Can't Sleep

I have been neglecting my writing, which means that I have been missing myself.  Tonight I went to bed, trying to feel tired, but couldn't get there.  Mostly, this is caused by the discomfort of having my mother visit for two weeks.  We are more than halfway through and I can see the light, but it is still tough.  Many women see their mother every day and they are used to all the slings and arrows of childhood being flung back and forth all life long.  I went three thousand miles away, as soon as I had the choice and it was perhaps the only clear decision of my life.  There was just no doubt that I wanted to be far away from my birthplace. 

I can't even say that there is anything wrong with my mother.  It's just that I hate to see all the ways I am just like her.  I just can't stand the similarities.  And I can't act like my normal adult being when she is in the house.  I run to work to relax into who I have become.   That is all worthy of endless therapy, but it is easier to keep a big country between us.

For right now, I am keeping a little list of the things I will do when I get normal life back.  Sorry, Mom.

Big Birthday

I just reached the speed limit of birthdays.  It has been feeling too fast for awhile, and now it is official.  My life has been full of half-hearted attempts at achievement, followed by long periods of potential.  I seem to remember a physics lesson about potential and kinetic energy that might apply.  I believe that everything important to know I learned before I was fourteen, including stuff that involved pulleys and springs. 

This might be the first birthday ever when I didn't even get a cake.  Somehow the tradition of chocolate cake has been replaced by expensive restaurant meals.  I must visit a bakery tomorrow and correct the omission.

It is cliche to comment on the aging process.  For one thing you immediately lose your audience.  Those older than you make fun of your anguish.  Those younger still can't imagine what you are talking about.  Also, we all worry about such different things.  I repeatedly come back to a board game I played as a kid, called "Careers" where you had to pick a mix of fame, fortune and happiness, and find the career that was most likely to give you that mix.  I remember I always did an even division, unable to guess which aspect of life might be the most important.  I note that there was no option to choose lawyer in that game, perhaps indicating a basic flaw in my path.

Anyway, as I face the second half of life (!), I promise myself there will be more creativity, more friends, and  more adventures.  There will be more action, less potential energy stored in springs.  There will be more beauty, less cynicism.  Already, it has begun.

Lost in the Funhouse

I have been lost in Blipland for more than a month.  This magical place is found at blipfoto.com, where I masquerade as Lido Beach.  http://www.blipfoto.com/grazingllama   Although writing words is part of the experience, mostly it is a daily scavenger hunt for a photo worthy of framing for all to see.  Because of this activity, my image-ining being must apologize to my literary being.  But here I am, at my wordy desk. 

Geography and its delights depends on expectations about the weather.  The Northwest has not been behaving as it should and thus, a trip to the emptiness of southeast Oregon did not yield the hot dry weather I craved.  It was cool, rainy and the high places were filled with snow.  But where most of the landscape is open for the taking, and you can camp and hike wherever you want, I relaxed into the car camping routine, which goes like this:  Take everything out of the car, make some imitation of a home without all those hard edged walls, cook, clean, sit around, go to sleep, and then put it all back into the car and go some other place and take it all out again.  

During our journeys we saw evidence of those who tried to keep the outside out and then what happens when they gave up.  How quickly nature took back the property, the rats and owls and swallows moving into places where people once had raised a family.  It was fun and sad to take pictures of the disintegration.

Looking at the remnants of lives lived makes me yearn to create something of value to mark my place on earth.  I know the Ozymandias foolishness of  this desire, but it fuels my creative endeavors.   In the end, I just want to be able to see a path behind me of where I have been, to remember all the days, even as they slip away.

Stuff

I woke up in a sweat, which is the usual consequence of the hot flashes that hit me at night, like lightning rolling across the hills.  However, this arousal seemed more the fault of a dream, where I gave some menacing street people some money, only to discover later that they found my home and further ripped me off.  I know this scene came from yesterday when I saw an apparently prosperous man stop and give another man who was sitting on the sidewalk, some money and engage in a conversation.   I wondered why I, passing the same sidewalk sitter, had not done the same.  Overhearing the two talking, as I unlocked my bicycle, I heard a scrap of information about the charity recipient, that he was trying to get a visa so he could work, and my sympathy moved towards him.  So he was not a street person by avocation, only in governmental limbo, trying the best he could.  This was immediately replaced by the thought that he was probably lying.

What is it that makes us simultaneously want to connect with others and stand in suspicious judgment over them?  My guess is that we are all in a state of insecurity, perhaps a remnant of our animal days where we could be attacked at any moment by a saber tooth tiger.  This feeling is often triggered by situations where money is exchanged for something we want.  Earlier this same day I bought two expensive objects.  First, a fancy raincoat, to replace one that had gone missing after twenty years of service.  The second was a framed photograph  I saw as we toured neighborhood homes in an "Art Walk."  The coat I undoubtedly will use over and over in this rainy climate, but I realized  my decision to purchase this item was determined entirely by the endorsement given by the helpful salesman, who said  he owned this very model and loved it.  Getting it home, I still am pleased with it, but I feel I might have been told what I want to hear, a time honored technique of retail sales.  What I don't understand is why it works so well.  Am I so desperate to ally with a complete stranger that I would put down hard earned money to show approval and agreement?

The second purchase was certainly of no use at all, yet I felt drawn by its beauty and felt desire to have it for my own.  Is this the same covetous nature that caused us to extirpate the Indians from the US, and now the seal lions who dare to take salmon we might otherwise catch and eat?  Of course I paid money for this item, yet somehow, as soon as I got it home, I was disappointed with it, proof of the folly of all shopping.  The potential to buy a piece of happiness is never fulfilled.  The real question is why, in the face of multiple lessons do we never learn?

I think it is because money is a magic system we have created to trick us into feeling good.  When we have extra cash, we look around for how to trade it for stuff to induce a positive emotion.  This transaction always ends up inferior to the truer ways of feeling good; the ones that involve personal effort or mastery or risk.  For the last ten days or so I have been smitten by a new website where you post one photograph taken each day, with room to name and explain your choice.  It has been a fun challenge to go out and take photos every day and pick one that you want to share with the unknown masses.  I discovered I do not have the chops to produce good photos on demand.  My success with photography comes with beautiful places I happen into, not because I have an eye for the shot.  And certainly I do not have the patience to tune a photograph into its best version.  Perhaps I was just acknowledging my limits in buying a picture from a person who makes a living with a camera.

It is interesting that the word "stuff" means both an essential essence and unclassifiable debris of possession.  Contrast "We are such stuff as dreams are made on," from Shakespeare, and the recent newspaper headline: "Piles of stuff complicated Southeast Portland housefire."  I guess we keep hoping to buy the former, but end up with the latter.

Sound of Music

At the Sign of Concordance

We arrive in automobiles
conveyed from city intersections
and airport concourses,
on a winding road
that ends at three rocks
splashed by the Pacific.

We come for strange music:
not pop or classical, not
techno, rap, house, emo, folk, trance
nor any of that ilk.
What we play needs at least a sentence
perhaps a paragraph to describe.

What we love needs even more room to explain.
Music yes, but also the way the sun
hits the face after a fortnight of rain,
the way we greet each other like distant relatives,
also the Sitka spruce, and elk,
and  Salmon River, S-curving to the sea.

What we do is very simple.
We take air sweetened by violets and alder,
wiggle our fingers and blow;
into story and meditation,
into history and dance.  We are magicians,
changing oxygen into happiness.

5/2/11
At the Wind and Waves Recorder Workshop

This Land Is Your Land

It was evening, the salmon feast had been cleared away, and the hundred or so participants in the annual meeting of the Oregon Natural Desert Association were hanging out, listening to the local country band, the Wheeler County Ramblers, or circling the bonfire outside the dining hall at Hancock Field Station, in the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.  We were feeling very good, helped by a keg of microbrew and the righteous tiredness of having toiled on the side of the earth all day.

I had been with a group who hiked a very steep road for two miles to remove a half mile of barbed wire fence.  Most of us had joined ONDA on a fencepull before, so we quickly found an order to the work, first untwisting the metal stays that spread the strands of wire apart, and then unbending the wire clips holding the wire to the metal posts.  Once the wire was hanging limply, we cut it and rolled it into pointy wreaths, piling them for later pickup with a truck.  Finally, the more brawny members of the group used the levered post-puller to wrench the post out of the ground.

The volunteers were mostly from the ranks of the retired and near retired, contrasting with the youthful staff of ONDA.  During the hike and work we compared our lives, finding  intersections in our backgrounds,  and we looked from the high ridge to the vistas surrounding us.  Although the day was mostly cloudy, the brown hills were starkly beautiful,  with outcroppings colored by the volcanic ash formations for which this area is known.  The one stripe of green was in the valley where a curve of the John Day river could be seen, bisecting the spring hayfields. 

I was struck by how capable humans can be, whether in putting up this fence to turn a jumble of contours into a container for cattle, or when removing the same fence, erasing the legacy of exploitation, and giving wildlife another chance to roam free.  Once we have a purpose, we can do most anything we can think of.  This has been our genius and our curse.

Back in the dining hall, the Ramblers were dutifully playing through the top one hundred hits of the 1960's. and '70's.   Of course I  knew them all,  and something in me demands that I move my feet whenever a drumkit starts pumping out a rock beat.  As I was hopping around in some semblance of dancing I perfected around 1975, the band started into the Woody Guthrie anthem, "This Land Is Your Land."  Although I had never danced to this folk song before, I realized that this song has been the hymn of my whole life.  Whether I first learned it at school, or with the neighborhood activists who gathered the local kids for "Hootenannies," this song has perfectly embodied both my nationalism and revolution in one gesture.  This land will always be yours and mine, and how to have both at once, sharing with others and treasuring it for yourself, is the eternal tension of our life on this planet.

 

Sleepless In Seattle

     I have spent the last two weeks at the mercy of the flu.  It made me less able to fill my head with busyness, which changed my perspective from relentlessly purposeful to a more passive awareness.     
     "What do you want for dinner?" Robert asks, rising to the role of nurse.
     "I don't care, as long as it isn't a lot," I answer, for once throwing out all the various food rules I might otherwise invoke: as in, nothing we already had this week, nothing flown in from another hemisphere, nothing that swims in the ocean, etc.
 
      In such a mood, I stumbled on the Seattle Area Happiness survey, which I recommend, for a reality check about your own view of yourself. http://www.sustainableseattle.org/survey/GNH/en/.  Apparently, I have been exaggerating my degree of satisfaction with life.  Or more likely, I accept my cynicism as intellectual rigor, rather than the actual damper on pleasure that it is.  Anyway, I scored below average in happiness.
  
      Maybe I am too fond of the scientific method, but taking the survey made me think of the aspects of myself that pull me down.  One of them is the sheer weight of personal history.  Even when life is good in the present, I unconsciously measure today's happiness against the accumulated disappointments that have come before.  This is bolstered by the knowledge that I have proof of such disappointment, filed in shoeboxes in a closet, under the heading of mementos.  I keep cards, letters, ticket stubs, programs, and the like, in order to have a record of my life.  To be certain of my general impression of these materials, I open a box and start going through it.  Evidence of bad choices in love immediately overbalances best wishes in Christmas cards, good grades of my son, and proof of a steady diet of cultural happenings.  Reading such mementos  shows that I have a long history of struggling with disatisfactions, both in myself and others.  I continually resolve to change everything into some ideal that has yet to materialize.  No wonder I am unable to just be.

     Sickness has a way of focusing us back to the physical self.  I can't begin to philosophize about how I should live when coughing makes my ribs hurt.  But getting back to health, I do see a route to more happiness.  I begin to toss the contents of those shoeboxes.  Not everything, but the stuff that makes me feel bad.  Why did I think I would want to refresh those recollections?  After filling a grocery sack, I am starting to feel better.