melt the snow to imagine this…, ordinarily Chico, Redbluff do not have snow, but there are hills and mountain oak. this shelter would sit well, way back on the acres. and it IS true, that i could build it, or not. maybe i have already built it in my mind. that very well could be just enough.
something shifted today. not because of any intent on my part, it just
shifted.
the day was relatively normal for a "work" day. with the added beginning of the Tai Chi class. although i am still awkward, i am very much less so. it is the third week of twice weekly learning. the sciatic thing is pretty much gone, unless i "push it". there was a tendency tonight when i came home, to dig one more tree well out and fill in the mulch. but maybe most important of all, i didn't do that. instead, i thought about cloth. i thought about how my daughter is in California for six days visiting Her daughter. i called her there and she related her day with her grandson. they took a walk. which ended with getting a push-up ice cream at the gas station. he was very interested in the mechanism of the push-up. then they came home and had a nap.
Kinds of Balance
after the phone call, i went outside to smell the lilacs. and as i was leaning in to a bloom, something vibrated the air so close to my cheek that my hair moved…. the Pandora Sphinx. so completely absorbed in the nectar of the blooms that she was almost part of me.
can you see her beautiful round black eye??
not knowing exactly what to do next, i leafed through the current issue of Buddhadharma that had arrived in the mail today and saw a photograph of a round building…that it seems, will not appear here. but i will try tomorrow to place it. but i saw it, and knew that however it all goes, life will be supported. i may very well not know the form, but it will be supported.
my mind is full of images of cloth making tonight.
it look a long time. i happened upon it by accident. but it seems to be the necessity. ????
this is for Terri, who identified the beautiful grape colored form of the Pandora Sphinx Moth. it is in an attempt to explain to her, and i guess to myself too, why i got rid of literal pounds of writing.
Living Like Weasels by Annie Dillard
A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.
And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton…once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones?
I have been reading about weasels because i saw one last week. I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance.
Twenty minutes from my house, through the woods by the quarry and across the highway, is Hollins Pond, a remarkable piece of shallowness, where I like to go at sunset and sit on a tree trunk. Hollins Pond is also called Murray's Pond; it covers two acres of bottomland near Tinker Creek with six inches of water and six thousand lily pads. In winter, brown and white steers stand in the middle of it, merely dampening their hooves; from the distant shore they look like miracle itself, complete with miracle's nonchalance. Now in summer, the steers are gone. The water lilies have blossomed and spread to a green horizontal plane that is terra firma to plodding blackbirds, and tremulous ceiling to black leeches, crayfish, and carp.
This is, mind you, suburbia. It is a five-minute walk in three directions to rows of houses, though none is visible here. There's a 55 mph highway at one end of the pond, and a nesting pair of wood ducks at the other. Under every bush is a muskrat hole or a beer can. The far end is an alternating series of fields and woods, fields and woods, threaded everywhere with motorcycle tracks…in whose bare clay wild turtles lay eggs.
So. I had crossed the highway, stepped over two low barbed-wire fences, and traced the motorcycle path in all gratitude through the wild rose and poison ivy of the pond's shoreline up into high grassy fields. Then I cut down through the woods to the mossy fallen tree where i sit. This tree is excellent. It makes a dry, upholstered bench at the upper, marshy end of the pond, a plush jetty raised from the thorny shore between a shallow blue body of water and a deep blue body of sky.
The sun had just set. I was relaxed on the tree trunk, ensconced in the lap of lichen, watching the lily pads at my feet tremble and part dreamily over the thrusting path of a carp. A yellow bird appeared to my right and flew behind me. It caught my eye; I swiveled around…and the next instant, inexplicably, I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me.
Weasel! I'd never seen one wild before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizard's; he would have made a good arrowhead. There was just a dot of a chin, maybe two brown hairs' worth, and then the pure white fur began that spread down his underside. He had two black eyes I didn't see, anymore than you see a window.
The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.
Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and i looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don't. We keep our skulls. So.
He disappeared. This was only last week, and already I don't remember what shattered the enchantment. I think I blinked, I think I retrieved my brain from the weasel's brain, and tried to memorize what I was seeing, and the weasel felt the yank of separation, the careening splashdown into real life and the urgent current of instinct. He vanished under the wild rose. I waited motionless, my mind suddenly full of data and my spirit with pleadings, but he didn't return.
Please do not tell me about "approach-avoidance conflicts". I tell you I've been in that weasel's brain for sixty seconds, and he was in mine. Brains are private places, muttering through unique and secret tapes…but the weasel and I both plugged into another tape simultaneously for a sweet and shocking time. Can I help it if it was a blank?
What goes on in his brain the rest of the time? What does a weasel think about? He won't say. His journal is tracks of clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone; uncollected, unconnected, loose-leaf, and blown.
I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Holling Pond not so much to learn how to liveas, frankly, to forget about it. That is, I don't think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular…shall I suck warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands?…but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel's: open to time and death, painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
I missed my chance. I should have gone for the throat. I should have lunged for that streak of white under the weasel's chin and held on, held on through mud and into the wild rose, held on for a dearer life. We could live under the wild rose wild as weasels, mute and uncomprehending. I could very calmly go wild. I could live two days in the den, curled, leaning on mouse fur, sniffing bird bones, blinking, licking, breathing musk, my hair tangled in the roots of grasses. Down is a good place to go, where the mind is single. Down is out, out of your ever- loving mind and back to your careless senses. I remember muteness as a prolonged and giddy fast, where every moment is a feast of utterance received. Time and events are merely poured, unremarked, and ingested directly, like blood pulsed into my gut through a jugular vein. Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?
We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience…even of silence…by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't "attack" anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Sieze it and let it sieze you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreads, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.
Annie Dillard Teaching a Stone to Talk 1982 Harper Collins
~yes. i wanted to be a writer, Terri. and yes, i wrote tons. and yes, it's all gone now. this particular gathering of words is how i wanted to say things. but to say things in this way, you need to do as she says…it must be your one necessity. i was/am really not a writer. and all those pages were weighing me down. i could either live, or write about what that meant to me.
today the lilacs began to open. this is a little bouquet of i'm sorry.
lifetimes. purpose.
this being surprised me two summers ago on the grape vine. there was only one. and s(he) very efficiently ate most all of the leaves, but left the grapes untouched.
some lives of some beings are very focused and in my terms, short. i am thinking about my own life. all of it so far and what i imagine might be remaining of it.
i think it is going to change quite a bit. interesting…how some things have SOME meaning for so long and then all of a sudden, because of seemingly unrelated events, acquire so much more meaning that we did not notice, or, did not really see before???? fully apprehend…i like that word, apprehend.
the Tai Chi is working. it's working way more and way better than i had imagined it could. which has caused me to think about why this might be. some of you might remember me writing about one of my most loved friends Dora who, in my early 30's, i would watch do her Tai Chi forms while we waited in a very large empty room together. i talked about her small figure in her black uniform. her white hair with a silver hair clasp. the numbers tattooed on her arm from her girlhood in Dachau. how i would often find myself with a thread of saliva dangling from my chin because i would be so mesmerized by her, her movements, her etherial beauty that i would forget to swallow. she was old then. in her 80's.
in the past, i tried to learn Tai Chi. but i am akward and i found it very hard to coordinate the movements and i was embarassed. i quit. This particular class i am involved in now, is taught by a woman i have known in a very superficial way for a while. she does a few things…fitness training, and hypnotherapy are two. she works out of the new to this little town of Socorro Wellness Center. I'd read in our little newspaper how she had gotten funding through some federal grant to teach Tai Chi to women of "a certain age" as part of a study of the benefits of Tai Chi with balance, osteoporosis, general well being, etc. at the time i didn't pay much attention, really. Well, here i am.
and i have the feeling that a LOT is going to change. not only will the thing with the sciatic nerve be healed, but many things that i don't even know might be healed. it is a group of sometimes up to 10 women, all kinds, and i find that the Ego that caused me to quit before has since been dropped as useless baggage and i just do the best i can. i am still akward. but i don't care. each time i go, i fine tune some little thing and i am learning. getting some small thing right. today, as i stitched the daughter cloth, those endless invisible baste stitches, i realized how similar this was to the Tai Chi, how similar learning Tai Chi is to stitching. it is a deep inner attention for the well being of the Whole. somehow. Chi. LifeForce. the buddhists have always told me that i need to be so grateful to have born as a human being. born to a circumstance where you can contemplate these things. for some months now, i have been reading Mind of Clear Light Advice on Dying and Living a Better Life by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
somehow, all these things are slowly swirling into somekind of constellation. just the Time in my life, the sudden injury to my body that changed everything for a while, the more than usual concern with the changes in North Africa, the Middle East as a whole, the great grief for the devastation in Japan and whether or not it can be seen for all that it means to the planet as a whole. and what is my place in all this? is it important at all? i am looking, feeling.
sitting outside looking at a new leaf springing from the Elderberry. so new. so green. and debating whether or not to let go of one of my last remaining jobs. the impetus for this being the thing with the sciatic nerve, but as some have suggested and i agree, this is physical metaphor for other challenges.
and the phone rang. it was Wendy Golden-Levitt. she had just seen some little girls that had been brought to her in hopes of working on their grief of family members that had been lost in the tragedy of Japan. but what they chose to work with was this Window Hanger that i'd sent.
this was in October, last year. at the time, i was very unsure about it. it is in a way, very plain. but it was what i "needed" to send.
and today, what transpired really does not have words. on that end or on mine. what this cloth "held" was some way to work with the non-verbal sense these children were struggling with about nuclear disaster. this is all i know. it is all Wendy can tell. but i was told this much and for me it is beyond enough to piece together any small pieces of faith, of the Whatever of endurance for Continuing. i have no real words for this, no real shape. but the spirit of the Sign is clear.
this morning i found myself having lost a sense of confidence.
last week, when it became evident that i had really done the thing with the sciatic nerve, by "done the thing" meaning something more than i'd perpetrated on myself ever before,
i sat a long time trying to sense what i should do. i have no connection at all with the medical world. i have never needed that. having worked in a hospital for many years, and having educated myself, i have always been able to heal myself. this was different and i understood that part of it was that i simply have some wear and tear of normal aging of a physical body. and that this time was different in that i had gone over some invisible line with too much too close together. it had begun with the basting on the ladder of the Daughter cloth, then needing to split and haul wood inbetween, then hauling those heavy oak pallets across a half acre of land and stacking, re stacking. and finally, not wanting to surrender to it all, going to daughters and helping shave 6 goats. so…there i am, finding it so hard to even stand, and what do i think of????
i remember there is a woman in town who teaches Tai Chi. to make a long story shorter, i went twice last week. the first time was completely ify. it hurt. the second time, on thursday, better and then over this last weekend, better and better still. but then i worked Monday and again, that nerve glowed with pain.
this morning i woke, just NOT WANTING TO GO. it took everything i had to drag myself there. but i did. and ~a small or not so small miracle….as i went through the exercises, then through the forms, everything softened. i found myself breathing as suggested, instead of holding my breath. home again and i am very very good. so…now i learn.
and i am taking this as a Sign. this morning i was feeling a real lack of confidence in my ability to intuit what was happening in my world. maybe everyone was right. maybe it Was something that i needed to seek "professional" help with. but i have such faith in listening to my self. not just about physical things, but also about the last post…just in general, how to live this life.
as i stood on the porch late this afternoon/early evening thinking, i saw that the Apricot tree has begun to leaf.
and then i looked up and saw the wooden lizard…komodo dragon
i take these as signs. they are still coming. i just need to have a certain kind of faith.
raking away winter's leavings under one of the little Native Plum trees and lo and behold…these beautiful pods. i have no idea what came before. i often wear out in august or september and just let it all go wild out there. and in this privacy, something grew. many beautiful black seeds. a gift.
the Mexican Elderberry. She who gives good green from her leaves in copper
so…inbetween the Daughter Cloth stitches, i need to work on this. it will be a variation on a dragon cloth…those central threads, the dragon and for the first time in days, my mind is creating pictures. we'll see what else wants to be here. but it is a very good feeling to feel the energy again.
Deb G said the other day about the sorrow in Japan:
"…how it could fundamentally change our lives, our perception of vulnerability" and then "equilibrium is going to be a long time coming i think, if ever".
then, Cindy said this about my mother's diaries:
"of all the things that happen in a day, what would we each choose to record?"
am thinking about these. and in terms of moving through this period of time with both the very great sorrow of Japan and also the potential for almost anything in Lybia, i am making my way through it as best i can and in this moment today, am thinking that there is really only one thing that i know for absolutely certain and that is of the destructive nature of nuclear energy. and what i know for certain too is that in these last years, very little has been initiated in this state toward developing Wind and Solar potential. these things i know. all the rest…i don't know. there are too many variables, too much that i am unaware of. too many lies. and so…with this one certainty, i will go forward. i will educate myself so that i can be well spoken about the state of nuclear "business" in this country. and it IS, nothing but business. i will be thoughtfull and find clear ways to express what i come to know and i will then take every opportunity i can; in the grocery store line, on the telephone, at the gas station, to the neighbors at the post office, anywhere i am, and i will plant a seed for alternatives. This i Can do.
the sludge is lifting, lightening.
for some reason, i feel i can't come here unless i have "something to show for myself"
as in…something i have made. accomplished.
i have been mostly thinking about equilibrium. looking for equilibrium: 1. a state of adjustment between opposing or divergent influences or elements 2. a state of balance between opposing forces or actions that is either static or dynamic (as in a reversable reaction when the rates of reaction in both directions are equal
things aren't static. or equal in both directions. and i keep thinking that if i look long enough, wait, i will find some equilibrium. it's not happening.
there are at least, and i made a list, 10 things, ten factors, that are in motion, in this day that are strong in the mix. some are personal, example: i seem to have severely compromised my sciatic nerve. some are of my immediate community: my neighbors have been evicted. others are of my larger community: Lybia and Japan. i look at them and they seem to weigh equally heavily on my sense of equilibrium. this is strange. how can this be?, i am thinking. how can Japan or Lybia be similar to my sciatic nerve?…or, to my neighbors plight?
pics above. Kadir. the beautiful and magnificant Anatolian Shepard, livestock guardian dog.
jude's woven piece
so..on we go. i should have taken a pic of the center piece on the clothsline. i was preoccupied with Japan, with my brother calling very early. i simply moved through the day in a kind of daze almost. but here we are. the Whole Thing taken down and placed on the adjusted table top. the center piece in from the line and layed in place. i will not stitch it now as i'd thought. i realized that the Whole Piece needs to be invisible stitched…well….as in every …ooooo, what?…let me go measure. every 1/4 inch across its expanse. all the way down. then i can stitch in the center.
i have 5 rows done. the feeling of them…the two layers of woven cloth and the third of the backing…all becoming One, is well….ecstatic.
my brother is reading through my mother's notebooks that details the weather, what she ate, whether she slept or did not sleep. he read them aloud to me for about an hour and a half while i stitched this morning. he found too, papers i'd never seen before. the birth certificate of my mother's mother Francis Katrin Ludvinka, Jzero…..something, Moravia. he will send me the correct spelling. i can SAY it, but not spell it.
the daughter worked to create a different space for the next doe to kid.
i did not talk to the granddaughter. but i thought about how i have not yet sent her the cloth she asked for…the one i made while i was waiting/anticipating the first class with Jude.
and inbetween, i looked at photographs of Japan. the displaced people in shelters. all surrounded with kinds of cloth as they waited, sitting on the floor. waited for something, not knowing what that might be? but they have their cloth with them.
