Lots of skiing

So glad for lots of skiing this weekend, Wanoga yesterday and Meissner, miles and miles of Meissner, today.  I feel thirsty for exercise, I can't get enough of outside, trying to soak up as much snow and sunshine as I can, infuse all that bright energy into my cells.  I've been putting out too much, and not replacing enough.

Two small pieces

I'm enjoying these pithy little pieces created from the words of someone else's sentences.  They seem a bit mysterious, I'm grateful that they're out of my control.  Here's another piece with each word of a sentence the beginning of a line in a poem, of sorts:

I peeled a mango and
decided that life should have this much slip as
to escape, seal-like from one's fingers, and
heave upon the floor.  You
chase such a sweet thing.
A pit requires
technique
designed to separate the mango threads,
to suck the last bits of sweetness from the sunrise
weather of the fruit.
A hard fruit might belie a
storm ahead.

The line from whence it was born, "I decided to heave to, a technique designed to weather a hard storm."


And still one more:

Another young girl might have
factored in the brightness of the sun on her yellow dress, but
to consider such things is beyond her.  She
is instead within the sun, startled by daylight
the spangle of dust motes her dancing
color the thrum of blood in her delicate arteries
of flesh nearly not-human
the spins of her dance an arc upon
paper.

From, "Another factor to consider is the color of the paper."

Bits and pieces

Lisa and I have decided to hold each other accountable for posting bits of our 1 hour writing sessions, at least 3 or 4 times per week.  This piece was just today's warm up, a prompt that asks the writer to pick a line and write the words, one per line, vertically down the page, and then complete a poem of sorts.

I walk on a jetty, storm-battered balance makes for a giddy trip
needing the sharp stones to cut my toes, razor's edge presses reality up through me.
To recover some sense of presence
a
rhythm in the rocks is necessary, a universe of opposites
in balance.  Will
my
heart, not centered in my chest, upset
that delicate tightroping, will wind that
moves wraith-like around straining calves upset
my tortured dance?  A
body like water can
first hope to bubble
and shimmy but
mine will not
mind and will boil and burst
second.

The initial quote is, "I need to recover a rhythm in my heart that moves my body first and my mind second, that allows my soul to catch up with me.  I need to take a sacred pause, as if I were a sun-warmed rock in the center of a rushing river."  Dawna Markova

My pilgrim shrines

"those locations that have become like pilgrim shrines to us for the power they hold over imagination and identity."  
- one prompt among many from Kim Stafford's website: http://web.me.com/kimstafford/kimstafford/How_to_Sleep_Cold.html

Like a pilgrim shrine to me for the power it holds over imagination and identity, years ago, still now, I would choose our family's cabin, tucked in an insignificant New Hampshire town, without a mall, with the classic white Protestant church, small businesses, brick library....  But it was the cabin, on a lake, that formed the centerpiece of my identity.  My years started and stopped there, under the great pines, centered on the weeks we'd spend idle there, in the summer.  I'd read, nap in the sun, write, run, swim.  Eat with the neighbors, maybe listen to music.  My head would empty.  I did not know guilt for doing nothing.

I looked, for hours.  Small fish, close to shore.  The wind rippling the water.  At night, the steam rising from the lake, around the floating docks, forming ghostly shapes.  I found myself and felt whole there - but because there was always the return to home, school, the frantic life of a busy teenager - I doubted the realness of the place and what I felt there, couldn't imagine a future in which I permitted myself such a place, full time, couldn't imagine being able to make a living out of such a place, felt compelled to investigate more obvious, acceptable paths, and thus ignored my increasing feeling of alienation, the farther I went from the solace of that place.

This prompt drew my attention, resonated - a place like a pilgrim shrine, true north for identity...  What was that fleeting bird call of recognition, that high keening?  Not just the past... but ah, also what I've had here, in the high desert, and what I'm continuing to seek.  Not in this horrid house in the burbs, but the house we lucked into when we left the city, and used as a home base, looking glass, for all our explorations of this place.  I can't call that house home anymore, and without it we, too, are too removed from the daily miracles obvious only over time in an undisturbed, wide-open space, but I still feel it out there - the mountains, ever-changing, cool and mysterious; small creatures, dun-colored in the brush, surprising colors amongst the dryness, the giant sky.


I wanted it, want it, because I found myself there, too.  Felt my feet in the dirt, my heart beat slow, allowed my eyes to follow the birds across the sky, learned birdsong, thanked the universe each day for the river, became present, knew the place and felt how short my time in it.  I was innervated and slowed by the minute changes, felt myself a small, gratefully observant thing in the place the river calls home.



I am so much more the girl who walks through dust, sun overhead, beside rivers and lakes, than I am the one who shovels a cement walk that looks like all the others in a neighborhood of 400 identical houses.  I am the one that notices that day's new, minutest blooms, that notes flocks of birds migrating through the seasons, that lies back to watch the sky, that sees the water bend around a rock, that requires quiet and solitude to think, center, rest.  I declare myself a foreigner to urban, unimaginative environments.  I want to go home now, find myself, live from that fecund center. 

Be less stingy.

I'm resolved to be less stingy with myself this year.  As Siri and I walked along the river this afternoon, I puzzled about what that actually means.  My initial impression was that it was about treating my body better - more baths, more lovely oils for my winter-chapped skin - an attention to sustenance, in place of a misplaced and outmoded devotion to Puritan scarity, replacing the inner critic's "You don't need..." with an affirmative "I want."  Some of that is material, yes.  A piece of me cringes from that reality, even now - but I consider that the last few months are the first in years that I've had an adequate income.  I'm behind on necessities, not luxuries.

I've inflicted other stinginesses on myself, too.  Classes I've wanted to take, things I've wanted to explore that I haven't, because of money, but also because I thought I could live without them for now, in favor of more practical, pressing needs.  And then there is the giant stinginess, how I live my life, such that I don't prioritize the things I want to do, always putting the things I have to do first.  Inevitably, I have no time for writing, painting, walking, playing with my dog - and sometimes I'm almost relieved to be so singlemindedly busy, because who knows what would be unearthed if I wasn't?

So what does being less stingy look like? 
Gleaming skin - from being loved up with oils and lotions, at least 2 facials a year, and many warm baths. 
Signing up for beginning singing and guitar classes.  (!)
Making time for art - writing, practicing instruments, painting, photography, whatever. 
Buying some new music! 
Letting myself discover and follow my interests. 
Getting some fun winter dress-up clothes.
Taking the time to sit still, anywhere, and notice anything - asking "What is there to be enjoyed in this moment?", and enjoying it.

Ciao, 2010!  Bienvenue, 2011!

I'm not fond of our current neighborhood, but oh, the light in the trees at sunset!

And then they knew that everything would be alright.

“There’s no better balm for a sad soul than an excessive amount of cookies,” she thinks, and then begins to take flours down from the cabinet. Brown rice flour, coconut flour, tapioca starch, guar and xanthan gums… It sounds like a science experiment, rather than the beginning of cookies, but this is what baking has become, post-gluten.

Noting that she’s out of brown sugar, she takes down the raw sugar and pours 1/3 of a cup in the grinder. The goat butter has been warming to room temperature, as has the egg yolk. She mixes the flours, and adds the cocoa powder. The flour bowl already has a heady scent – like pot at a dark and loud outdoor concert – the cocoa and coconut wafting deep into her nose, triggering addiction-prone neurons.

They’re called world peace cookies, and she’d been skeptical, assuming that a hippy dippy baker was the creator, but there was no hemp oil to be found in the recipe. That scent, though… Suddenly she understood. Something that good, that complex, could surely bring about the cessation of all armed conflict. Perhaps she could come up with a way to waft that scent across the mountains of Kazakhstan. Greg Mortensen would certainly be proud of her.

Gluten free baking requires a light hand, and so she spins the KitchenAid only a few times with the butter and sugar and egg yolk in the bowl. She pours a bit of the flour blend in at a time, stops the mixer to scrape the contents from the side of the bowl, and adds a bit more. It’s a crumbly mixture, perhaps a bit dry for the substitution of moisture-sucking coconut flour. She contemplates adding another bit of butter, but decides to go for it, as is.

The dough is room temperature as she dips her hands in the bowl and begins to form a roll that she’ll wrap with plastic and set in the fridge for a few hours. A warning tone sounds in her head as she swipes dough off the mixer blades with a finger and sticks it in her mouth – she knows better about eating raw egg and maybe even raw grains, but the inner kid always wins out. There’s enough dough to share, and her next fingerful finds its way into her boyfriend’s warm mouth.

“Oh my god,” he moans. She considers keeping the mixer blade for herself but in an unusually promiscuous fit of generosity holds the blade up between them for a simultaneous licking session. There’s more to soothing souls than caloric absorption. The cookies need to set in the fridge for several hours, anyway.

Sea shell mobile

I might have been 10, and still thoroughly convinced that my grandparents possessed special powers – which others might have just called love, but I was too young to understand the warm feeling that their undivided attention created in my belly. My sister and I spent a week with them every summer in their magical house on a mountainside in Connecticut, and they did their best to fill our time with endlessly fascinating things and activities.

That afternoon, I’d gotten into Nana’s shell collection. She and PopPop and their two boys had spent myriad and epic summers on camping trips up and down the eastern seaboard. Both Nana and PopPop had eyes and hearts for beauty, and heads for detail, and in those days, there was still a bounty of beauty to be had at the seashore. They had gallon-size Zip Lock bags full of seashells, now stored in their basement. I wonder if this began my childhood fascination with the sea, or if it just augmented it. Even now, I look at these shells and wonder at a world in which beautiful, iridescent abalone shell is excreted from an otherwise slimy, unrecognizable creature.

I asked Nana about the shells and it was probably she who suggested that I pick out my favorites so that we could together create a mobile from them. Then, as now, I was stunned by her generosity. Surely, the shells must hold stories – where she was when she found them, the quality of the sea air the moment she plucked them from the sand – and how could she part with them, so beautiful, and perfectly imperfect – particularly the sand dollar that was as big as my hand at the time.

I chose the sand dollar, two pink and two cream colored shells, and then two mussel shells a otherworldly, purply color. Nana found fishing line, a short bit of driftwood, a small bit for the drill, and began - with hands now so delicate that the skin tears with a careless touch - to drill the tiny holes through with the fishing line would run. I stood at her side at the workbench, uncomfortably anxious, fully expecting my beautiful shells to shatter at any moment.

When they’d all been drilled and the lines run, Nana lifted the mobile for the first time, giving it an iridescent, tinkling life. My heart lodged in my tiny throat. I’m sure my 10 year old body quaked with an unsaid thank you, while this woman that I suddenly, fiercely loved admired a mobile that I treasure to this day.