograph by Carl Jackson
cbjphoto.com
Facebook page

This morning I quoted a Haitian proverb that I remembered reading way back in an article about the great physician Paul Farmer.

Dey mon, gen mon (beyond mountains, there are mountains)

It became the title of a book by Tracy Kidder about Farmer and his work in Haiti. I was talking to Carl, the Bird Photographer that I love, who is currently in Houston helping in some of the clean-up going on there after the terrible hurricane two weeks ago. It is, as you can imagine, nearly insurmountable work.

Some interpret the proverb as meaning there are inexhaustible opportunities. Others say that surmounting obstacles gives you a better view of the next.

I am so grateful to Carl and his friends for doing this work, these acts of love.

As I type this, it's only been an hour or so since a young girl, one of our beautiful and close-knit epilepsy and cannabis community here in southern California, was rolled into surgery to remove her organs for donation to those who need them. Aiyana was admitted to the hospital a few days ago and put on life support, her brain unresponsive, perhaps from a seizure or some other hideous complication of the rare disorder she had suffered from her entire short life. She was a radiant child, her mother a goddess. We are all bereft to lose her and know her mother's and siblings' heartbreak, yet are also filled with the most encompassing kind of love that you can imagine, the kind that comes from witnessing and abiding with suffering and unconditional love.

So many obstacles, yet love is endless.

Dey mon, gen mon

Going to the Fair with the Fair People I Call Mine

We went to the Orange County Fair last week, ate a lot of fried foods, rode some rides, played some games, won a fish and walked about one hundred thousand steps.

And guess what?

The Bird Photographer took an Honorable Mention in Nature Photography for his exquisite photo of cedar waxwings sharing food. Honestly, it should have taken first place (and there were a lot of astounding and beautiful photos there), and I am -- as you know -- a fierce and discriminating critic. Plus, I'm not biased at all.

You can see more of Carl's photos here:

Website: www.cbjphoto.com
Facebook: carljacksonphotographer
Instagram: @cbjfoto

How We Do It, Part (Lost Count) in a series

photographer: Carl Jackson

When I was a small child, I lay in the grass or up in the cherry tree and stared up at clouds, floating. I did more than imagine shapes when I was a child, a rabbit, a snowman, a man shaking a stick. I called a tree, flower and a flower, tree. Cloud, sky and sky, cloud. I thought Smell and then pick that tree. Climb up into that flower. Words. What they meant when I said them, how I made them up. It was the same with God. How I made Him up. Or wondered if I was making Him up. I imagined Him like the clouds, floating, shaped. And what of it and what of Him? Were we His dream? Were We his dream? Had He made us up? I saw the world through God's eyes, made up, a ball, a sphere, a reflection. Trees, clouds, flowers, grass, me on my back, ground, perched on a branch, bark, cherries. I had a lover once when I was very young and when we left one another (we left one another, over and ever), I was certain that I'd made him up, yet I made another again. Another lover. God is now god and He is he or him. I made a baby that we named Sophie. I made her up. She has no words and yet is made.


When I sit in meditation, breathe in, breathe out, my thoughts are words. I make them up, I make them clouds. I watch them float. On by.

A Reverie For Where I've Been

The Mermaid Pool where I swam laps
Victoria, British Columbia

The Poet and Me
photographer: Carl Jackson

My dear friend, the poet Heather McHugh, arranged for Carl and me to stay in Port Angeles, Washington and for a week in Victoria, British Columbia. I don't even know where to begin to describe the fun we had, the sights we saw, and the relaxation I felt over the past eight days. I was here four years ago for a respite week through Heather's Caregifted foundation, and I will say that it was, indeed, that week that literally propelled me toward Hedgebrook the following year, and then the enormous changes in my personal life over the last two and now, this.

This.

There is just NO WAY I could have imagined re-visiting Victoria four years later in such happiness. There is NO WAY any of us know where our lives will lead us. I am convinced, again, that it's as important not to despair when things are shitty as it is to feel grateful when they're good. Nothing is permanent, ever.

I took a lot of photos on my iPhone as well as on the regular camera, and I can't wait to share the fancy ones with you because we went out whale watching one afternoon for more than 3 hours and saw/encountered a big pod of killer whales. That's a religious experience, to tell you the truth. Then again, riding ferries could also count for a religious experience, especially in the Pacific Northwest. We rode merry on the ferry from Bremerton to Victoria, from Sydney to San Juan Island and then back. It was windy and rainy sometimes and about a thousand shades of gray and blue otherwise sun-split skies and the air is filled with melancholy and peace and salt tang and sweetness. Being with The Bird Photographer for so many days was divine.

Jigsaw puzzles on the ferry to San Juan Island!

English Camp, the dreamiest of the dreamy places we visited
San Juan Island, Washington

No words necessary

Lying on my bed and gazing out to the ocean
English Camp
San Juan Island, Washington

The most astonishing color peonies I've ever seen
Butchart Gardens
Victoria, British Columbia

Butchart Gardens
Victoria

English Camp
San Juan Island

A very windy whale watching trip/Religious Experience

My future home
Victoria, British Columbia

The Bird Photographer, doing his thing

I have oodles of pictures on my fancy camera, especially of killer whales, so as soon as I upload them to the computer, I will share them. Right now, I'm sitting in a tiny airport getting ready to board a seaplane which will take us back to the Seattle airport. I've never flown on a seaplane, but I'm about as relaxed as I've been in many years, so I think it'll be good, and if I crash into the Canadian ocean -- well -- there'd be worse ways to go.

About Canada: I'm sorry to leave. Every person we met was so kind and thoughtful. If politics came up, every person we spoke to was deeply sorry for the bullshit we face in these Disunited States. Every person expressed sympathy and agreed that 45 is horrible, that the changes wrought by him and the Republican congress are abysmal and not a little depressing. It was comforting to have these conversations, sort of the reverse of the gaslighting we've been subject to over the last few months.

Sigh.

How are ya'll? I've missed reading your blogs and getting your comments and will be back soon more regularly.

I miss you.

All Italics Are Da Vinci's Except For That Moon

I say that the blue which is seen in the atmosphere is not its own colour but is caused by warm humidity evaporated in minute and imperceptible atoms on which the solar rays fall rendering them luminous against the immense darkness of the region of fire that forms a covering above them.

Leonardo da Vinci, from Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci


What happens when everything you see and touch and hear and smell and feel comes to you as in the fulfillment of a dream?

Writing about the kite seems to be my destiny since among the first recollections of my infancy it seemed to me that as I was in my cradle a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips. (a dream of Da Vinci's infancy)


The room at the top of the stairs where I learned to rest four years ago, the woman who cared for me like a mother, the courage to send in my writing, the awarding of three weeks in a cottage in the woods in the same part of the world the next year, a great upheaval that led to a bird photographer, an owl, a whale's fluke (like a whirling wind scouring through a sandy and hollow valley which with speeding course drives into its vortex everything that opposes its furious course....), a white bed in the same part of the world four years later and then this: waking at four, always four and a beam of moonlight shining in the only strip of window not covered by curtain. Shining on the blue sea, blue moonlight. I'll get the moon for you, he had said, and he pulled the curtains to there right before love (touch), and then sleep, and waking at four, always four and there it was, and you (I) stood there in a black nightgown bathed in blue.

To me it seems that all sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, mother of all certainty, and that are not tested by Experience; that is to say, that do not at their origin, middle or end, pass through any of the five senses. For if we are doubtful about the certainty of things that pass through the senses how much more should we question the many things against which these senses rebel, such as the nature of god and the soul and the like, about which there are endless disputes and controversies.

There's a little blue book by the side of the bed of the woman who cared for me like a mother, a little book of selections from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, and I open it to Flight, to Structure of Birds' Wings, to You will study the anatomy of the wings of a bird together with the muscles of the breast which are the movers of these wings. And you do the same for man in order to show the possibility that there is in man to sustain himself amid the air by the flapping of wings. And what are the chances of this, of reading of birds and whales and blue and flight written in the 16th century?

Impetus is the impression of local movement transmitted from the mover to the movable thing and maintained by the air or by the water as they move in order to prevent the vacuum. (Movement Through Wind and Water)

The body of anything whatsoever that takes nourishment continually dies and is continually renewed; because nourishment can only enter in those places where the preceding nourishment is exhausted, and if it is exhausted it no longer has life. (Life of the Body)

Still

Somewhere in Durham, NC, 1982

I recently found a bunch of letters from friends and lovers in a box at the back of my closet. I also found a trove of negatives from a documentary photography class I took as a sophomore at UNC in 1982. I'd forgotten about the family that I visited over a period of three months and chronicled and with whom I became friends. I moved away. Still I remember developing them in the darkroom, my hands immersed in the bath, the slippery feel of the paper blooming shadows and light, the hands of the boy I loved mixed up with mine, his mouth.

Saturday morning. Complacencies of the peignoir.

Still. What makes me "happy" is fifteen minutes in bed meditating, then reading about authors I love and their new books, then hearing Sophie in the room down the hall humming again after more than a month of silence. Also, Costa Rican coffee from the man I love who is out there somewhere taking photos of burrowing owls.











Field Guide

Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in that most precious dement of all,

I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the water

at the very instant when a dragonfly,
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,

hovered over it, then lit, and rested.
That's all.

I mention this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a page

in certain library books,
so that the next reader will know

where to look for the good parts.

Tony Hoagland

The Measure of Our Desperation

We've got two choices: resist or cut and run.

Cutting and running is the choice of the privileged and the desperate, so maybe it's more about the measure of our desperation.

Here's a poem:

Girdle

In our teens we all bought girdles
with rubber knobs to hold up our stockings.
We wiggled into them, our “foundations.”

So many things look absurd from a distance
that people still take seriously,
like whether there's a Heaven for pets.

What ever happened to my girdle?
One day I peeled it off for the last time
and all hell broke loose.

Connie Wanek, from Rival Gardens

I cut and pasted the poem here from The Writer's Almanac this morning after reading someone's post on Facebook. 

I bought a copy of Wanek's book and hope she doesn't mind that I've put her poem on my blog. Maybe you'll buy a copy of her book, too. 

So many people are throwing around their desire to flee the Disunited States of Amerikkka, Inc., and I get it. I'm a person who rarely feels sick to her stomach in the literal sense of the word and have probably actually vomited only about five times in my entire life, but I've felt more nauseous and fearful over the last few months than I have in the 53 years previous that I've lived on the planet. I wouldn't mind living in a small space along the coast of Costa Rica despite the bugs. I'd move to New Zealand, but traveling that far in a plane with Sophie might be worse than taking the fallout of a nuclear bomb from North Korea. 

You'll have to forgive my dark, tasteless humor if you're new here. 

Anyhoo.*

The thing is, I can't shake my privilege. What about all those who won't be able to cut and run? Are we as desperate as those people who travel thousands of miles through deserts and over barbed wire with only the clothes they're wearing? I'm not. This is as much our country as the fuckers who are ruling it right now. I'm going to have to remain fierce and resist the bullshit, even if the resistance amounts to nothing. If I take the measure of my desperation, I immediately plunge back into the many moments of watching Sophie seize and suffer, of watching my sense of control slip away, vomited up in some intense instant and then flushed down with water, my own face clammy against the cool of the bathroom floor. And still. Do you understand what I'm saying? I'm going to have to remain fierce and resist the bullshit. In this moment, this now, that ends the moments before and begins the moments after and on. 

It all sounds dramatic, maybe too dramatic. Peeling it off and letting all hell break loose sounds better.

#resist

*For those who are new, I hate this word and use it sparingly and in jest.

Desert Jewels

I stood and looked to the east and took that picture as the sun rose on Sunday morning near the Salton Sea. I shouted hallelujah in my mind and looked to the west where the moon was going down.

The birds were truly like a chorus, and I whispered hallelujah in my mind. My troubled mind so heavy along with my heart over Sophie's struggles. The photographer of birds who holds my heavy heart with such light hands.

Day after day I think of you as soon as I wake up. Someone has put cries of birds on the air like jewels.

Ann Carson, from Short Talks

I hope you can play that video because it's sublime. I also posted it on Instagram where you can find me at elizabettaa.

I went with C to see the desert bloom, supposedly over-the-top-once-in-a-decade because of the unusual amount of rain we had this winter. The desert didn't disappoint, even though about a million people were doing the same thing. The ground was covered in a carpet of yellows and purples and whites. I took pictures with the fancy lens, but I haven't uploaded them, yet, so here are some from my iPhone.

We met dear Yolie and Tearful in the desert where they're living the boondocking life. It's like a dream both to meet them and see what they're doing. They are a couple with whom I connected many many years ago on the world wide webs. Now we've met in person, and it was an intense collision. We already knew one another. I held onto both of them for a good long time, absorbed their goodness and strength.

These internet friendships are the real thing, people.




This morning I read about the trauma that Syrian children have suffered, have absorbed, will suffer. I read about the people of the Sudan, of Yemen and other countries -- the starving bloated face of a child, the warning that displacement, famine, warfare will bring on the greatest humanitarian crisis since 1945. I looked at the smug faces and read the words of those who rule the plutocracy that is the Disunited States of Amerikkkaa. I felt the dread of what is to come even as I heard my own daughter's sigh into seizure over the baby monitor. I rushed into her again and again and again and all the years of agains. Suffering. The world is so vast, the suffering so enormous, I texted a friend, our efforts to stem it so paltry. If I am charged to care for Sophie and suffer in doing it, I will try to do it with strength and love.

I repeated that over and over and over today.

Perspective as Higher Power, my friend Chris said. Yes. The ongoingness of it all.