Posted on by d

Here we go.

prompt: a young teen with long brown hair and brown eyes and an olive complexion and full lips is looking at the camera, blushing, with little hearts coming off of her. She is wearing a masquerade mask that covers her eyes and nose really well and leaves the rest of her face exposed. and she has a scarf over her hair to help disguise her further. In the image she is standing, wearing a tank top and baggy jeans, a shorter black pea wool pea coat, realistic comic art portrait style ~ Bing image creator

This is a post about mothering. Just mentioning that in case someone needs to keep scrolling for whatever reason.

But for those who have been here, or are coming here, or care about it, maybe you will appreciate this sharing.

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I saw my daughter crush blush for the first time tonight 😀😍💘

I’m living for these moments with her right now, grateful to have the time to dedicate to them.

I didn’t spend a lot of time with her when we were up north and I was in school. My friend basically adopted her and I took that space to get a degree done. I am grateful to that woman and her beautiful family and I know she loves my girl. And over that span of three years my daughter shot up a foot. Now at barely thirteen, she is five six and borrows my shoes.

And so I am glad to have this time right now. Though I am constantly being informed of the *right” way of doing things–yes, even though I am so wildly out of touch that my recognition of a Harry Styles song comes as a great surprise–she still wants to hang out with me, watch movies, go shopping, take the dogs to the woods, go over to grandma’s next door and hang out with her… Pretty soon she will be off on adventures, and I know this – but I will always want her to know that home and mom are safe spaces and that I will always have open arms for whoever she is.

So I try and take note of each of these new moments because they are the only ones that will ever happen, and they happen more and more quickly and frequently by the day. It’s wild to witness this so closely, but who am I to deprive her of this thrill? I want her to love it, and to be smart about it. That’s where I’m putting my focus instead.

Tonight a young person (I don’t assume to know their gender) walked by and dropped a folded piece of paper with “my socials, let’s be friends” on the table in front of my daughter while we were out with my mom. I tried to maintain a decently nonchalant manner but there was nothing I could do about my eyebrows and as she focused very, very casually on the burger in front of her, her cheeks became inflamed.

The only other time she’s ever had cheeks that red, I had to rush her to the hospital because I could not get the fever down, and it was dangerous.

Posted on by d

Active listening.

a DJ controller that looks rugged, looks like it's made out of the forest and has grown together organically, moss and wood, glimmer, mystical surroundings and sparkles in the air, hyper realistic, ultradetailed
Prompt:
a DJ controller that looks rugged, looks like it’s made out of the forest and has grown together organically, moss and wood, glimmer, mystical surroundings and sparkles in the air, hyper realistic, ultradetailed

My pandemic hobby was/still is maybe also a mid-life crisis though truth be told, I just turned fifty and I’m not lying to myself, or maybe that’s hope.

(seriously, do you?)

Things are good now, though. I’m trying to adjust to being my age, having just come out of three years living on a residential liberal arts college campus. It was such a mindfuck how coddled everyone was, how people had time to seriously consider poetry – but also, how cool is that?

There was a woman in my cohort who was, is, an unbelievable poet and also a clinical herbalist. We would take walks around campus sometimes, especially during 2020 when there was a small group of us, a set of mothers and children, living on an otherwise unoccupied college campus.

there was also a town, but that was closed, too, so it was somewhere between an oasis and an island but she showed me some of the local plants like the trout lilies and their edible, spring-filled leaves and the Japanese knotweed, “invasive” everywhere, and a wonderful support for Lyme Disease.

There were tons of ticks there. It was serious. There is a Lyme, Connecticut; a Lyme, New Hampshire; and a Lyme, New York. We were in western Massachusetts, surrounded on all sides.

But also, there was knotweed, taking over, shouting at people like ‘hey, oh my god just put down the test tubes and agree with me already. you act like it’s such a huge deal that this is what i do but this is what the land calls for right now to keep things in balance and so i am here in force.

You can drive yourself crazy — but in a good way — looking for these patterns. I live for it.

Anyway, that was a tangent. We are warlike in so much of our language, fearing these invasives, these foreign, non-native people that most of us once were and have probably been at least once in our lives, even if we’ve remained so exceptionally silent about it.

I had originally thought to talk about music, to talk about the thing that pumped my brain full of happy neurobiological happenings but things meander periodically, as they should.

my god, that’s really the panic of dying, isn’t it, that you do not do it satisfied?

i know for some that the panic of dying is something called “hell” and I am supposed to imagine the worst of all possible worlds, the most torturous, for eternity and you know what, that’s the problem, i can.

If it gets any worse than this, I can’t imagine.

But also, this is not to say that I don’t love my life, immensely, and or that I am not happy to have it. I do. I am.

I love my family, my dogs (who are also family), my old house, and this pandemic hobby of mine, because thanks to pandemic unemployment I actually became financially solvent for the first time in a long while and so i made an investment in my half-centurion self and bought an expensive toy, and a couple of intensely-researched and considered accessories and I started learning how to push buttons and twist knobs and god, it’s addicting.

it’s like, listening to the music, moving to the music, and also interacting with the music with my body and my hands in a give and take exchange of control, the whole thing is just very synergistic and multi-dimensional i guess maybe like ketamine therapy. i’ve never done sanctioned ketamine therapy so i’m not yet sure on what level that operates, but i do know it works and as with all of it, if you have a will to heal it helps things remain in balance a bit more easily, since these are always an edge.

i guess that’s it, really, I guess I just came here to say that it all requires such active listening.

Posted on by d

On letting go of extraordinary ambition

The feeling of it is indescribable.

In a place like the one where I am now, it’s very easy to get caught up in the dreams of others, tossed into a pot of brilliance as we all are.

I remembered though, recently, that my walk is my own; I don’t have an entire life ahead of me anymore, just half of one, probably. My life already reads as a list of grand adventures and minor accomplishments, and I have little desire to let go of some of the things I had before immersing myself in academia: a garden, a wildness, time to create and enough of an income to provide for my daughter and pay for a pleasurable life lived within our means.

I’d felt isolated, but now I know why. The separation was only painful because I was unwilling to accept the truth: I am different, I am in a different place in my life, I believe that knowledge is power, I’m already good at what I do and being able to study and network with top-notch professionals is an icing on the cake. And I know exactly where the few people I can count on here are. This is literally all that matters right now.

I came here with much more noble ideas. I am finishing my stay with the realization that I am at a zenith. It’s time to reflect.

It’s a story that was told to me many years ago, but I only chose to remember half of it. I would eventually come to this place. I would eventually have things to accept. I would have to come to terms with what I’ve always known: regardless of how loudly I shout, I’m more effective when people don’t know who it is that’s yelling.

I will relax into doing something for sheer joy, with the knowledge that my choice to do so is a radical act in and of itself. It doesn’t require age to earn the privilege of pleasure or creative expression. Anyone who’s been doing the hard work of trying to make the world a better place deserves to settle into the goodness of a present, and we deserve to have the time to create that space if it’s not already there.

I don’t need to be a hero, I just need to live, to show my daughter how it’s done, to make sure she and others have the space they need to be joy.

Posted on by d

night blooms

Photo by Fabiano Rodrigues on Pexels.com | petrichor, cyclical release | sanguine meander

here we are again. this cyclical expression of reproductive desire manifests in all sorts of strange ways. i have no desire to be out and about, but i want you to come to me. with me. in me.

my bookshelves and my seed bank are really organized but domesticity has never been my strong point. i am a person of regimen about many things but I often leave the vacuum in the middle of the living room floor. i have three dogs. i walk on land. my feet reflect that. i am grounded, rooted to the earth. I have befriended the soil and sometimes it comes inside. i have a child and a cat and a small population of spiders who reside in busier corners. Together, we keep the home and the ecosystem as balanced as we can, so leave me be, leave me to my motherhood, my books and words and spiders and dirt, plants and animals. these too, provide harvest. i want our love to be an interlude, the stuff of a troubadour’s song. i need to yearn.

there is thunder, such a joy to listen to but even so, where lightning strikes there is often fire. this rain is blessed, extra welcome during this driest time of year, yet the fear strikes, always, and today the sky filled with smoke. It made for spectacular sunsets here while two hours away, 4500 acres of grassland burned and was 0% contained. Here, midnight summer rains left crystal drops on glowing tobacco flowers which exuded the most utterly intoxicating scent (to be present for this was to understand the origins of every cliche that just happened). The tobacco plants are beginning to go to seed. I have saved some and I have scattered others. Even through this long, dark winter there is a future of infinite opportunity, just as long as it all doesn’t burn down. Now we fear the storms.

We cannot learn to fear this wet necessity, the most natural and encouraging delivery of life. Sometimes now, water here rumbles and burns and people scatter. Water, she’s been in our deepest, darkest places, washing off the leftovers and sending them on their way. She has announced her arrival with rolling booms and flashes of light and we have danced in her court. It’s a blessed and ancient ritual. If only it were simply power to respect, but it engages all our senses. Dangerous territory. We don’t always know what kind of magic we really weave when we draw down the moon.

Posted on by d

where the roots of it lie

i decided to mess with her head this afternoon. i’m not a violent person, she was telling me, but someone had made her very angry. blew the top right off of her.

but i didn’t punch her, she said. i could have, but i didn’t. i’m not a violent person.

we were sitting by the river and i was high and so was she, and she’s savant-smart so i went for it to see if we might be able to talk philosophy and so i said yeah, there are people i have wanted to punch too but i didn’t do it, but i still thought about it. so what is it that makes a person truly nonviolent? is it when you simply don’t think of punching someone anymore when they drive you to rage, or is it the choice you make not to act on impulse or to indulge that rage? the latter would suggest that violence and rage are innate, instinctual things that had a point when our amygdala served more of an upfront purpose.

If the latter is the case, then more than likely some of this fear is imprinted in our genetic expressions, our limbic systems, and originating from a scarcity fear that turned us from peaceful garden dwellers in fig leaves to the warring, post-Saharasian tribes that may have given us our first real, violent inclinations. it’s one theory, anyway.

i liken this particular question to that of freedom versus determinism. i find great comfort in determinism, of course. it gives me purpose and meaning to look for and stay focused on. i am here with a purpose and that purpose is… bam. done, kinda. i will just go and do that.

freedom seems terrifying in comparison, like the difference of being in a lush and comforting forest versus facing a great wide open plain. it is easy to see which i prefer – the forest is as a womb to me. the field has nothing to hold up the sky and is too full of too much possibility. and again, i’m likely operating from my amygdala. i’ve done a lot of work the past several years on rewiring some things around that, but at one point in our evolution, we shifted to bipedalism so we could see over the grass and better keep ourselves fed and out of danger, so… it’s in there, that fear of the hunted, and it’s more about collective species damage than individual trauma (add that to our united misfortune, though, and that person suffers even more than most. they are always watched). It might do me some good to channel the raptor, to fly over the plains searching for prey, but i am not really interested in hunting anything, and I do not want to kill.

what i want is trust, strength and indulgence and a consciousness that has a very sharp eye. i ask myself what it is that i want from other people. the next step is to cultivate those things in myself.

when i remember to do this, i’m forced to be honest about what it really is that i want from others and what is mine to fill. what comes next then, are those joys that can only be shared through conscious communication with others, endeavored and indulged in with a much higher level of clarity, sincerity, and courage. and maybe some dirty words (actually yeah, definitely some of those. i’m a fan of spoken word).

oh, courage. one sometimes needs so much of it to be vulnerable. shame is maybe the biggest curse to befall us; it cuts us off from joy and catharsis and the sloppy wet sounds of life. we lose out on the answers to questions we don’t ask.