Sparkling Lotus-land

heart centered/congruence

The pictures in this post were taken on Sunday.   Several friends who read here have cuttings from the beautiful angel wing begonia who was ready for her close-up while I was having an immensely enjoyable rambling discussion with my son.  He didn't mind at all when I picked up my camera.  We continued to talk while I clicked and he followed closely on my heels. 

 

He's been following me around - specifically so we can keep talking while I also do something of a creative nature - since he first started walking.  There's a very comforting rhythm to it; it's a dance of our fundamental relationship to each other and the ways we've found to support and encourage each other's strongest impulses.  Since the weekend there's been a big change in daily life for both of us.  After a lengthy phase of borrowing my car to get back and forth to work - plus have some semblance of a twenty-something social life - Tony has purchased his own vehicle.   This means he's driving something he actually wants to drive and, not at all beside the point, I have access to wheels all the time. 

The shift is coming at a point when I also have some accumulated energy reserves.  So I actually want to be out and about as a matter of course and have the improved faculties necessary for driving.  So far I have stuck to ventures in a three town radius but that doesn't feel at all restrictive.  My plan is to build up endurance for longer drives and social happenstances.  For now it's been an immense improvement just to run my own errands and take a few brisk walks in some of my favorite local spots.  Once I publish this post I'm off for a power walking route that's new to me; I dreamed it last night.

Sleep is coming A LOT more easily and my quality of rest has greatly improved.  So has my pain thresh-hold.  Mental and physical metabolic process is HUGELY improved. Muscle wasting has reversed itself and I'm reconnected with a morning yoga practice that feels quite wonderful.  I'm getting re-immersed in writing related to flower essence research and land healing ventures.   Am balancing those efforts with a parallel re-connection to some of my favorite creative passtimes.  All these much-appreciated improvements are accompanied by greater mindfulness on my part.  I'm taking none of the positive shifts for granted and will do my best to maintain a commitment to well-balanced goals both large and small.

The begonia in these images was once a very modest handful of cuttings - nearly 30 years ago - from a plant of unknown age.  It was flourishing madly when I first inherited it as part of my office surroundings at a clerical job from hell.  I like to think the cuttings were as pleased to escape the generalized toxicity of the environment as I was thrilled to eventually leave it and move on to a completely different phase of life experience and aspiration.  Two years back the cuttings-turned-grandmother-in-their-own-right reached upwards and outwards to seven square feet.  I cut her back somewhat severely and many friends received the trimmings.  Nowadays I periodically receive pictures of the large happy plants that have grown from them.

The plant's current dimensions are still substantial but not completely overwhelming.    She's happy in the western light of a living room window.  Her former place in this alcove has been taken by one of the gardenias and a strawberry guava.  This summer both of these young trees sustained impressive growth spurts.  They could no longer take a place on top of this desk or in the available window space in Jim's music room.  I'm grateful I have much more energy to tend to all the exotic plants that winter-over in the house.  At their stage(s) of maturing development they need proper feeding, grooming and attentive pruning for maximum flowering and continued health.

I considered the angel wing begonia to be a guardian spirit of the creative flow in my workroom.  Now that she's changed her place in the house I am noticing the same protective vibration encircling the combination dining/living room.  As a family we spend a lot of our shared time there.   The begonia has been flowering prolifically ever since she settled herself on the cedar chest beside the table where we read books and eat the majority of our meals.   There's a belief to which I subscribe:  that flowering plants put on "extra" blooming displays when they're particularly happy and well-connected to the landscape at hand.  It's an idea that's always made sense to me both emotionally and by way of experiental observation...

inevitability

I love terra cotta - as a medium and as a color.  One of my favorite things about the later fall season is the way this color abounds in the natural landscape here in new england.  This year has been unseasonably warm and the dead leaves are lingering on the trees.  I've had plenty of time to relish the final understated spectrum of their color changes.

I don't make a secret of the fact that I have to put some concentrated effort into appreciating the colder seasons of the year.  But, in this particular part of the world, those seasons are inevitable. On today's walk I was thinking about that word; remembering how I learned it from a cousin of mine when he was newly returned from Vietnam.  We sometimes took walks together and I caught myself wishing I'd had a chance to share some of my favorite wandering spots of the here & now.

Although I have a very well developed set of crisis-handling skills, they don't include dealing with personal grief in a timely manner.  It's a particular (recurring) life challenge that tends to put me in deer-in-the-headlights mode and, in that context, I've felt myself slammed to hell and back by many a metaphorical Mack truck.  Frequently I don't know much about what I was feeling and trying to tell myself about my emotions until I've reached the sane, safe distance of retrospect.  Thus it sometimes feels as if I miss my cousin more actively with each passing year - especially when I hear a certain song he liked to sing during unselfconscious moments. It was something he favored as a background for a chore he was doing or an antidote for a boring stretch of road he driven hundreds of times.

This is a homey, intimate detail I noticed about him so vividly that it's become my cornerstone memory of him.  I wrote the previous paragraph with full intention of linking to song lyrics.  But then I hesitated.  It seems better to leave room for whatever song may remind you of someone special from your own life.  Somebody who had immeasurable patience with you.  They went places and did things you could never adequately imagine and you both knew that.  Yet they answered your questions about where they'd been with honesty and steady, compassionate eye contact.

In high school I imagined myself in love with someone who liked to sing the same song.   For them it was an over-the-top performance piece.  Their voice lilted and lingered over different words and sections of the melody than my cousin's low key version of the same tune.  When I think of those differences it's almost like I'm remembering two different songs.   And I've noticed that whenever I sing it myself (usually on walks, when I'm thinking of my cousin) I always stress one particular line that all but recedes when I consider my memories.  Or hear the popularized recording in a movie soundtrack or drifting out of somebody's car radio tuned to an oldies station.  In that version the phrase that means so much to me is hardly noticeable. 

My hands wavered over the keyboard as I considered ending this post before I'd gotten to the bombshell lurking in its uncharted depths.  But why bother to come back to this blog if I'm going to keep things tidy and sanitized.  There was a third person of special significance to me who frequently sang that song.  Today is the anniversary of their suicide.  And, when I woke to the realization that this was one inevitable thing the day meant to me, I felt the same primal shift of unease I feel every year.  My heartbeat was a wild salmon intent to swim upstream to the its source of origin.  And I thought what I always think: I didn't see it coming. 

Later in the morning, when I had talked myself past the sense of frozen disarray, I took my customary walk.  When I looked up at the empty bird's nest I had a powerful moment of helpless recollection. Because I didn't see it coming.  I can't even guess how often I've wished with all my might that I could have known and done something - anything - to keep someone safe when they didn't know the meaning of the word on their own terms.  

It doesn't matter what I know to be true of suicide's mechanics.  Obviously anything I could have known or done would not have prevented an outcome beyond my control.   And so my desire to have known and done something that defied all odds and obstacles is an impossible wish.   Knowing this is crucial but it doesn't make my sadness and regret any less potent.  I took a picture of the nest to remind myself:  we can only do our level best.  Whatever that may mean will shapeshift from moment to moment.  Inevitably.

resolving

This is a bed quilt that's been in a state of such slow progress that I've lost patience with the habit of putting it aside for long chunks of time.  The top was constructed many years (18) ago.  At the time I was in the middle of a very painful and difficult talk-therapy process related to the darkest parts of my childhood.

Being me, I did not want this necessary work to eclipse everything else that I knew to be true of how and where I was raised.  I have any number of authentically pleasant/sustaining memories from the same time passage.  So I started piecing simple star blocks to honor those memories.  The fabrics I used in the stars relate to particular events or ongoing activities.  The background fabrics remind me of gardens, furniture upholstery, or wallpaper that I especially loved.

Yesterday I worked on the couch with an intensity light.  Today's sunny weather allowed me to sit here in the alcove and work in all natural light.  Took these pictures of the way the quilt fell across my lap.  Right now it's draped over some cartons and Celeste seems to be claiming the area as a private retreat.   This suggests she must think this is meant to be her quilt; we'll have to share it!

The back is a gigantic nine patch that I've never quite got around to photographing.  Last winter I didn't work on this project at all but this year I'm determined to finish the quilting and get it bound.  This is a realistic goal especially if I stick to my intention to work on it for at least a half hour a day until it's finished.  Chances are good that, once I'm actually settled with the needle in my hand, I'll maintain a schedule of spending far more time with it but at least I've set a bare-minimum goal that seems fully do-able.

There are lots of crossroads in this quilt since I have added a lattice of ocean waves (to remind me of all the trips we took to Cape May) that are posted with sunflowers and honeybees.  It has a wide-range rainbow color scheme.  You can see a picture of the whole top here.  Yes, I posted that image back in 2006.  Like I said.  It's been very slow progress but now I'm ready to buckle down and get it done.

So.  There's one fully functioning resolution set ...

it's over there ...

 Recently I watched Lawrence of Arabia.   It was impossible not to think about my mother as the plot unfolded; this was one of her favorite movies and she was unabashedly smitten with Peter O'Toole.  I was struck by the fact that I have very clear memories of her raving on at length concerning his piercing blue eyes yet, in the movie, his eyes often appeared to be colorless.  It was intensely creepy to me but in a riveting kind of way that meant I couldn't look elsewhere.   

Another creepy factor relates to the fact that so many locations in the movie hold names I've come to know all too well via war-related news bulletins.  There's nothing remotely girly about the movie.  There isn't a single female in the film - a fact that isn't personally creepy but it did lead me to ponder afresh the longstanding awareness that my mother was mortified by her female nature and did everything she could to repress and deny its inherent place in her personal identity. 



Thankfully enough I don't suffer from that particular issue. But I do have other sorts of baggage that relates to being female and not necessarily wishing to self-define in ways that are considered normal and/or typical but nonetheless strike me as bizarre or downright pointless.  I thought about these things as I watched the movie.  I also thought about how much significance my mother placed on the arduous journey to Aqaba.  It held such deep personal meaning to her that she kept a 3 x 5 card taped to the wall above her writing desk.  It contained what, for her, was a pivotal line from the movie:  Aqaba is over there.  It's only a matter of going.

As a young girl I was prone to pestering her about that card on the wall.  What did it mean?  She played so close to the vest that it probably never occurred to her that I wanted - nay NEEDED - to know what it meant to her, specifically.  And so she would take my question at face value.  It was a line from a movie.  Someday I'd be old enough to see the film for myself and then I'd understand.

I finally did see this particular film when it played at an art house in Philadelphia.  I was 20 at the time and virtually crippled with mother issues.  Her inner workings didn't fascinate me in the slightest so I didn't think about her attachment to the film or the card that was still taped above her desk.  I don't think I even noticed when the line was spoken.  Half the people in the theater were smoking weed and some couples were having sex right there in theater.  I still recall the details of a comically inept drug deal that transpired in the row ahead of me, but remember next to nothing about the film other than the fact that it was quite long and very very butch.  Also I couldn't help but notice that Peter O'Toole's character appeared so insane that it just figured my mother had found him immeasurably attractive.



When my mother died it was very unexpected.  We had to hustle to pack up her belongings from the rented house where she spent her final years; grief had no choice but to wait on a back burner because no sooner did we get everything boxed and moved than it was my son's first holiday season.  I didn't want to cry my way through it, even if he probably wouldn't hold a conscious memory of my distress.

Grief to have lost my primary life's connection proved to be as convoluted and complex as the relationship I had with my mother.  I wasn't sad so much as I was furious; suicide really does mess with the hearts and minds of those who are left behind to make sense of it somehow.  It took me a long time to sort through the mish-mash of cartons containing her most personal belongings.  So it was a few years after her death before I unearthed a 3 x 5 card with the quote that meant so much to her.  I held the card in both hands and wept for all the things she'd never told me - about herself, life in general, being female and the compulsion to go one's own way even if it involved a harsh road full of death-defying peril.  And in the end the vast expanse of unrelenting desert got the better of her.  I feel I have no choice but to live with that since she couldn't.

I founding myself thinking about allllll of this while I watching Lawrence of Arabia for the second time.  When I sensed the pivotal line was imminent I literally held my breath until I heard the familiar words spoken in their original context.  I also thought about the art house where I first saw it.  The things I'd witnessed there during LOA were NOTHING compared to the sights and happenstances of a New Year's Eve marathon of rock-n-roll movies I attended the following year.  And then, inevitably, I thought of myself weeping as a young mother while I held the talisman my mother's 3 x 5 card had become.  I keep it in a very special place.

When my son was seven or eight I took down my own favorite inspirational quote once I realized how much it was disturbing my child.  It was from Jack Kerouac:  Oh the pain of telling these stories but why else write or live?  My tender-hearted fiercely devoted son couldn't bear the idea of me being in any sort of pain and he certainly couldn't fathom willingly accessing pain in order to tell a story or live in an authentic fashion.  I refrained from telling him that someday he'd be old enough to understand - primarily because, as unrealistic as the desire might have been, I didn't want him to be able to understand.  Ever.  For any kind of reason.

I kept all of that to myself as I attempted to soothe his distress.  It didn't take me long to realize that the quote had to banished before I could hope to do the same with his disquietude.  So I took down the quote and together we solemnly watched it burn to a shred of ash in the bathroom sink.  It occurred to me that my child was giving me an opportunity to re-think my relationship to words and what I was most compelled to do with them.

Of course, life being what it is, Tony is now "old enough" to know about profound pain on his own terms.  He has his own corollary understanding of how it can be converted to creative fuel.   He writes as constantly and wholeheartedly as I did at a similar age.  And he would probably get the Aqaba quote even more fully than I grasp it myself but I'm not sure he'd be willing to sit through Lawrence of Arabia in order to also grasp the original context.  I could be wrong about that but it's a very strong hunch.



It turns out that I never replaced my personal Inspirational Quote with something that was comparable in terms of personal meaning so profound that it's timeless in its applicability.   For the past dozen years I've written surrounded by flowering plants during winter and precarious disorganized Piles of Things while the plants are summering outside in the garden. Quotes seem beside the point but I still occasionally think of the Jack Kerouac line.  Sometimes it strikes me like a bolt of lightning that I no longer consider pain to be my primary creative motivation.  It's simply there along with a lot of other emotions and abstracted states-of-being.

My son's ongoing inspirational quote of choice is  All You Need Is Love.  When I look at the generational progression from mother-to-daughter-to-son I do indeed see progress of a very beautiful kind.  Every time I have a low or non existent sense of personal achievement I remind myself that I've managed to raise a son who believes in the moral imperative of love rather than war.   I'd like to think my mother would be happy about her grandson's chosen priorities and motivational cues.  I'd also like to think that, where-ever her soul and spirit may have traveled, she's managed to make it to Aqaba.  Whatever that means ...

P.S.  Jim brought me tulips last night and sang about them in a quavering Tiny Tim voice as he stepped over the thresh-hold.   The buds were very tightly closed but by this morning they were ready for their close-up.

looking for things ...

I am in awe of people who can fit everything they need to stitch into something the size of an Altoids tin.  Hell.  I'm in awe of the ladies whose backseats and trunks are outfitted with wall-to-wall plastic containers full of various projects-in-the-works and extra craft/stitching supplies.  I'm in awe and frankly unworthy of anyone who develops ANY kind of organizational system - who makes it a point to have it reflect their relationship to their supplies and projects at hand.  To me, that's squaring the circle of creative manifestation.



I have a purple plastic container that I call the other sewing box. Other as opposed to roughly half a dozen sewing boxes that are an even mix of plastic shoe boxes, children's craft supply boxes and decorative cookie tins.  They are all sort of interchangeable in my mind because I do know what's in them (more or less ...) but there's always the dangerous lure of getting distracted.  And flat out overwhelmed if in a very pleasant way.



Am trying to stay on task today so I didn't start pawing through these things and dreaming.  Just found what I was looking for and continued with my morning.  The goal is to deal with the top biz and domestic related priorities until lunchtime and then give myself an afternoon of stitching.  It's very gray weather today and surprisingly warmish.   My original plan was to hit a vegetable store as it's been far too long since I made a hearty soup from scratch.  But I didn't think I should be on the road that long or on the particular road I'd need to travel to the store of strongest choice.  So I simplified the errands.  I've found when I need to do this, it's helpful to construct a secondary list - things to be accomplished IF later circumstance and physical energy flow allow.   In this case, I'm wondering if Jim would be up for making it a mutual excursion this evening.  Hmmmm...



Mainly it would be nice to formalize that plan and then relax at a deeper level.  My body is unfortunately still tense from recent pain onslaught.  Everyone knows by now that quilting and other handwork lowers your blood pressure as well as your stress reflexes.   Have been finding out a lot about that healing property recently.  It is very nourishing to consider the afternoon plans I've made - no plan but to stitch in a series of small individual tasks that all yield a large result at the visual level.

I remembered the large mint green bead in this shared trove and as the time came to see if it would be well-placed on the TIF wall organizer, I re-discovered a few other things as well.  Yes, especially the black bead with white stripes ...   

pleasant regression

Early last week I decided to apply some of my mother-in-law's holiday gift check to this book.  It's a contemporary version of a 1900 classic by Sibylle Von Olfers.  This version is translated by Jack Zipes.  The original artwork by Von Olfers has been re-created by Sieglinde Schoen Smith as a quilt, which won Best of Show at last year's IQA presentation.   She made this masterpiece as a way of processing her grief over the death of her adult son.  Since then her quilt has taken on a life of its own for many people.

In my extra-special memory trunk I have a copy of the first English printing of this story, which was originally known as Something About The Root Children.  I grew up knowing the title as When The Root Children Wake Up.  On certain fundamental levels I've always felt that the book and its engaging illustrations are a significant part of what made it so easy for me, later on, to embrace the concept of the nature deva, elemental angels and humanly accesible plant medicine spirits.

The book was my grandmother's when she was a child and then my mother's.  I inherited it after she died in the December of 1985.  Tony was intensely suspicious* of this book when he was a child (a fact he now doesn't remember any more than he recalls a certain Richard Scarry book that I read to him hundreds of times over ...) but he did develop a strong fondness for a little set of puzzles I discovered that were based on the story's illustrations.  I'm hoping to unearth them during my next attic foray.  And yes.  I will sit and work the puzzles while I hum tunelessly under my breath in a state of suspended cynicism.  And NO - I will not force my grown son to sit with me and participate.   But maybe I'll drag out one of his own favorites from childhood and archly suggest that he read it to me for a change of pace.

On my end, I remember The Root Children quite vividly.  I also recall that sharing the book with my grandmother and mother was one of the few times when we all experienced a mutual sense of unilateral happiness and a light heart.  Usually that kind of thing was more internalized for us or shared one-on-one rather than all together.  I have especially fond memories of sitting on my grandmother's lap or snuggling against her in bed while we examined each detail of the illustrations and discussed what they evoked for us.  My mother created a song from the rhyming lyrics and there were a few years in a row where I pestered to have them sung to me on a nightly basis.  The book was so precious to both of them that I never actually handled it or turned the pages myself until I brought it home after my mother's funeral.

When I decided to bring this new version of the story home, I cuddled under a quilt while I examined the familiar images transformed into fiber art.  When I was finally done with my first tour of inspection I removed the book jacket and answered all the I Spy style questions that are printed there along with a wonderful image of the full quilt.  I cried a bit as I read the heartfelt afterward by the quiltmaker.  There's also a bio for Von Olfers that gives some glimpses into what a special person she was. 

Since that night I haven't yet been able to bring myself to put this book on a shelf.  Instead I've been carrying it around with me - not exactly like a child but not exactly like an adult, either.  Sometimes I stop what I'm doing just to stare at the cover and smile.   I've frequently lingered long enough to look at random pages - to recall all the happy times of looking at the original story book and to hear, ever so faintly, the sound of my mother's voice singing to me.  It's been really lovely - especially during a point of the year when my memories aren't always anywhere near as pleasant or emotionally satisfying.

*When my son was a little child he had a lot of Mr. Spock in him.  He was adamantly clear that literal plant roots, rather than children, "woke up" every spring.   This is a fact that has grown more endearing to me at a maternal level with each year that passes.   And somewhere along the line his fanciful aspects  began to keep pace with his logical brain.  Over the weekend, when I showed him this new version of the story, he was absolutely enchanted.  He especially liked the fact that the original illustrations (which he swears he has NO recall of throwing fits over during my periodic attempts to share them with him) have been transformed into a quilt.  And yes.  When I first brought home the set of little puzzles I didn't exactly trick him, but I didn't draw a correlation between the images and the book he refused to embrace at a slightly younger age.  We simply focused on the "puzzle" aspect and I refrained from throwing an internalized fit of my own because I simply don't like puzzles, even a little bit.  This is undoubtedly connected to the fact that I had the kind of mother who insisted on scripting most moments of my waking/conscious life.  She therefore insisted that I loved puzzles, primarily because she had an enormous fondness for them herself.   It took me a few years of Tony's childhood before I could even look at a puzzle without wishing to scream.  Maybe, by the time The Root Children made their re-appearance, I was hoping some of my hard-won tolerance would rub off on him.  And maybe it did ... 

balancing

When I first woke up this morning, I had a low-range sense of anxiety regarding how much focus revolves around honoring my physical frailties and doing whatever I can to stay resilient and relatively healthy. When I got as far as this machine, I noticed Karoda had left a comment reminding me to be gracious with myself.   I stared at the words until I started to feel them.  Now I am also feeling a lot less frazzled; the deadlines I missed have been extended or re-absorbed.  Jim's perfectly willing to help me keep things rolling in the garden, around the house, and with the mundane chore aspects of SLI concerns.   Both those facts make me fortunate.  I can afford to breathe.  And relax with an eye towards re-developing a daily yoga practice.

The above closeup is from one of my old journals.  I don't always title them.  One thing that's interesting about this particular volume is that it houses notes from an extraordinarily happy period of time.  The "difficult" aspects of the passage, ultimately, revolved around accepting that happiness without clinging to it or overlooking its scope as I waited for the other shoe to drop.   Sometimes the thing that strikes me hardest about what I wrote in my journals relates to what I did not write.  Am now toying with the idea of adding more inserts that contain my retrospective memories of things I either wanted to avoid dwelling on at the time OR presumed to be too pivotal to adequately contain my thoughts & feelings with mere words.



The box of old journals has begun to mix company with more recent volumes.  They are scattered here and there in the bedroom and here at the desk.  It's got a hackneyed self-help book sound to it, but I've been learning to embrace myself in a more complete way.  This is a very authentic process; an immersion that stops just short of being overpowering.

Another thing that's very noticeable about the older notebooks is the amount of time I gave to two topics.  (1) hardly an entry went by when I didn't mention a craving to sit with some quiet sewing, or simply play with my fabric stash; (2) literally hundreds of excruciatingly detailed lists I composed concerning how I wanted to live and spin my dreams in specific preparation for the point of life where I now find myself.   I wonder, now, why I so consistently deprived myself of messing around with fabric or an embroidery doodle cloth.  I apparently considered such things an extra-special special reward rather than a built-in sanity booster.

I also wonder if I would have ever believed that I would come to the place I most wanted to be - albeit from a very convoluted spiral of motion.  As I wonder about that I remember a conversation I had a few years back - during the period of time when I was keeping The Difficult Passage journal.  A female medicine maker in my acquaintance asked me what my 21 year old self most wanted.  I answered so promptly it shocked us both.  "She wanted exactly what I have.  She wanted this life - the one I'm actually living."

I silently marveled at how true this was and yet it was something I hadn't organically embraced on my own - hadn't even thought about who I used to be and where I wanted to go with myself in the terms I so swiftly articulated.  In the past few years I've often thought of that moment.  In terms of actualized self-awareness, it's second only to the slightly earlier moment when I realized my life's path was a detailed tapestry rather than disjointed fragments of tangled thread and fraying scraps.

At this time, I seem to be somewhat preoccupied with learning more about how that tapestry was constructed.   I know where/how/when I got most of the raw materials I've been working with but now I want to examine the specific choices I made once I started combining elements and a wider variety of inspirational resources.   It's a lot like looking at somebody else's quilt and figuring out how they achieved visionary unity.

more rain & a true story

Most of the hardwood trees that I see here at the desk have lost their leaves.  In Jim's music room this is true at one window but not at the other.  The dulling gold of the maple leaves in this picture has been brightened by rainwater.  The room itself isn't nearly as dark and cavernous as this photo would suggest.  I spent some time in there this morning tidying up a wall cabinet full of essence mother stocks.   Next I'll need to put some effort into the wall hutch but not quite yet.  The recuperative process continues to be slow and I don't want to sabotage it.

It's very warm so I spent some time on the front porch doing a standing meditation.  The evergreens by the front door are covered with leaves from the hardwoods.  It's only backwards luck that left me free to enjoy the sounds of the rain and the scents of the trees, leaves, and wet ground this morning.  Jim would have taken down the screens and put in the glass window panels if he hadn't been ill last weekend.

Have been reading through some old journals from the carton that recently emerged from the attic.   In the evening I share some of the highlights with Jim - this has inspired some wonderful bouts of shared laughter and a few more serious conversations.  Yesterday I read a volume that was about half the size as the books I normally favor.  For this reason, I repeatedly mentioned my sense that the small size was causing me to record small-mindedness.  I couldn't wait to move on to a bigger size so I'm looking forward to locating that particular volume.  I want to see if the switch back to a larger size did in fact have an impact on the quality and scope of what I chose to record.

Today I'm reading a journal that includes mention of a pivotal experience I shared with Tony when he was eight years old.  I wrote just one line about it - saying I was positive that I'd never forget any of the details.  So far that's quite true.  I'm going to print the rest of this post and paste it in the front of that particular journal.  Some day in a future tense that I can't properly imagine I may pick it up and read it again - with the additional record of what time and distance gave me the emotional fortitude to record & share on this blog.  Note:  sometimes as I'm reading these journals I think to myself I wonder if I would have blogged about this and, if so, in what combination of words & pictures.

It was the last day of school before the winter break.  I'd picked Tony up at the school as a special treat so we could ride home on the 57 bus rather than him taking the school bus.  Several other children had received a similar treat and the atmosphere was festive and carefree.  There was a lot of holiday candy, wrapped presents and many of the children were wearing santa hats or elf caps.  It was a very happy and borderline raucous place to be.

Then, it suddenly wasn't.  Tony and I were sitting in the front of the bus, on the long seat that faces the bus aisle.  Across from us there were a few elderly nuns and a man about my age with a daughter slightly older than Tony.  A middle aged man sat next to me, muttering angrily to himself.  All of a sudden, he pulled a gun out of his jacket and started waving it around.  Because I was sitting right next to him, I saw the old fashioned revolver clearly enough that every detail of it remains etched in my memory.  I instinctively shoved Tony behind me as unobtrusively as possible, using my body as the best shield it could be.

You could tell we were all city dwellers and thus in possession of certain situational crisis reflexes.  People moved from self-involvement to collective awareness in just a few nano seconds.  The nuns were staring very intently at the man and I imagined they were praying for him as well as the rest of us.  The elderly man on the other side of Tony continued to nap. I kept silently wedging my kid more and more firmly behind my shoulder and back while immersed in the silent running mantra of anybody who's ever done any psych triage: no sudden moves.

Across the aisle, the man with the daughter was doing his version of the same thing.  The girl looked absolutely terrified.  She was old enough to understand exactly what was happening and what might come of it.  Her father's eyes locked with mine and I could tell we were both sharing a stark and stomach-turning thought:  I may die on this bus protecting my kid.  I may not succeed and my kid may die, too.

By then the bus was absolutely quiet.  The man with the gun was lost in his own angry world and didn't really seem to notice any of us.  Very cautiously I shifted my eyes to the bus driver.  She'd seen the gun.  I watched her eyes never leave the man as she drove past one bus stop and then another.  We passed the Brighton police station and then a few more bus stops. I noticed she had her flashers on and that the lights were blinking in a syncopated rhythm that must have signaled our distress.  And so I found myself incredibly glad that our route took us right by the station-house at a point in the afternoon when the shifts were getting ready to change.  Surely somebody had noticed her signals!  They had to have noticed.  I thought a few extremely unpleasant what-ifs related to a lack of attention to our plight and then I noticed a phalanx of black & whites slowly but surely encircling the bus.

Finally (this entire episode took a bit less than five minutes but it felt more like five hours) the driver stopped the bus at the outskirts of Union Square.  I could see a few police cars arrived from other directions, already waiting for us there.  Everyone was still very quiet.  Police were suddenly everywhere - silently motioning everyone from the bus, helping the more elderly passengers get a safe distance away, opening the rear bus doors as well as the front.  In a mere matter of seconds everybody had gotten off the bus before the man with the gun even noticed what was happening.

We were safe.  People were crying and hugging each other.  A lot of curious onlookers drifted towards the scene while five policemen quickly entered the bus - one from the back door, two from the side rear and two from the front.   That's a swift-moving blur full of distinct details: the five cops worked like a single organism to get the man off the bus. They slammed him against the side of it while they got the gun away from him and then threw him in the back of a police car, just like a Law & Order episode.  Except it wasn't television.  It was my life and my neighborhood and my kid whimpering beside me.  That was the first time when I felt like it might be time to give serious heed to my husband's desire to move away from a city I loved quite dearly.

We lived about two blocks from the bus stop where we were released from the bus; usually we got off at the previous stop so we could dwaddle our way home by an alternate route through a charming back street full of old victorian homes.  We lived on the first floor of such a home and there was no dwaddling getting back to our apartment that day.  My next door neighbors had just gotten home from work and seen the incident as they disembarked from a different bus traveling from the opposite direction.  My son and I breathlessly explained what had happened.  My neighbor shook her head with a hearty laugh.  She reached out and squeezed my son's arm as she said "Well that's soooome story for the memory books of '93!"

Except I never put the story in my memory book of that time; instead I spent hours and hours going over it at a PTSD level with my kid who subsequently refused to ride on MBTA buses with me.  By the new year he'd go on them with Jim but with me he either insisted we walk or asked if we could take a cab.  He couldn't get over our neighbor laughing about what had happened. I kept explaining she was probably just relieved that nobody had been hurt and that she herself hadn't been sitting right next to the man like us.  In response he'd give me an icy stare that he's inherited from my side of the family so I know it very well.   I think I probably gave it to a few friends who heard of this experience and promptly blurted out "thank god that didn't happen to me!"  And a couple of country dwellers in my acquaintance who just as promptly used the episode as an excuse to city-bash.

On the day this happened, once we were in the house and Tony was calm enough to be left alone for a few minutes, I called the MBTA offices.  I talked to three different people, insisting to each of them that the driver of the bus have a letter of commendation placed in her personnel file. There was no follow-up in the papers and I have no way of knowing whether the driver got her well deserved praise for a job well done.  I had lived in the city for more than 15 years and thus seen my share of weirdness and disturbing incidents in the peripheral sense.  I'd also seen unmindful MBTA workers and police incompetence or disinterest many times indeed.  But on that day everybody who needed to look sharp had considerable game.  I was grateful for that as well as the fact that the gun wasn't fired and no blood was shed...

extending the practice

 I photographed this small head of monkshood flowers earlier this morning.  This is one of the plants that really suffered from the summer drought so I'm glad at least a few of its flowers reached their peak.  Monkshood/aconite has been a favorite of mine for a very long time.  In my first unsupervised garden (created when I was 23) I grew mainly vegetables and herbs.  In the second season of co-creating with that space, I asked Jim to dig a fresh bed in a part of the yard that didn't have enough light for growing food but could still accommodate many of the childhood flowers I loved.

He dug the bed in the shape of a candy cane; echoing one of the flower beds from my early years.  Most of what I planted further echoed that bed but I also ordered bare roots for some things that were new to me.  The monkshood roots were sold in groups of five.  More knowledgeable gardening friends told me I probably would not have success because the plant is very finicky about relocation once its root systems are established.  I felt, at that time, that there was no such thing as a gardening failure.  I thought if I simply put the right kind of energy into welcoming a plant spirit, it would respond with vigorous growth.

While I still think this is true more often than not, I have become quite well acquainted with failure.  Back then I was very fortunate in the experiential sense as well as incredibly starry eyed about my personal ideal system.  I didn't allow such trivialities as facts or likelihood to modify my certainty where co-creativity was concerned.  In fact I still don't but that doesn't mean the interim decades haven't taught me a boatload about gardening snafus.  Had I known that in my early twenties, I might have been a bit more mindfully grateful for the magic and miracles that occurred in the garden that I christened Little Findhorn.

I wasn't surprised (though some of my friends were ...) when I wound up with five flourishing Monkshood plants.  They grew swiftly and beautifully.  The deep purple flower heads became part of my brain's permanent gardening record.  I often think of this as the first "new" flower medicine spirit that entwined itself with my consciousness as a young adult.  When Tony was a toddler, I regretfully pulled up the plants before they had a chance to flower and attract his attention.  I did this after a nightmare that repeated itself for three nights' running, of a small, motionless dark haired child who was face-down on the grass beside the monkshood colony.  At the time and to this day I consider the dreams a warning from the plant's  medicine spirit.  I didn't welcome any plants back to my gardening space until the second growing season of my current garden.

Monkshood flower essence is often associated with ramping-up our psychic acuity, particularly in the third eye/ajna region.  The remedy is also tremendously useful during periods of time when we're learning new lessons about the importance of drawing and maintaining healthy boundaries.  I like working with this essence in a number of ways that are both protective and illuminating.  One of my favorite applications applies to Tarot.  Periodically I like to cleanse the silk lined pouches that I make for my various decks, as well as cleansing the actual decks.  I enjoy spraying the pouches with a small mister bottle of charged water that contains a few drops of lavender essential oil and a monkshood/optical calcite elixir.

The title of this post could apply to any number of matters that relate to the Monkshood medicine spirit, but I was really thinking in a lot more linear terms when I chose it.  Recall that I shared the fact that October is a month when I devote some concentrated effort to personal organization.  This year I did not have a great deal of time or energy to devote to this ongoing process so I decided to bring the yearly ritual into the month of November.  In fact, I'm currently thinking I'm going to continue to focus as an ongoing rather than cyclical effort. 



This decision coincided with my husband taking some steps to re-organize and purge in the attic.  He knew I hoped to find two particular books from my childhood and that I didn't want to search for them in the chilly attic.  So he brought five cartons (there are evidently four or five more) of my books into the stronger light of day.  They are scattered on the floor of Tony's room.  So far I've found it a strange and powerful process to sift through books that hold memories of myself at varying points of time - particularly since I'm in ultimate search of childhood treasures within the context of also spending time in my own child's former sanctuary/sleeping chamber.

I've found tons of things that bear stronger scrutiny - e.g. three entire cartons full of women's studies volumes that I didn't exactly forget I owned, I simply haven't thought about them very concretely in a number of years.  I also discovered the carton pictured above, still bearing the packing tape I applied before we left Boston.  This box is crammed full of old journals.  This excited me  although I also felt a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of volumes.  A few years ago, I sorted through a different carton full of journals.  I wound up purging about half of them because they contained very little useful information or insight.  Although some people do treat every single journal as sacrosanct I found I had no sense of "needing" the volumes that were mainly mundane/highly subjective complaints, agonized confusion over where I was and where I was going and/or self-conscious efforts to be Nin-like* in my observations.  Sure enough, I felt profoundly liberated and a great deal lighter in psyche once I'd culled in this way.

*Fittingly enough I pulled open the tape on the carton full of forgotten volumes right after I opened the box that contained my copies of Anais Nin's diaries and other writings.   I haven't yet had an opportunity to sit with any of the journals.  I've only opened one of the notebooks so far  - encountering a really bad photocopy image of a HUUUUUUGE teenage crush of mine.  It's his high school yearbook picture; a fact I dimly registered because I was mainly absorbing the caption I'd given the image: Shadow Man.  That was two days ago.  Since then I've occasionally preoccupied myself with trying to remember how/when I was in a position to photocopy this picture.  This morning when I first woke up, I finally remembered. 

I don't imagine I will get this much mileage out of the inside cover of every journal in that box, anymore than I think each volume will leave me spellbound and illuminated.  I'm sure there are at least a couple of books that will be fed to a roaring fire.  I also think it will be fun to reunite those notebooks that I decide to keep with the rest of my journal collection.  Maybe amalgamating this world of my private thoughts will serve as a metaphor for more complete organization overall ...

flight of fancy

When I dumped fabric all over the floor last week, one of the things I wanted to find was this rough-basted elephant applique.  There's a story behind it that seems better suited to sharing once I've stitched some of this creature's transformation process into being.  On the other hand, the story* winds up explaining why such process is especially meaningful for me.  For the past two days it's been making me incredibly happy that I finally found the elephant...while I was deconstructing-the-deconstruction of fiber chaos and putting everything back in relatively tidy fashion!  I put off doing that in part because I felt so badly that this elephant had apparently escaped.  On the upside, that means I got extra-happy when it finally showed itself.

*This little friend holds potent significance that belies its humble appearance.  He was originally created to help my toddler son understand every step of applique.  This emerged as a subject of pressing curiosity for him.  At the time, he wasn't talking yet (my kid - the elephant spoke to me plenty despite losing him in the maw of endless scraps) but he had a very eloquent and endearing set of hand motions he would make to convey his need to grasp EVERY STEP (lots of emphatic hand slicing moving in a organized successive fashion with an equally emphatic square-drawing motion enclosing all the slices...) of a process.   

For other moms who like stories about children and their development, you might enjoy scrolling to the P.S. section of this post for more details on Tony's late verbalization and how/when he finally chose to express himself through words.  The point is I remember his intense devotion to following the process of making the template, tracing it on the fabric, cutting it out and basting it.  And then the joyous incredulity on his face when the red flowered elephant at last presented itself for inspection! That's a very nice memory for a simple little piece of fabric to hold; this creature has definitely earned itself a beautiful pair of wings once I figure out how they need/want to be made.

If you enlarge this picture you will see a host of elephant beads that have been given magical wings and tails so they can safely leave their magical underground barracks.  See ... another reason I dumped scraps all over the floor is because I wanted to get something manifested of an idea that's been intriguing me for more than a year.  This relates to scroll making and the process of articulating our inner myths and legends in that particular format.

As usual I had fairly clearcut ideas of what I wanted to accomplish - the ideas are never the hard part for me.  It's the mechanics of execution and everybody's favorite bugaboo:  Enough Time Or Lack Thereof.  Have been so focused on these things as well as the planned theme that it caught me off guard to "suddenly" start working in a very quick and totally organic manner.  Although I love elephants dearly I hadn't planned to tell a story about them.  I had only hoped to make a single flying elephant from the red calico piece at the top of this post.  Now the story is brewing and I'm enjoying sorting out what gets told with words and what is told by images and color.



Have had these elephant beads for awhile.  They keep migrating to the work table because I love looking at them so much and wondering how I will use them.  The one on the left needs a bit of reconstructive tail surgery but other than that I like the way they came out.  Now I am thinking about other tiny elephants that are stitched or painted.  I've stopped being surprised by the unexpected development and am now actively embracing all I can learn about scroll making that will help me get to the more substantive part of my intended journey.  In the meantime, I can stop feeding myself "I should really's" that relate to making a sample scroll. 



I'm going for a kind of Peter Max/Yellow Submarine type feel.  The tails and wings are stitched from some space dyed Stef Francis silk.  Can I just rave about the thread for a moment?  I got some when I ordered the Romanian thread featured in today's Nichobella post.  It was on sale and I was curious about how it differed from the flamed silk thread that has brought me so much enjoyment.  For one very obvious thing it's a consistent width and that makes it very useful for satin stitch, knots etc.  For another it has that lovely silken luminosity that's just so joy inducing.  So I believe I see more of this stuff in my future because the ultimate plan is to create an all-silk scroll with a very special theme ...